Hey, welcome back! Now that we’re fully back form break, and our last projects have been wrapped up clean and proper we can move into our next project on the topic of gender. Our driving question for this project is:
How might communities reduce the harm caused by rigid gender expectations and increase belonging and wellbeing for everyone?
In our launch work, we saw how deeply rooted traditional gender roles and expectations in our society and culture. We also looked at the history of movements and ideas challenging traditional gender roles, like the waves of feminism, and the gay rights movement.
This is a Challenge Based Learning (CBL) project, so our goal will be to design and execute some piece of action as a solution to the driving question. Since the efficacy of our action lies heavily in how information is communicated, I think the most impactful strength will naturally be communication. As per my VMV, my goal here will be to think of format and presentation as tools to strengthen my message.
For the first stage of the project our focus researching our chosen lens, masculinity, femininity, or in my case, transgender and non-binary identities.
I chose this lens as it deals with ideas of both masculinity and femininity, letting me break them down and compare the intersections and the contrasts between the two in regards to gender expression.
I find the topic of gender as a whole very interesting, particularly in respect to it’s implications on society, and power. I want to make the best of this project, and learn as much as I can. To do so I’ll be heavily focusing on growing my Zettelkasten to process as much info as possible, especially in the first stage of research.
I already have a decent shortlist of sources and topics to look into, so I really don’t want to get burnt out on this project. This is where my self-regulation goals around time and work management are especially important, since I don’t want to stretch so far I’m unable to complete my work.
Anyways, I’ve got to continue my research, so until next time, stay tuned.
I started learning about Canada’s history in grade 8, with the first arrival of European settlers, and the beginnings of colonization. Most of the Canadian history I’ve covered in 3 years of high-school is, in a way, the aftermath of this.
In this waypoint1 we got to go beyond that, and look at the history of pre-contact indigenous societies of (what is now) British Columbia, to create a collective class book.
My chapter focused on the Gitxsan, a nation in northwest BC, around the Skeena River. In this post, I’ll be talking about the learning, and thinking that went into it, so I’d strongly recommend reading it so you can get an idea of the work I’ll be referencing.
First thoughts assumptions
I’ve lived in Vancouver for most of my life, so I grew on the lands of (mostly) the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Watuth people. This meant that a large portion of my experience and knowledge of first nations came from these three, and was more modern than historical.
Because of this, I had the general assumption that most first nations operated as a collective whole, like many do today. In the specific case of my nation, I actually thought that the historical governance systems would be the same as the modern ones.
While there are similarities, I found that modern governance was largely impacted by the Indian Act’s chief and council structure, while merging in more historical elements.
Second, Observations and corrections
This example of some assumptions I had right off the bat shows two important things about First Nations.
First is that they aren’t static. The way Gitxsan operate today isn’t the same as it was 3000 years ago(shocker I know), because just like any other society, they changed as the world did.
To me, this is a clear example of how no one moment or state of a cultures existence is any less authentic than another, which is an idea I want to make sure I bring into future projects.
Secondly, this is an example of just how diverse all of BCs First Nations actually are. Given their depth of culture, and the sheer number of them, it would be impossible to fully understand all of their histories.
The work on anthropological thinking we did in the beginning of this project was very useful for identifying these assumptions and biases, and leaving them behind in my research. 2
Relevant, accurate, and respectful
This project required a fair amount of research. I wanted my chapter to provide good, relevant information on the Gitxsan in specific without repeating too much general information.
As I started my research, I thought there wouldn’t be very many good sources, because of the time period I was studying and the nature of the information I needed. It turned out that there was actually a decent number of sources I could pull from.3
Since I wanted to make sure my work was both accurate and respectful, I found that I had to be very mindful about which my sources. As I started to compare multiple sources with the same information, sources that initially seemed good turned out to have some significant differences to what a lot of the other info said.
Here’s a peek behind the curtain, at least for the sources I remembered to track
Because of this, I had to make sure my information was generally corroborated by multiple sources. I can’t be 100% sure that everything is totally accurate, but I do feel confident in the fact that I did my due diligence to try and ensure it would be.
Let’s talk language and layout
Language was also something I had a responsibility to ensure was correct and respectful, while also being accessible to the reader. For me, this meant using Gitxsan words and phrases with proper context in my book and communications4, and that if needed, translations also preserved context as well as possible, in hopes of not accidentally doing something like a Chai tea.
I think in pursuit of accuracy and depth of information my book did fall short on creating a story for the reader. Besides the content itself, I think layout was partly to blame as the amount of information I wanted to show did make the pages harder to easily to parse.
Going forwards, I think this is a good reminder for me to think more intentionally about the experience of the average reader/viewer/user of any works I make. This is I saw done well by a lot of people in our first humanities project, and admittedly my video there also could have had a stronger story.
I did try to make my visuals were as valuable and relevant to the text as possible. There was a lot of textual information on my nation, but good photos were somewhat rare. Fortunately, this is where my creation skills saved me, so I was able to make some nice graphics and maps (also finding watershed data is way harder than it needs to be).
Maybe the text is a bit dense, but I’m still happy with the graphic.
Back to the launchpad
To wrap this post up, I want to talk about my goals I set in my learning intentions post for this project.
Since I didn’t have any super high-confidence guesses as to what skills our work would require,I focused on logistical and organizational goals.
This was to help me stay on top of my work so I could receive feedback on time, which I fell short of in our first humanities project and I very much wanted to avoid doing it again.
I am somewhat disappointed that I didn’t develop my Zettelkasten with this research, but I found that with the number of sources I had to cross-reference, a hybrid system was a lot better. I think this means my Zettelkasten systems need some updating, because this should have been a good situation for it.
On the brighter side, sticking to task scheduling especially front-loading work helped a lot in getting through all the research for my project.
Making little notes as I was skimming sources, writing down ideas of things I could say, and keeping track of sources as I went were all things that made putting together the final book much more streamlined and organized.
I started to slip up on my goals in the middle of the project, as my source collection started to get out of hand, but I was able to pull things back together and ultimately create something I’m fairly happy with.
Thanks for reading.
Our BCFP work this year all actually falls into one very large project, building towards a final piece of “Reconcili-action”. This means each of what would normally be considered a project, is actually a benchmark. ↩︎
Because lets be honest, a modern worldview isn’t super useful when trying to piece together the history of people who have lived in BC longer than our calendar goes back. ↩︎
This actually reminds me of the research I did for In the Name of Nationalism all the way back in grade 9, the main similarity being the slow reveal of information as I started to dig, the type of info I was looking for being very historical(in this project even more so), and the presence of what I’d like to call red herring sources ↩︎
I wrote an email to some members of the Gitxsan Huwlip to see if I could get any information, although I never got a response ↩︎
After the fears of WWII released the world a new conflict came to take their place, the Cold War. Despite it’s name, this period wasn’t characterized by any ongoing conflict but instead the constant fear of the possibility of conflict. The rapid development of nuclear technology created an arms and intelligence race with a best-case outcome of an uneasy stalemate, and a worst-case of total annihilation.
In our research and Socratic seminars(more on those later), we focused on these fears and how they influenced everything, from global politics to the lives of average families. Recommended reading for this post includes:
“What difference will it make? We could all be dead tomorrow.”
– Todd Strasser, Fallout
That quote is from Fallout(2013)1, a work of semi-historical fiction. From when we read Obasan last year, I know that analysis of fiction can be very useful when looking at history, and this was no exception. Fallout showed how fear affected individuals during the cold war, as well as what nuclear war could really mean.
The book traps its characters within a fallout shelter and the anxieties of the cold war, creating an environment where fear drives their every action. Essentially, it brought a level of humanity to our work. While I did find it to be somewhat simple in its storytelling(I is explicitly marketed as a middle-grade novel), there is a level of depth to the world and characters, possibly informed by the author’s personal experiences in the cold war.
After reading Fallout, I wrote this short reflectionon some of the themes I felt were most interesting in the book.
Beyond the content itself, I think my the largest part of my learning in this project were the Socratic seminars we did. We did our first Socratic seminar towards the end of our last project, but I’d say this was our proper intro.
A Socratic seminar is, in broad terms, a collaborative dialogue about a text. In our case, that “text” was the entire corpus of what we learned and synthesized from our in-class lectures, the aforementioned Fallout, and independent research (provided it could be used constructively).
Our third Socratic seminar.
Socratic seminars can take a variety of forms, but all of ours so far have followed the fishbowl model, with an inner and outer circle that swap.
I initially struggled with the pace of the discussion in seminars, and I found that it was very hard to keep on top of the conversation, come up with good ideas, and find the right moment to contribute. By the second seminar, I kept much better track of things as they happened, and was able to build on top of ideas more easily.
Prepping my Zettelkasten for quick navigation played a big role in letting my build on top of new ideas. Before I did it felt like once the topic shifted off what was on the prep sheet, everything got so much harder.2
My biggest goal for the seminars was to try and bring people into the discussion, either by asking for input, or giving an idea for people to connect to. I feel like I achieved this with one of my last points in the last seminar, but It’s not something I’m going to stop trying for.
Putting it all together?
In my learning intention, I talked at length about developing a concept for what I would build for our final project (a companion piece to our previous projects’ video). I was fairly concerned with what I was going to say, and how I would say it.
Going through the project pitch form, I was able to narrow down the what decently quickly. As I’d hoped, I was able to find a more interesting angle for my project in talking about how fear drove the race for technological superiority, as a tool for both security and cultural impact. Those factors are what enabled such a boom in technology during the cold-war era, and public education around it.3
Somewhat unexpectedly, this pitch was where our work on our companion pieces stopped due to some perhaps overly tight deadlines. While this was a relief for me as I hadn’t yet how to best go about making any of my ideas, It was also a bit disappointing for the same reason.
With the amount of freedom we have here, I want to do something that I execute in a way I’m proud of, while still stepping a bit out of my comfort zone
– My learning intentions
My intentions for this project focused heavily on the creation process and overcoming its struggles, so it feels like a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card.
That said I do think that not going forwards with actually building stuff and cancelling the showcase was the right move, as I definitely wouldn’t have been happy with what I could’ve made in the time we had.
Up next
I was still able to get some good practice in the use of my Zettelkasten, especially for Socratic seminars, but I don’t think I could have fully reached the goals I set out for myself because of where this project ended up going. Nevertheless, I’ve heard we will be revisiting this topic, or at least something similar, so hopefully I’ll be able to use some of my ideas and research there(my 5 part, 3 act concept album will surely ride again.)4
I’m terrible at writing blog posts, so we’ve already started our next humanities project on debate by now. Skills-wise, I see this as a bit of a trial by fire for the skills we did practice in this project. Research will be critical, and the skills of collaborative discussion in the Socratic Seminars are getting turned on their heads.
I struggled a bit with clarity and succinctness in my answers during the seminars, so I’ll need to improve on that if I don’t want to drag my team down.
Until next time, find some interesting ways to keep yourself occupied in the meantime.5
Not to be confused with Fallout(1997), although I’m sure the latter could’ve also had some value in analysis. ↩︎
Taking better notes was also useful, as it meant I didn’t have to hold as much in my (somewhat volatile) short term memory. ↩︎
On the topic of concept albums, I’ve been listening to some stuff by KGLW. They have some great albums, almost all of which could be considered a concept album. Start with I’m in Your Mind Fuzz or Nonagon Infinity. ↩︎
Here’s an extended reading list for your convenience: My previous blog posts, The articles, A taste of the Gizzverse, and your wildcard: Badness 0 (this is partially about a typesetting system called TeX. My reflection was typeset in Typst, which operates under similar principles. ↩︎
When you think of modern discourse, the first thing that comes to mind might be people mindlessly arguing on Reddit about whether human rights were really that good of an idea to begin with. Now, if you think of modern intellectual discourse one thing that might come to mind is debate.
Debate is how Parliament decides laws, how political candidates sway voters, and how courts reach a verdict but most importantly, it’s what PLP 11 will be doing at this year’s winter exhibition.
So, why are we doing this
While debate is at least somewhat well known, a formal debate isn’t a common situation to be in. However, by doing debate, we’ll be training skills such as:
- Public speaking
- Research
- Critical thinking(especially in time sensitive situations)
- Collaboration
These skills aren’t specific to debate, far from it! They happen to be common to
This is one of the projects I’ve been excited about ever since last year, both because I think it’ll be interesting, and because I think it encompasses a lot of skills I want to grow.
Being able to develop informed opinions, and be able back them up is something I value. Public speaking is also a skill I’ve found more need for as time has gone on. As I learned from the Socratic Seminars in our last project, I need to get better at thinking on my feet and presenting ideas with clarity under pressure.
As I mentioned before, our debates will be taking place during PLP’s annual winter exhibition, on December 18th. In a throwback to our first winter exhibition in Grade 8, this year’s theme will once again be based on Avatar2. Luckily, our debate topics are not based on the plot or merit of the movie itself, but rather the much broader themes of the movie.
The debates will follow an 8 team single-elimination tournament format, with a consolation bracket. Each round will be scored by two judges and the collective audience, with each awarding one point.
For all rounds except the quarterfinal, our topics and positions will be revealed 90 seconds before the debate starts, with the affirmative opening. This will be followed by rebuttals then crossfire, and finally closing statements. Each debate will be 12 minutes total with 3 minutes per team for opening case, 2 minutes total for crossfire, and 1 per team for both rebuttal and closing.
If you’re still a bit confused, here’s a flowchart showing how a team would move through the rounds.
How we’ll (hopefully) win
Unless we lose our first two debates, we’ll be competing in 3 different matches. The topic for the first match will be known prior to the debate, but the second and third rounds could be one of two options for each. This means that we’ll need to prepare 10 arguments total, 5 for affirmative and 5 for negative. That’s no small task, but as a group of 6 it’s totally doable if we manage ourselves effectively.
Our team has a mix of strengths and stretches, so one key part of winning will be organizing and coordinating ourselves so that everyone’s strengths are fully utilized. It’ll also be key to make sure everyone is familiar with everything they might have to talk about so communication will also be vital.
In a team, organization and teamwork are definitely strengths of mine. Since we have both confident speakers as well as people who are less confident, I want to make sure that everyone is able to contribute their ideas, and that nobody feels shut down.
Some of my other strengths are that I’m good at research, and that I can be very confident in my ideas, when I have strong evidence for my point. Based on this, I’ve already started to put together team resources, trying to make sure they’re a tool that’s as easy to use and effective as possible.
I think that my strengths also need support from some other skills to become a great debater. I can be very articulate when I have time to review and revise my words, less so when the clock is ticking and there’s lots of new information to process. A good argument might not necessarily win a debate but a bad argument will lose one, so listening to your opponent and analyzing everything they say is the most important part of a debate, assuming of course that you’re actually prepared.
With a little under 4 weeks to prepare winning should be easy as long as we’re adequately prepared, at least on paper. Will reality be so forgiving? Stay tuned.
This is the actual name used to refer to the tournament structure in the project guide. ↩︎
The James Cameron one, as opposed to the clearly superior piece of media, Avatar the Last Airbender. ↩︎
In my last post for The Manhattan Project², I talked about a single impact of the creation of the atomic bomb, that being the system of national labs that stemmed from it. Continuing on from that, we’ve started to look into what might be the largest consequence of atomic weapons in the 20th century: The Cold War
Background
Rapid development of atomic arsenals by global superpowers created an environment of constant fear and paranoia. While the Cold War did have conflicts, many were small proxy wars. The main conflict was the Soviet Union and the USA dancing in deadly lockstep, unable to directly get at each other without risking devastating retaliation. Our final benchmark for this project is a companion piece to our video, taking any form we please. Last time we had such a free-format benchmark, I got overly caught up in the technical execution as opposed to the ideas I was trying to communicate.
Ideas
All of this is a lot of talk considering I haven’t even said what format my companion piece could take so here are the most interesting ones along with a more specific angle:
A simple resource-management simulation: shows the almost frantic need to keep nuclear weapons ready at all times.
A concept album or concept song representing the ebbing rhythms and patterns of the nuclear arms race – a rhythmic, semi-looping call-and-response with different passages representing key scientific events.
Out of the two, I’m most fond of the concept album, however it also has every characteristic of something that could get away from me quickly. This video does a good job of showing how interesting it could be, but also how overly in-depth it could get:1
Since both ideas are fairly ambitious, especially in their execution requirements. In their current form, I don’t think any of them would be very conducive to my goals for this project, and they’re each very dependent on a core thesis that is likely to change.
How we get there
Speaking of a core thesis: since my video was unilaterally focused on the U.S. national labs, the most straightforward connection to the Cold War is their role in the development and upkeep of the U.S. atomic arsenal.2 In my VMV, I said I want to grow my communication skills by being intentional with how the medium can impact my message. While I’m talking about my VMV, some other useful success behaviours will be using my Zettelkasten to full effect (especially for the upcoming Socratic seminars) and keeping a record of my creative process. I’d like to try to push myself by using a format that’s outside of what I’m familiar with (as you can see above). A clear plan of what I want to make and the decisions made as I do so will help keep my message clear and make creation easier. With the amount of freedom we have here, I want to do something that I execute in a way I’m proud of, while still stepping a bit out of my comfort zone.
With the amount of freedom we have here, I want to do something that I execute in a way I’m proud of, while still stepping a bit out of my comfort zone.
The idea of creating some sort of music is still on my mind as it’s both a concept I find interesting, and something a bit outside of my comfort zone. If I don’t in this project, hopefully I can later this year. ↩︎
Through the magic of revising this post, I can now say that I ended up finding an angle that I think will make a much more interesting companion piece. ↩︎
The video you just watched is the result of our first project of the year, the Manhattan Project Project.[^1] My last post was actually for this very same project, where I set my intentions as to what I’d be interested in learning. Since then, I’ve been hard at work, creating my video to explain an impact of the creation of the first atomic weapons. If you watched my video, it should be pretty clear that my main point was that the Manhattan Project led to the US National Labs system. It might be hard to see why that matters, especially if you don’t happen to live in the US, like I do. Ultimately, the national labs are a centre for innovation within the United States, and fill a niche between university labs, and private companies.[^2] Conveying the true scale of this in my video was tricky so I tried to focus more on singular events and achievements letting you (the viewer) paint the bigger picture yourselves. At the very least, it made finding visuals easier.
Research (took a while)
My video’s topic was the US national labs system, but that’s not the topic I started with. My first topic was the manhattan project’s impact on large-scale project management. After a good bit of research that seemed to mostly support this idea. I was still looking for somewhat of a smoking gun, one clear thing I could use to explain the connection to the present day. I eventually found it within a 30-page research paper that at first glance looked like it was just what I needed. Unfortunately, the barrel was aimed directly at my topic and the trigger had been pulled.
To keep a long story short, I pivoted.
I briefly toyed with the idea of talking about the funding idea I mentioned in my intentions post, but it seemed like another fairly dense topic for a 3 minute video. I eventually settled on something that had been popping up throughout my research, the US National Labs, which is what I stuck with. Throughout this project, an important tool was my:
Zettelkasten[^8]
Around 65% of the Zettels I made this project were literature notes, which in my system act as a reference to my impressions of a source. Generally, they had a summary of everything that stood out to me, some other quotes numbers or data, and other errata. They all came out a bit differently structurally, but here’s a somewhat typical one, and the overall structure of this project.
As I mentioned before our Zettelkasten is something that continually grows throughout the course of a project as we create new notes, expand previous ones, and synthesize our own ideas based on them. This is definitely something I managed to do in this project. I made a lot of good sourcing notes, and my connection structures are pretty nice. I didn’t make as many permanent notes as I’d like and I also didn’t make as much use of them in my final video. In the rest of the year I’m going to try and focus more on synthesizing ideas in permanent notes, and actually making use of them.
Planning
Moving on from my second research sprint, things went relatively smoothly aside from the fact I was about a week behind from a combination of the pivot and a particularly nasty cold. For planning purposes, 3 minutes isn’t a very long time when it comes down to it, so I had to crunch down my (already reduced) scope a lot. Scope creep is really quite annoying. Realizing I over researched a bit came as part of the storyboarding process[^4], which I took as an opportunity to commit to a visual style, that I might have spent a little too much time thinking about. (if you want to hear some of the useless specifics of the visual check this footnote[^5])
Animation
Animating the video was a mildly unpleasant experience. Keynote can do a lot of different things, but I’m afraid that precise and expressive animation is not one of them.[^6] My process for animating a slide was:
1. Listen to the VO and revisit my storyboard to get a general idea of the actions I needed
2. Find or create the individual assets needed
3. Lay out all the assets at their initial positions in the frame ( or part of it for more complex scenes )
4. Animate with the timings I *think* would fit for a small section ( referencing a time-coded transcription )
5. Re-watch the section, and refine the timings until it matches the audio
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until the slide is done
Here’s one of the longest build orders I ended up with. In retrospect, it really should’ve been two separate scenes but splitting the audio was annoying enough I didn’t want to do it any more than absolutely necessary.
About 95% of the video is exactly what was exported from Keynote, the only other post-processing I did was shortening some slow scene transitions, cutting out some silence, and re-synching the audio in places where timings were affected by lag. If I’d had more time, I really would’ve liked to add some sound effects, but after 15 hours of Keynote animation I was done. I know we’ll be showcasing these videos soon, so I might make a remastered version for that.
Post-mortem
I’ve been failing to mention one thing that featured quite prominently in my intentions post, and that was the expert. I was never quite able to fully conceptualize why we needed an expert, or how to fit them into our process. This unfortunately made it hard to find people to contact. I ended up reaching out to about 5 different people, only one of which responded to say my topic was outside their range of knowledge. If we do something similar with experts in the future, I think that if I want any chance of success I’ll have to email more people even earlier with a much clearer vision of what I want to get out of it.
Overall I don’t think this project will be amongst my favourites of the year, but that’s ok! Moving forwards I think my biggest takeaway is to not get bogged down in the details or committed to one specific vision because ultimately done is better than perfect.
[^1]: The Manhattan Project² for short! (yes I had top copy-paste the superscript 2)
[^2]: The national labs have actually collaborated with universities and private companies on multiple occasions, thanks to their affinity in science at scale!
[^3]: If you haven’t read my previous posts, the Zettelkasten is a knowledge management system based on drawing connections between notes and thoughts.
[^4]: I decided to script after the storyboard, which didn’t really work great for this type of video.
[^5]:The main font for titles is Helvetica Neue LT 53 Ex, bold. Captions for images use a condensed version of Garamond, and the stylized Helvetica variant Alte Haas Grotesk used for some other text. The presentation has 3 separate stages. Pre-National labs, Pre-AEC and post-AEC. Each stage introduces an additional primary colour in the order of Red, Blue, Green, representing the growth and maturity of the system over time!
[^6]: My number one piece of advice about animating with keynote is to really consider how you’re layering things. If you can, I’d also suggest using many slides, so they don’t get overcrowded.
Bias is inherent to existence. Every aspect of our worldview distorts and warps our interpretation of information, like facets in a sheet of glass. In anthropology — the study of humanity through culture, society, and human behaviour — minimizing bias is important. When analyzing a culture other than our own, it’s important not to jump to conclusions that may seem clear within our worldview; those conclusions often fall apart with more context.
Out for Launch
Our launch activity made the importance of reducing bias very clear. It showed how we could use only the context of a single image to deduce something about the society that made it. For example, my group was given this image to analyze1:
My immediate first impression was that this was a knife evidenced, as our teachers pointed out, by the shape of the handle and the presence of serrations. The manufacturing of the knife itself also posed a clue, as it showed that whatever “society” it was from could work with metal and wood in a fairly precise manner. The last clue we picked apart was the large circular cutouts, which showed that it was likely meant for some sort of heavy duty cutting, where the holes could catch offshoots. What this whole activity showed is that taking something at face value usually isn’t enough ( other groups got much harder objects than us ), but that even while thinking about an object in complete isolation you can glean a lot of useful information from it.
The future
In this project, we’ll be learning about how we can adopt an anthropological perspective in our thinking, specifically within the context of learning about the indigenous peoples of Canada. My goal as an anthropological thinker is to be able to analyze and understand new information in ways that minimize the impact of my own biases. In the last project my intentions were largely set around learning about the role of western systems in the oppression of indigenous peoples, which I feel was reflected in the rest of the project, and in most of history of indigenous peoples we’ve studied since grade 8. So much of our knowledge has been affected by the white settler worldview of those who recorded it. Even in this, the learning was largely through a western lens, so the next step is to start to more deeply understand indigenous culture with the aforementioned anthropological perspective. Maybe we’ll be examining our own culture, and the harms we’ve caused to indigenous peoples. Maybe we’ll be trying to clear biases, and make some sort of action towards reconciliation.2 To be honest, I haven’t heard much about what the rest of this project will look like, and I feel like my guesses are pretty far off, but I’m exited to learn more!
Since we’re going very day-by day with this, my time blocking, scheduling, and informational front loading goals from my VMV will be very useful to help me stay on top of whatever comes next, and as always, my zettelkasten will be the primary way I digest info.
That’s been my intentions, thanks for reading!
—
I didn’t save the photo from the activity, but I managed to track down it’s original source to this reddit post↩︎
Fair disclaimer, these are nothing more than educated shots in the dark. ↩︎
Not even back at school for a week and here we are again, courtesy of Humanities and the Manhattan Project Project. This post is meant to serve as a reflection on what things I know ( admittedly few ), and a preview of where this project might go, and my intentions in that.
In the last few days we’ve taken a brief look at the details of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Though the book Hiroshima, some independent research to create zettles, and everything I happened to come across before now, this is roughly what I know:
Sometime in the 1930s scientists started to theorize how the energy from the splitting of atoms could be harnessed. Fears of Germany developing nuclear weapons drove the United States to create the Manhattan project. In 1945 the first atomic bomb was detonated in the “Trinity” test. A month later, two nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This lead to a combined 200,000 fatalities, and extensive damage. The effectiveness of atom bombs was proven beyond any doubt, and the war ended soon afterwards.
So far, I’ve only done some research on the general timeline, as well as the specifics of the damages to the two cities:
Even with my relatively shallow depth of knowledge, it’s clear how deeply the Manhattan project effected the world we live in today. Atomic bombs changed the entire context of all warfare that followed; The research needed to create those bombs lead to modern nuclear energy, and created ethical questions that are still being discussed today.
Safe to say there’s a lot of different directions I’d be interested in taking this animation[^1] such as: The rebuilding of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how the bombs changed their identities as cites, how atomic bombs restructured war, or even how the manhattan project set a precedent for state-sponsored science, and standards for top-secret research.
In the research and production of my video I want to fully utilize my zettelkasten[^2] Since this is animated, I might also need to dip my toes back into some tools like DaVinci resolve, blender, and keynote.[^3] Finally, we’re going to be contacting some experts in fields related to our topics and while I yet don’t know who that might me for me, I do think I’ll have to brush up on my email writing to have any chance of finding someone.
This project does have a fairly tight schedule, so I hope I’ll be able to manage my time to get this done alongside all the other work that grade 11 brings. That said, I think that with a bit of effort this will be a cool project, why else would PLP do it every year without fail?
That’s all for now, stay tuned!
— Finn
[^1]: did I mention we’re making an animated explainer for this?
[^2]: We touched on zettelkasten a bit at the end of last year. Essentially, it’s a way to organize and connect information to keep track of your thoughts and ideas, which will hopefully come in handy this project.
[^3]: Depending on how much time I have to polish this video :p
We’re back at it again. Last week, the Destination Imagination Regional tournament took place at Seycove, and for the second year in a row, I was part of it.
Now that last year’s grade 10’s are now in grade 11, us grade 10’s were now the oldest group doing DI, and we would be l be working with the grade 9s. The teams weren’t the only thing that was new, because apparently DI doesn’t just do the same challenges every year. By late December, we had our team forms filled out, and a few weeks after we got back from spring break, we met our team.
This year, I was working with two other grade 10s, Neko and Baz, and 3 grade 9s, Brooklyn, Ella, and Maggie. After getting to know each other, and filling out the team contract, we could start working. I wanted to make sure this year DI went better than last year, so one of the first things I did was make a shared craft doc to act as a central planning hub. This was because last year, sharing files, and making sure everyone had access to information was a struggle, so I made sure to create a space to help with that, and explain it to everyone early. [^1]
As you can see from the screenshot, there was a lot of stuff we needed to get done. Although everything just got sort of muddled up together, I’ll bundle it up into nice pretty categories, for the narrative. Here:
* Concept
* Story
* Actual physical items
I had the heaviest hand in the story and planning this year so that’s what I’ll focus on here, I did help with some props but thankfully my team actually had a somewhat even division of work, although there were definitely some things we were missing. More on that later. One thing that was a bit harder ( at least in my opinion ) was actually coming up with the base idea for our story. For our challenge, the basic idea was that we needed a story about one or more people on a /real non-earth/ /planet/ who /think/ they are alone but discover they aren’t. We spent a while trying to figure out how the base details, but we did eventually settle on mars as a planet, and from there things started to click into place. This took a while to get all sorted out [^2], but we eventually had a good enough base to start making props, backdrops, and of course the story.
We knew from the beginning that the story might be tricky, because even though we had 6 people on our team, only 5 would be at the regional tournament, and for the upcoming provincials, there will be 4. This is because Neko was going on a trip right before provincials, and both Neko and I were going on the band trip, which will be right before regionals. With this in mind, we knew we would have to make sure we didn’t have the story need too many characters, and that we could cut one character out. We eventually figured out a “cast” that would work for the first, and decided we would just merge two characters for the second. [ ^3]
The script took way too long to write, as we were still fleshing out story details as it was made, which meant things often had to be changed. By the end, the script was about twice the length we needed, so we had to trim it down a fair bit, removing a whole section of “Mission control” lines.
While I had been writing, the other members of my group had been working on making props and backdrops, making hats, and choreographing the dance, [^4] and everything was coming together in good time for the tourney. One thing that wasn’t coming together quite fast enough was our actual performance, so coming up to the day of the tournament, we had only practiced fully three or four times ( and one of them was the dress rehearsal )
That meant that by the time DI came around we had ( almost ) all the stuff we needed, but didn’t really have the performance down. Luckily, our performance was fairly late in the day, so we got to spend a good few hours practicing, and we got everything running smoothly, maybe too smoothly in fact. We ended up being almost two minutes too short on the performance, which was something that hadn’t happened in any of our rehearsals, stress does crazy things, eh?
As for the rest of the performance, it all went pretty well, but I’d say there were some pretty clear areas for improvement. First was our Technobabble depictor. We were pretty confused about what this was, and while we wrote technobabble into the story, we never actually made a proper depictor. This is a /very/ clear path of improvement for provincials, as even if it’s only 50% on all related categories, it’s still close to 30 points we can gain. Second area for growth is our Scientific Demonstration. Again, this was written into the script, but the actual theatrics and function of the demonstration were lacking, considering it was just a slightly modified fan with streamers on top. I think with a bit more of a polished and impactful demonstration, there’s another easy 10-20 points we can get.
Anyways, that’s most of what happened this time, and what needs to change for next time. I think our team has all the elements for a winning solution, we just need to stop using tape and start using glue to hold everything together ( metaphorically speaking )
That’s all for this post, I’m Finn Hofbauer, So long for now.
Why craft over basecamp? Well, craft actually works better for collaboration with smaller groups, and it’s just an overall nicer experience IMO.
I’m not too sure why, but one theory I have is that everyone the same general concept of the story everyone’s individual ideas were different, which is in theory good, but in practice a bit of a hassle to coordinate.
We also managed to find a way to keep Neko in the performance, with some prerecorded lines of “ship computer dialogue”.
Our two team choice elements were crochet alien hats ( as part of the alien costumes ) and a dance, for the finale of our solution.
This is a memorial made to facilitate the remembrance of the thousands of Japanese Canadians who were interned during WWII.
That opening sentence probably raises a few question for you and while I am unable to know what you are actually thinking, an educated guess will probably do. Firstly, you may have read the intro, seen the image, and thought something along the lines of why a memorial?” or “why Japanese internment?” You might also be wondering “How exactly does /that/ symbolize Japanese internment” or “it’s a bit small for a memorial, is it not?”. There’s even a chance you wondered “What’s Japanese internment?”. [^1]
Well, If this post goes the way I’ve planned, all of your questions should be answered in due time, so let’s start right at the top of the list with the Why. So, why are we making memorials? Well, first let’s talk about what a memorial even is.
We spent a lot of time figuring this out, by looking at examples of famous memorials, identifying common elements, and even making some basic memorials on a serious time crunch.[^2] Now, what did we actually learn about memorials from that? To make a long story short A memorial is (memorial definition) .
Why we made memorials at all becomes a bit more clear with the project’s driving question:[^3]
How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?
This project was all about memorials, and acknowledging past wrongs. In short we looked at case studies, did research and then designed and built a prototype memorial to a past historic event.[^4]
Let’s start, as all good things do, with the study. As I mentioned before, we would be looking at past injustices, specifically those that happened in BC.
Since that doesn’t necessarily narrow it down a lot, the three we looked at were the Chinese head tax, the komagata maru, and Japanese internment.
The head tax was a fee that had to be payed by any Chinese immigrant that wished to enter Canada between 1885 to 1923. It’s main purpose was to limit immigration from China, with the fee becoming as high as $500 per person.
Next, the Komagata Maru was a ship carrying hundreds of south asian immigrants, aiming to challenge the continuous passage act that effectively banned them from immigrating to Canada. When they arrived in Vancouver harbour, they were not allowed to enter Canada, and were sent back to India after a two month standoff.[^5]
Now for Japanese internment, which was my focus for this project.
Japanese internment refers to the forcible relocation and incarceration of over 22000 Japanese Canadians during WWII. A combination of fear of the enemy, and strong racial prejudices lead to policies being enacted that allowed the government to take the property of Japanese Canadians, and send them away to live in internment camps and ghost towns, not allowed to return for years after the war ended.
At this point we were put into groups[^7] where we would be designing our actual memorials. This would be a challenge, as we would have to know all about our topic to design an effective memorial without being disrespectful. As part of our research, we created Smart Brevity[^6] notes on our topics. For my part, this mostly consisted of as much research as possible to distill out the key details. Here’s what I came up with, if you’d like to reap the knowledge:
With research fully researched, we could get together and start planning. Despite spending a bit of time stuck, we came up with the concept of doing something with a cherry blossom tree to symbolize Japanese Canadians. From there we started to come up with more symbols. We thought of barbed wire, to represent the past trauma and hardship of interment. We also were told about Japanese fishing balls, which we used to represent Japanese Canadian property being seized, and them being forced away from their homes.
Our final design consisted of a tree, the trunk wrapped with barbed wire and fishing balls hanging from it’s branches. We decided the hypothetical “real” memorial would be a metal sculpture, so we started to design a memorial around that.
I 3d modelled a tree that Adam was able to 3d print, which served as the base for our leaves. The trunk ended up being too small, so Adam made one out of clay. After adding on the fishing balls ( made of marbles ) and barbed wire ( made of wire ) we hit it with a healthy coat of spraypaint, and we were done!
We presented our memorials to the other half of the class, and things went pretty smoothly. We had created memorial explainers, which outlined the symbolism for our memorial, which made presenting very easy.
With presenting done, the last step was to display our memorials for the world to see ( the world being Seycove ). We put all our memorial explainers on one page, made a qr code, and put them in the display case ( ours is in the centre )
With that, the project was officially done. Here’s our explainer page:.
That’s all for this post, So long for now.
If you have not thought anything resembling these options, you’ll need to contact the original thoughts bureau.
We did ours on the Jan 6 riots and made an… interesting representation of Donald trump
Yes it does use em dashes
That is part of the reason the memorial picture didn’t look very good
These are only brief summaries, and since everyone was making a memorial on one of the three topics I’d advise looking at the blogs of someone who actually covered these topics.
Smart brevity is a system for composing concise and brief writing to deliver information efficiently. It revolves around the concept of Axioms, small headlines that make text very parse-able.
