Month: April 2025

The Health Ever After project is an interesting project that helped us understand how to make a video and get us ready for our bigger project—the Disney World trip. The thing I mostly focused on was mental health and why mental health is so important, especially the role of melatonin in mental health. I explored the question: if you do not get enough sleep, what does it do to your mental health?

I was interested in that topic because I was wondering how many of the side effects actually happen to you mentally if you don’t get enough sleep. How much do you get behind in school? That was the main thing for me—understanding why it’s so important to have melatonin production and why it’s necessary for your mental health.

I found this project to be fun because it was a shorter project, but one where I thought we got to have a lot more freedom in choosing our own topic. You had three options: mental health, physical health, and health literacy. I picked mental health because I thought that one was the most interesting, and I didn’t know a lot about it before.

After this project, I think I’m more confident in understanding why sleep is necessary for your mental health. Overall, I found this project to be very interesting in helping me understand how mental health, physical health, and health literacy are all so important to what we do in our lives.

Here’s my video

You’re probably wondering, what is DI? DI is a project that POP wants us to do to get more imaginative. DI means Destination Imagination. In this project, you have to be very imaginative in what you do, and you have to be very collaborative with all your teammates to make sure that you get everything done. DI is mostly centered around what thing you were in. I was in the technical one, so for technical we had to make an assembly machine and then make a destruction machine.

A really big important thing about DI is making sure you have a good script. Your script is usually what your machine evolves around, and I know that might sound kind of ridiculous, but it’s really difficult to build these machines, and that’s why most groups focus on building a script first and not machines.

For our assembly machine, we got cardboard and made pretty much a rectangular cylinder, and then we would drop Tetris-looking blocks down it. Our script was mostly about games and gladiators. For our destruction machine, one of the guys in our group, Coyote, built this flicking machine that would hit a ball down, and then they built a tube so the ball could go down and hit all the blocks.

The main thing we got points for in both Provincials and Regionals was our script and acting. For Regionals, we got first because our group had a good script, and not many groups had machines that were working or even built, so we really lucked out with that one. For Provincials, we didn’t luck out on that one, so that was very disappointing, but for Instant Challenge, we did get first.

Looking back on DI, my favourite thing had to be my group writing the script and the collaboration in our group. I think in our group, most people contributed about the same. It wasn’t one person doing a lot and then, you know, the four other people doing nothing. So I think looking back on that is a really good thing for DI.

We had to tell a story from our lives. I picked a horror story that happened to me 1 year ago with two other friends. It’s just a story of a ghost encounter, or so that’s what we originally thought it was. Looking back, it’s most likely not a ghost encounter. It’s most likely just a weird story with a logical explanation, which one I cannot come up with right now. This particular story was very fascinating to me. Looking back on it, it’s weird how the first thing we thought of was a ghost and we didn’t come up with logical explanations at the start. The story pretty much comes in with us going into three different rooms and there’s nothing there. One of the rooms had a computer that we tried to punch in a bunch of random combinations that didn’t work. And then we went to a bigger room where you can kind of just imagine a bunch of thin Styrofoam cubicles in this massive room, and then we walk a bit in this room and there are these chairs stacked all the way to the top of the roof, and we go and look towards the chairs just wondering and we’re looking around and we see all these chairs come crashing down and flying out, and so we run out cause we’re scared. We think it’s a ghost, and so we get out of the building and the first thing we think of is oh it’s a ghost, but then we decide to go back in because we wanted to continue to explore. As we go into the next room, it’s this like library filing room. We walk in and we’re walking down and we go turn to our left and we see two bookshelves and they’re pretty tall, and so we go walk towards them because we wanted to see if anything was in there, and then we start walking towards it, and the one behind it falls and then hits the other one and it all goes crashing down, and so we run out and left the place because we were so scared. So that’s the basics of my story. And so I had to write a script for a podcast about it, which was pretty fun. Making the script, I found it to be tedious trying to remember a lot of it because it happened a fair while back, but I found it really fun to go through and remember what happened and to try and make a script around it so I can do the story. It’s not one of my favourite projects, but uploading it to Spotify and listening to other podcasts trying to understand how podcasts work was really fun for me. I found one of the most fun parts was to talk to friends and see what their stories were and even just listen to their podcasts and see what they were doing to get more of an idea of what I should be doing, and so I found that part really fun about it. Looking back, there were some issues with my video that for the future, I should work on, so next time I make a video I will have to do it better. Reflecting on that, I think the biggest issue was that I didn’t know how to use Spotify for uploading it and I got really confused, and I should’ve tried to do better on that. So if we do use this again, I will try to do better and reflect on that.