My declaration of learning

“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

Throughout both the first and second semester we had projects ranging from a futuristic ww1 book, and Frankenstuffies to our trip to Alberta, looking for reason for travel and tourism. We have had a range of projects, but there were a few projects that I enjoyed more, and found that I learned and grew the most on. One of the projects that I would like to highlight is our joint Maker and Humanities project, Rocky Mountain field school. This project was during our trip to Alberta, where we looked at the impact of geography on how we live. On the maker side of this projects, we made multiple videos. 

The first video I was our Alberta TikTok, where we had to make a TikTok trend video, that fit in to the trip. The second video we made was our at home video about what inspires us. The third video we had was the silent video that we made at the three valley gap ghost town. We made this video in one day at the three valley gap, where we had lots of old western themed building to choose from. Our final and largest video was the investigative video. This video was our answer want the allure of the Rockies was for tourism. We were to interview 3 people about why they travelled to the Rockies. On the humanities side of the project, we were to make a comic about the five themes of geography, being movement, location, region, place, and human environment. I enjoyed this project because it was awesome learning about Canadian geography, and because it was part of an awesome trip.

 

 The next project that I want to about was our revolutions project. This project was our winter exhibition project during this project we had to make a Rube Goldberg machine that correlated with the revolution we were assigned. My group wads the Irish revolution. Our machine was built on a piece of wood, painted like the Irish flag. Our machine used lots of different parts to achieve the goal of a total run through. I enjoyed this project because there was a massive creative element, and a making element which I enjoyed. I also found this project great because I learned a lot about the Irish revolution itself and the massive effect that it had on Ireland and England. 

The Final project is would like to show is the frakenstuffies project. This project was recent, and started with us reading a book called leviathan about a different version of ww1, with Austria-Hungary having massive mechanical beasts called clankers, and the English allied forces having beasties, which were genetically modified beasts, that were created for all sorts of purposes. After that book, we made our own Frankenstuffies, using parts of multiple stuffies, and then made a story about our stuffy, and then turned it into a short video. I enjoyed this project because we had a component of creativity, technical skills, but also a chance to make something physical. I chose this project because it was fun, but it also taught us the proper way to set up stories, and the heroes journey. It also taught us to use real world creation in videos which I also found awesome.

That’s all for this blog post, 

until next time, Jannik

Just recently we had our first Destination Imagination, and it was a bit of an DIsappointment. It was a shame because we had done a decent amount of work before the tournament but our machine still felt lacklustre. We had very simplistic machine modules, and it didn’t look the best, as we didn’t put much time to painting it. But after some work the night before, the machine looked like it was going to work as intended. The day of the tournament was not that bad, as we had had lots of time in between our instant challenge and our actual machine presentation to practice our story and presentation. Our instant challenge wasn’t that bad, however I am not able to talk about it until may, so I will not go in depth about that, but I will say that it did require our team to work together the entire time, and let each person contribute.

 After our instant challenge we had 3 hours till our main challenge. During that time, we practiced our presentation, which gave each person a roll. Our entire machine was themed off of Mario, where our script, our art on the machine, and our props were all Mario themed. The actual creation of our machine started right after the winter break, where we started both the creation of the story, and the creation of the machine. I mostly worked on the machine at the beginning of this project, where I tried to make a story based off of Mario without blatantly copying it. After I had finish the story, I revised it, and the with the help of Logan and Izzy, who also worked on the story, and props, we then transferred the story to our script which would be used during the presentation. After we had created the script we started working on props/ our team choice elements. 

Our team choice elements, was the painting of our props and machine, and our recreation of the Mario theme. I worked on the Mario theme, using a keyboard in GarageBand, to record and play my version of the song. The other team choice element was the painting of our things. Some of our props,/ things that we painted were the actual machine, after the completion of it, and some of our props like the turtle we created and Mario style mushrooms. I think that some parts of our machine and some costumes could use some improvement. All thing considered it was a quite good start for DI, and I hope that the next presentation goes better.

Until next post,

Jannik