Apparently it was time for a sprint project, and you may be wondering what that is so I’ll explain. F1 fans may know what a sprint race is, which is essentially just a shorter version of the normal thing and that’s pretty much what a sprint project is to; Just a shorter version of the normal thing. Our project this time was called “Healthy ever after” where we focused on how we could educate others on how to be healthier around a topic of our choice.

We started by learning a bit more about this project’s format, which was new to us although rather similar to our Project Based Learning (PBL), Challenge Based Learning (CBL) focusses of creating your own spin on the essential question as well as asking and answering your own questions. We learned soon after that would be useful for our upcoming field study “Change Makers” which uses the same CBL format. We also learned we would be making a short video to educate others on some aspect of personal health.

We then set our essential question around the theme of education others about health, and after a bit of workshopping I came up with “How can eating real food strengthen your personal physical health”, and then after asking some questions and subsequently following that up with some research I was ready to create a first draft of my video which I’ll show below:

I think I had the right idea, but it definitely needed some changes in production quality and I also got some miscellaneous feedback in a peer review session. Unfortunately that was right before I left on the senior music trip to Edmonton, which went well and was super fun, but broke my flow a bit, and after returning from our trip, my revision was put on the back burner for a while to catch up on other uncompleted projects, and when I did get around to it, I encountered a lot of technical difficulties and even after all that there is still some production flaws like audio desync but there is no more time to do another another take, as this project is already long overdue, but here is the finished video:

My two key takeaways from this project’s format were such:

1. Challenge based learning seems intriguing and I’m starting to understand it’s differences from PBL. I love the personal choice aspects but I’m slightly confused on how my class can still all focus on the core ideas of a project if we are so varied in focus.
2. I need to rethink how I catchup from setbacks like the Edmonton trip, which I will need to do again soon with our field school looming. I also need to figure out how to communicate with teachers better when something like this happens as I handled this rather poorly.

That’s all for today, thanks for reading!

Hey everyone! It’s been a little while since my last pose about destination Imagination where I went over what happened leading up and during the first Destination Imagination tournament of the year, and if you missed that go check it out here:

Yay, I didn’t D.I!

But after this there was still another tournament! I knew form the start of this that I would not be able to attend this tournament as I would be on a trip with the school band (which did go well and was really fun), but I still helped make some changes to our solution. I’d say may main creation was designing and fabricating a system to make our transporter machine easier to use for our other members of our group that will less familiar with its workings. Here is what it looked like:

https://collaborate.shapr3d.com/v/pOubR_miGVWu3I9bOGk_e

I know it looks a little weird but it connected to our existing machine though the spots for lego axles to connect, and acted as a weight and a way to easily load the other weights onto the machine.

It terms of a more general reflection about the entire project, I feel I definitely learned some things from this experience. I learned how much a having a dedicated group matters to me, as I felt much more under control this year with a great group compared to last year where I had some challenges and a slightly more difficult group for me to work with. An extra year of experience and time to mature was also a key factor in feeling more comfortable. This was a great chance to expand and develop my own skills as well as work on my teamwork and collaboration abilities. My team was instrumental to success of course, so thanks to them for being collaborative, and open-minded throughout everything. As always I learned what I can do better in the future, in this case that was to stop overthinking things before actually trying a solution and start working on planning work in advance and using a healthy work ethic.

Overall D.I. this year went really well and I was happy with my performance. Huge thanks to my team as well for managing to get second place even though they were were missing two team members.

Hello again, its me! I don’t know who else it would be, but at least you know now that I have not been replaced by a doppelgänger. Probably. Anyways…

Our latest Maker project was an exploration on podcast creation and storytelling. For our product, we made a short podcast episode about something/s that has happened to us, and in doing so learn about creating a podcast and how to tell a story. It went alright. I made a story about my experiences with a yearly event my school does and it was okay. My story wasn’t the most engaging or fun, but it had some decent plot elements and would probably be bearable if you had to listen to it. If you want to take a listen here it is on Spotify:

It was actually a decent amount of fun creating the podcast and I learned a lot of good techniques that I can use to improve my workflow in the future, using speech to text to write the script being a prime example. It was also useful to review and refine my storytelling skills.

I have some critiques about the project itself, but I’ll start with some more of the good stuff:

• Fun: This project allowed me to create some fun cover art and make some funky background music.

My cover art for this episode

• Creativity: It allowed for huge amounts of personalization and choice, which is always nice and it can definitely help me express myself sometimes.
• Storytelling: Definitely a good focus and a hugely important skill for life, both in school, out, and after.
• Revision: There was definitely an emphasis placed on revision and improving your own work

But I definitely found somethings in this project didn’t fit right with me:

• The criteria of this project was very shallow and just felt incomplete in some ways. The main problem was that the assessment section was not completed nor the learning evidence in the project guide
• It just felt rushed is what I’m trying to say, the final product is kind of odd after just doing a much more sophisticated podcast. It was all just too simple, and felt a little incomplete

I also have a little bit of (hopefully) constructive feedback:

This whole project felt like an introduction to the topic and that what I think it should be. I think having this project as an extended launch into podcasting would work well at the start of the year, before some of the later projects that could build off of what we learnt in this one and save some time doing so. Also there was a lot of emphasis placed on the podcast itself, which is okay, but its the storytelling that really matters I think, and a deeper dive into that at the start of the year would be good. 

Having the stories be from our life is a bit odd too; treating this like a launch activity would allow for potentially having the stories be personal choice, ranging from fiction, to interests, to whatever we can imagine instead of having to think of that one cool thing that happened to us once. (Although that is still a good prompt).

Thanks for reading, I know this was a bit of a change of pace from normal but it’ll be back to normal next time. Bye!

Hello, its me again! Aren’t you exited to read all about my latest school project? …You are? Awesome! Lets get right into it then!

I had always heard about kids learning about Shakespeare in school, but to be honest, I wasn’t sure if they still did that anymore, but low and behold, they do. In our case we knew we were going to be reading Romeo and Juliet and then creating a modern abridged parody and preforming it as a class. having just watched the other half of our classes performance, we were definitely a bit daunted by the prospect but we knew we could do it.

First, in order to understand the message of Romeo and Juliet which was one of the big parts of the unit, we did some practice interpreting theme and creating theme statements of stories by watching short stories like “KitBull”.

[Kitbull theme study]

We then had to read the play, I chose to read the simplified/modernized version in order to have a better understanding of the story if not the author or language of the time. I thought the story was alright, not my favourite but I’m also not exactly the target audience or even target century so I think that’s understandable. Along the way we had some small assignments and quizzes just to make sure we actually knew what we were reading. 

After doing a bit of a deep dive into the concept of parody itself, we broke up into groups to work on creating our modern parody which we determined (after a lot of discussion) would be replacing the two families (Montagues and Capulets) with America and Canada. We themed the story around the stereotypes of each country and tried to make it humorous as possible. In terms of teams, I was working on the audio and visual side of things. This meant that I helped with creating backdrops, finding audio effects, and a little but of practical effects but the practical effects didn’t work too well.

I also worked on compiling the full script together although I was not assigned to do this, but I felt I could do it well and it needed to be done, as we had each act in a entirely different format. To help fix that, I also whipped up a easy to use formatting guide that I was very proud of, and may have been one of my better products from this project:

I was assigned an acting role too, originally our teacher was planning for me to be the second half of Romeo (We had too so that there was less stress on each actor to memorize lines), but I told my teacher I wasn’t great at memorizing lines, and as proof of that, I then struggled to memorize the lines I was assigned, and so I used a script during the performance and still got some lines wrong, so that’s definitely something to work on.

One of the biggest challenges we faced as a group was trying to make our adaption relevant to a modern audience, but I learnt a lot of the importance of relevance for a viewer, and how that helps them connect with the story though finding common similarities between the story and their life or the modern world. It just adds an instant level of interest from anyone who sees your story.

So in terms of adapting Romeo and Juliet we found that relevance through shared experiences, good storytelling and performance, and good planning were all required to help modern viewers understand the theme of Romeo and Juliet. 

My favourite part of this project was probably either creating the full script and formatting guide, or doing some stage direction after I was done acting. I think there is some room for improvement in said acting, some of the initial ideas and execution of the audio and visual side of things, as well as just my performance skills in general.

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope to see you again soon!