Year: 2020

Tectonic plate board game project reflection

faiths Science , , ,

The big idea, how does the movement of earth’s tectonic plates cause observable changes and effects. I learned and improved my understanding in quite a few ways. One way was when I learn about the movements of the plates, another way was learning about what the tectonic plates are made of. Lastly I learned about what the observable effects are to the world.  

 

  1. The Movement of the Tectonic Plates

      Throughout the whole project I have been learning about the different ways the tectonic plates move. I learned that when two tectonic plates separate it is called divergent, I learned that when two plates hit (and possibly one submerges under the other) it is called convergent. And I learned that when two tectonic plates slide pass each other it is called transverse. We learned all of these different type of plate movement though textbooks, worksheets, and quizzes. If we had not learned these that it would be impossible for us to answer the driving question. 

 

2. What creates tectonic plates

    What creates tectonic plates. From reading textbooks and researching tectonic plates I have found out a lot about them. I learned that they are made at mid ocean ridges when magma rises up then cools pushing old rock away in order to make room for new rock. I also learned that tectonic plates are made of oceanic and continental crust and that a tectonic plate can be made of only oceanic crust but cannot be made of only continental crust. If i had not learned all of these important facts then I would not understand what creates the natural disasters. 

 

3. What are the observable changes and effects.

     In order to a to say how the tectonic plates made observable changes I had to learn what the observable changes were. I learned that earthquakes, volcanos, and tsunamis are all created by tectonic plate movement. I learned that an earthquake is created on a transverse plate boundary or on a fault. I also know that a volcano is formed on a convergent or divergent plate boundary, and finally I learned that a tsunami follows after an earthquake. Knowing all of this makes it a lot easier to find the answer to the driving question.

 

Now that I know all of this I can finally answer the driving question, how does the movement of earth’s tectonic plates cause observable changes and effects. Well tectonic plates are always moving because of mid ocean ridges so every time one of them bump, separate, slide, or build up to much pressure against each other they create disasters. We can see most of these disasters with our eyes or with machines. The sliding against each other creates earthquakes, when the plates converge it creates volcanos. All of these things are observable changes all created by tectonic plate movement. 

Mind Map  

Curricular competences  

  1. Evaluation: Demonstrating an understanding and appreciation of evidence. I showed I could do this competency when we did peer critique and when we created our board game. For peer critique we had to read over somebody’s game rules then tell them how they did. I think I did well on this one. I said that the person whom I was critiquing was great but that he needed to help his partner much more.   I also showed this competency when creating my own game. I used plate tectonics as the main focus, I included 10 science concepts, and the game showed tectonic plates. I did this when I printed out a photo of the world’s main tectonic plates. Meaning the whole board is made up of things I learned about. Additionally, I created rules for the game that show my understanding of how plate tectonics work. For example one of the rules is that you can only create an earthquake on a tectonic plate that your plate is connected to. Overall I think I did well on this competency. 
  1. Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest. This is the competency that I think I could improve on the most in scimatics. Since I have LAC in the morning and I do most of my work there, when I am in class I have nothing to do. If I do have work to do I usually can’t focus on the task because I had worked on it for 2 hours already. I could improve on this competency. 
  1. Understanding and solving: Develop, demonstrate, and apply mathematical understanding through play, inquiry, and problem solving. I showed this competency by including probability on every player’s turn in my board game. For example a player can pick up a card and it could be a helpful card or useless card, this depends on chance. I also showed the competency by putting several probability problems in the game rules this incorporated how to multiply fractions. Lastly I showed this through the worksheets that I completed. Overall I think I did pretty well. 

Tectonic Take Down! Game board

Screen Time Project review

faiths Science ,

Final Product

Hi I started quarter 2 one week ago and we are already done our first project. This project was all about how much screen time we did in a week! Our driving question was what fraction of my time is screen time on an average day. The answer that I got for this was 7/20 or 35%. That meant that I spent over one third of my time on my screen for the whole week. My average was 8.25 hours a day. That is way too much screen time.

 To get the answer to this question all week we had to keep track of how much time we spent staring at a screen, and add that information into a chart.

In order to do this we had to first learn how to make a chart. We used numbers to make (and learn how to use) our charts. What you see below is what the chart looked like when we first made it.

The next thing we needed to do is code the chart. I found this part very fascinating. We learned  that by creating a formula you can make the chart automatically add or subtract numbers. Also because I had spare time, I made it so the chart could also calculate the average screen time in a week. Without this step I would have had to add up all of the numbers on my own every single day.

The next part was learning how to make pie (and other) charts! I loved learning about how to do this I found it cool that (as long as you do it right) it will automatically change as you put more information into the chart. 

We also had to track something other than our screen time. It could be anything you want for example I decided that along with screen time I would also track how much sleep I got, and how much exercise I did. I found out that I sleep for an average of 7 hours a day and that I exercise for an average of 1 hour a day. I also learned that 60% of my exercise was playing volleyball. 

Over the whole week when we were tracking our screen time we also did some quizzes on fraction because in order to fine what fraction of my time was on screen I needed to learn about fractions. Last year in grade 7 I learned a lot about fraction so most of the math worksheets were just review. The first quiz that I did I got 100% though on the second quiz I got 1 wrong though I did get all of the bonus questions right so in the end I got 13/10. Even though I don’t like doing fractions I do think it was a important step. 

 

The very last things that I did for this project was one, hand in my final draft and two, present it in front of the WHOLE class. Just to let you know I strongly dislike presenting things in front of the class.  So as you can imagine I didn’t do so well on this step, I did well on the final product but not on the presentation.

 

Curriculum Competencies 

Applying and innovating: I showed how well I could do this by how well I spent my class time and by showing what I thought about how much screen time I had. I didn’t do as well on this because I had already done all of my math homework in the LAC block before so I found myself getting distracted easily, my table partner is also very loud and distracting. I did though help her with math questions whenever she asked. I also helped her understand how to create the pie charts. Finally I noticed that I have about the average amount of screen time that my class does though I still believe I have too much screen time.

Understanding and visualize: I showed how well I did this skill by making my numbers chart. Overall I think I did really well on this competency I not only put the sum of all my screen time but i also put the average for all of the things I tracked. I also got really good marks on the 2 quizzes I did and barely got anything wrong on my math worksheets. Finally I recorded all of my screen time hours on my sheet every day. 

Communicating and representing: I showed how well I could do this skill when I made the pie charts. I also did pretty well on this competency I had many pie charts and all of them had the right information on them. The pie charts not only show how much time was on/off screen but it also shows 2 other topics. I sadly didn’t do well in the presentation part because one I strongly dislike talking in front of a lot of people and 2 I haven’t presented in front of a whole class since March. 

Over all I think I did a good job on this project. I loved learning about how to use charts in numbers. I loved learning that I have way too much screen time and I loved learning how to make the table calculate by itself. I enjoyed this project.

Final reflection on medium is the message project

faiths Humanities ,

 

This project was all about advertisements and what they mean.  What you see above this is our final project our DCM ad. Myself and the other learners have been working really hard on creating this ad but we can talk about that later right now i am going to tell you about our driving question.

 Our driving question is “How does what we hear read and see effect us”, this is the question all of the PLP 8 learners have been trying to answer for the whole project, and I think I have an idea of the answer.  I think it can influence us in many many different ways. One example is that it can change our opinion on things, like if you see a celebrity saying that a brand is bad and before you watched that ad you might’ve thought it was great but hearing somebody big and powerful who you trust saying it’s bad might make you think they’re right. What we hear see and read can influence us also by changing the amount of stuff that we buy they can make a spend much more money by making products seem more appealing. They can also change how we are as a person by changing will be surround ourselves with. 

now how did i get to that conclusion, well i got to it by the many steps that we did in this project and I am going to tell you about a few of them now. 

Milestone 1 this is the milestone that got it all started without it i wouldn’t be able to tell the message of an ad or find the target audience very well. In this milestone we had to write a paragraph saying what the message and target audience was of an advertisement called welcome home. 

The next important part of the project was a worksheet to have us practised finding the message of an ad. This was the advertising survey. This helped me understand how to find the message in an advertisement. 

The next very important part of this project is milestone 4 the team launch journal. 

This journal we’ve been working on for the whole project.  It was the one we worked with in our advertisement group when we were thinking and creating our advertisement drafts. This was part of the project where my group had difficulties working as a team because we all have different opinions and it was hard to listen to other peoples’. I think this was a very important part  because it was one of the first times i work in a group in grade 8. I have not gotten a mark on this yet.

Next was milestone 6 the most important part of the project it was our final team advertisement. My group had to make an advertisement for Deep Cove Music and we finish just a few days ago. This was probably my favourite part of the project I loved creating the different advertisement drafts, you can see a couple of my individual and group draft below.  Without this advertisement I wouldn’t fully understand how much work goes into creating one and how we must think about the target audience. 

Here are some of my individual and group drafts. 

Individual drafts

Group drafts

Those are all the steps that most helped me to answer the driving question. I enjoyed this project and I love learning about media, message and how to answer the driving question.

I hope to do another project soon.

The medium is the message project reflection

faiths Humanities , , ,

This project was all about advertisements and media. The big question we are trying to answer is how does the things we see, hear, and read influence us. And even though we haven’t really got to fully answer that question we have done many other things. To start we did the launch activities but sadly i was away the first three days of this  project so i can’t really tell you what happened though i know for a fact that they did some similar thing that we did on the last project for example they put what they needed to know on  sticky notes and what they already knew on different sticky notes just like what we did on the last project. 

The 1 milestone I also away for though i still did it, only a few days later.  For this milestone we had to write a paragraph about an apple advertisement called Welcome Home.  For this paragraph i had to describe what the message was and how they got that across along with who it was for. I believe I did well on this one.  I earned a sun emoji. I enjoyed watching the advertisement.

The next main activity was Milestone 2. For this milestone, we wrote another paragraph, but this time it was on a historical piece of media. In this paragraph we had to answer the five key questions along with explaining what I thought the message was, who the target audience was, and who made the advertisement. I also earned a sun emoji on it.  I wish I had written down the five answers because I voice recorded my answers. Because of this the teachers could not see it and thought I did not do it! At the same time, voice recording saves me a lot of time.  Now I know how to make it so the teachers can see it.

The last milestone that we have done so far is Milestone 3. In this milestone we also had to choose a piece of historical media.  This time the piece of media had to be an advertisement. In order to write a paragraph on this advertisement we had to learn about the techniques and appeals that people use when they make advertisements. We did that in class. In our paragraph we needed to write about two to three techniques and appeals that the ad uses to catch people’s attention.

All of these milestones were leading towards the end product which was creating an advertisement for a Deep Cove Business. My group chose DCM as our business to do the ad on. In order to be able to create an ad fro them we had to do an interview with them. This is where we ran into our first problem!!

DCM did not answer our calls.  The person we needed to talk to did not contact us and seemed to be away.

One week later, we finally visited their business in person.  We did the interview. In this interview we asked Brandon an employee there, 5 questions about DCM and what we think the ad should look like.

The next day we reflected on the information and started our own individual drafts.  For my first draft, I looked at their past advertisements and tried to make mine based on what they liked before. I will say that I didn’t love my first draft. It didn’t;t seem to fit the DCM theme but as I did different drafts I got better and understood more about what I had to do. 

 

After every draft we created our group would have time to critique each other’s. They always said that it was too colourful and didn’t fit their past advertisements. I changed mine from portrait to landscape and adjusted the colour. I liked mine but it was different from the rest of my group.

One of the main problems that my group faced was when my group had to do our first group draft. Most of the boys in my group wanted to do their own thing and didn’t’t want to listen to other people’s ideas.  A few of them didn’t listen to the teacher’s instructions. Because of this, it took a long time to finish our first group draft. I did not think we would get them done in time. My group said I was too bossy and I sorta agree…I can be bossy. HOWEVER, I do believe that they needed to pay attention a little more so they wouldn’t keep asking me what we were doing when the teacher had just explain it i minute ago. Our first group drafts looked like this.

          

Right now, we are working on our latest group draft.  It is due tomorrow morning. We plan to meet before school to make sure can finish it on time.

User Manuel Project review

faiths Humanities ,

The first PLP 8 project of the year was driven by this question: how do I creatively communicate who I am? The main way was by creating a user manual. No…it was NOT a user manual for our iPads but actually was a user manual about us! To do this we would complete six milestones.

For the user manual project we first had to start by building knowledge about ourselves.  This meant figuring out what we knew, what we needed to know, and how to find out how to get that information. First we wrote what we already knew about ourselves and then we wrote what we thought we would need to know about ourselves and the apps on the iPad.  Finally we wrote down ways we could get this information. 

Through my group discussions I realized that I knew what I liked and what I disliked.  I knew what some of my troubles were and a lot of the things that make me unique.  For  example I am picky with food and sometimes talk in random accents for no reason. I knew how to use the camera, iMessages, and how to make an memoji, which was very helpful information to know.

I needed to know how to use the iPad apps more so I could creatively communicate who I am in different ways. 

To find the missing information I needed to be willing to ask people around me like classmates, teachers, and family…not my Mom for computer stuff. This is difficult for me because I do not know these people well(teachers,and students, I know my Family).  I am shy when talking to other people and I do not like talking in front of people who do not know me.  Mr. Hughes and Ms. Maxwell helped us explore the apps and I also did some exploration on my own.  The main apps that we explored were pages, keynote, notes, photo, and things. 

The next step was to see the user manuals that the teachers wrote about themselves. I loved learning about my teacher’s personalities and who they are after 3:00! Seeing the manuals gave me the idea of what we would create in the next few days. We then started to write down words to describe ourselves. For example if we were a daughter or friend or dog lover or cat hater we wrote that down. 

For our fourth milestone, we needed to use the Memoji laptop sticker we had made a few classes before. The Memoji laptop had stickers we customized to show a little bit about who we  are. The fourth milestones meant getting critique on that Memoji sticker and being able to reflect and create something better. First we got student critique and  I only had two sticky notes on my laptop Memoji the first round and 1 sticky note the second round. I was not sure how to move forward because of the critique wasn’t super helpful. 

The fifth milestone was all about the revising and getting critique on the user manual. We had the rough draft. I loved writing the rough draft of the user manual. I had a lot of ideas and found it fun.  The critique itself I found it hard to do. I got much better critique on this part. I don’t love giving critique and find it hard to tell people how they could improve. I also did not have enough time to read through their whole manual.

The sixth and final milestone was about presenting the project. For this we were supposed to stand in front of two classmates and read them some of our user manual and show them our laptop stickers. I believe that I did ok. I should have looked at the audience more and prepared what I was going to say a bit more.  I loved hearing more  about people and their likes, dislikes, and warnings about them. 

Overall I think I loved the project and think I did well on the project although there are a few things I could improve. I believe I answered the question I creatively communicated who I was in not one but in TWO ways…the user manual and the lap top sticker. I would have improved my layout for my Memoji laptop stickers. There were some things I wanted to make better but could not quite put my finger on them. For my user manual I had trouble with the trouble shooting. It was hard to get the main idea for that section.  Overall I hope that through PLP I will get more comfortable and better at presenting my ideas in front of others. It is a good life skill. Finally, I believe that through this project i improved in several ways making it so I can create the project you see below.

My user Guide