It’s June, which means that BlueSky has made its “triumphant” return. You know what that means.
EXHIBITION POST.
So, the exhibition went by pretty fast, and before we knew it, we were ripping paper off of the walls and tearing down hours of hard work. Here’s a quick edit I made of the chaos at the exhibition.
So with that out of the way, let’s start at the beginning. I’ll be telling this story through the LAUNCH cycle, because that’s the order we did everything in. We also did everything using the LAUNCH journal, which gave us prompts to try to help us achieve our goals.
L – Look, Listen, And Learn
This section featured a few writing prompts, including how might we’s, and also some world issue analysis. One specific prompt… prompted us to write about some pressing world issues, and from this, my project was born.
As you can see, I started researching and looking at home security. Safety and well-being was a topic that I still feel is under-recognized as a world issue, and my project was meant to change that. My first plan? A Home Security System.
A – Ask Tons of Questions
As you can tell from the title, in this section, we asked questions. Tons of questions. We looked at a helpful question formulation infographic-thing to help get the creative, questioning juices flowing. Ew.
The first step for this section of the journal was to make a chart of NTK’s, or Need To Knows. This was a chart featuring 3 columns:
Know – Something we already knew
Need to Know – Something we don’t know relating to something we know
Next Steps – What we’ll do to find out the NTK.
Here’s my chart.
The next, and final step was to make a timeline. Not too much to explain there.
Pitch Form
This was a break from the LAUNCH cycle. Mainly because P doesn’t fit into the word “LAUNCH”. But also because our teachers didn’t trust us (not all of us at least) to create something brilliant on the first try.
Long story short, I got rejected. Not fully, though. The main reason was because I am incapable of making a functioning security system in 3 weeks. So….
However, like someone going through a breakup, I bounced back, and a few days after, I settled for the next best thing: a Guide for Home Security. This was pretty much the same, but it featured myself, writing down my thoughts and home security research down into a digital book.
U – Understand the Problem and N – Navigate Ideas
I’m clumping these together, because A: I’m lazy and B: These steps kinda belong together. With that out of the way, U was pretty much the research stage.
However, N actually featured taking all of your research and plotting it out onto a post-it board, grouping similar ideas.
C – Create a Prototype
This section featured not only the prototype of your project, but rapid and live prototypes. Here are some links explaining rapid and live prototypes.
I created some wild prototypes, such as storyboards and mind maps. Here’s my mind map, which I used to try to figure out my accessibility.
H – Highlight and Fix
This is blatantly obvious. Revision. For my revision, I decided to add some minimalistic icons to my bland, colourless guide. I went into keynote, made some icons, and added them into my book, reformatting it so that it looked simple, but not effortless.
Launch!
Before we presented, we created interactive KeyNotes. These were called our Launch Portfolios. These are what we put our LAUNCH process into, like our blogs. These had icons that linked to different slides, featuring the L A U N C H.
As always, before we knew it, the exhibition was here. We (our group) was named “Home Products”, so our minds immediately jumped to home decor. Our group of Grade 8’s and 9’s set up decently well with the time we had, and soon, we Launched.
Reflection
There’s not much to say about BlueSky that I haven’t said before. BlueSky is great for practicing critical thinking, and with my digital book design, it really helped me work on my project design and my writing. I was able to kind of “find” my writing style, as I mixed elements from my essay writing (informative) and blog writing (humour and “charisma”). It also helped me figure out minimalism, as I think I did a pretty good job with the minimalistic design and formatting.
Conclusion: BlueSky was a pretty nice experience, and helped me work on skills I hadn’t really thought about before.
This is Jason, signing off.