Scimatics

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An average post about TPOLs

Hello and welcome to my post about my first TPOL experience. In this post I’m going to reflect on my learning throughout this past year. Into the post! It may not be the best, but I’m trying my best here!

Overall, I’m pretty proud of what I’ve done this year regarding school. Sometimes things went well, and sometimes they didn’t, but hey, thats how life is sometimes. And I dealt with it. One of the latter times was a project we did at the beginning of the year. It was a humanities project called “The Media is the Message”. I wont go too in-depth here because I talked about it in my mPOL post which you can find HERE. But overall I think that this project was a failure to begin with, but I learned from the failure and tried again until I got it right, and for the successful things, I’m proud of my work was a scimatics project called “Chemistry Coding” this was a project where we used Scratch to create a game that demonstrated chemical reactions in a fun way. You can learn more about that HERE. I think that I learned some great strategies for concentrating and getting things done.

This year I’ve had some great times, but I think that maker is a great example of this. Something very unique to maker is that every project we do incurs a whole lot of creativity. A great example of this is DI (blog posts here (Regionals) and (“Provincials”)). As awkward as DI is for us in the beginning, once we get the imaginary ball rolling we don’t stop for a while. I think that thats very important because creativity can be a huge tool with many things. There are great examples of this like high school students becoming famous through an invention or such. I’d like to build on my creativity more next year and maybe make some fun projects too, I’m looking forward to it!

This year, I’ve procrastinated a lot, and online school definitely isn’t helping. So I’d like to make it a goal of mine to try and minimize the amount of late work I hand in from now on. I hope I can get it to almost none in grade 9!

 

Overall, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished over the past year and I think that, although it wasn’t the greatest, it was mine, and thats good enough for me. Until next year’s tPOL!

One last thing. I’d like to thank the teachers of PLP so much for making all of this possible. You’ve put us through a lot, but we know its all for our learning.

THANK YOU!

Leave a comment Posted on Humanities, Maker, PGP, POL, Scimatics

An average post about my mPOL

Hey, For this post I will be talking about my learning and reflecting on the skills I have learned throughout this year. This post will include a reflection on each subject covered in PLP. This includes: Humanities, Scimatics, Maker, and PGP. For each subject I will provide an example of my work ethic, habits, and proficiency.

The first thing I would like to talk about is this question. “What is my learning goal that I want to reach by the end of the school year, and how will I meet it? This is a very tough question that will come up a few times in this post because this is something that will stay with me for the rest of this school year. Anyway, let’s get to the reflecting.

Humanities: this is one of the two classes that we have every day, meaning that I have lots of examples of work habits and such. The example that I chose for humanities was actually part of our first humanities project, this being The Media is the Message (you can find my post about this project HERE). I have chosen milestone 3 as an example of my hard work because it shows that when I get invested into something I can put a lot of hard work and effort into it to be the best it can be.

This is an example of some work in humanities that I went beyond the expected work without even realizing it.

Scimatics: this is the other class that we have every day! Anyway, in this section I will talk about and mention parts about teamwork and evidence of high quality work. For the scimatics portion of this post I want to talk about our Laser Maze (find it HERE) project. This project was based all around dividing work and teamwork when needed. To be honest, I think I took a little too much of this project on by myself, and made it harder than it could have if I had help from my group members. The thing that I am most proud of in this project was actually the final product. The final product of this project was to make a triangle out of lasers in a Star Wars themed ship/object. We made a Venator class republic star destroyer.

This is the “laser maze” my group made. It’s a Venator class star destroyer from the clone wars.

Maker: this class takes up one of our elective spots, for better or worse, I’m not sure yet, but there have been some great experiences with this class. One of those being the subject for this section! A great experience that I am proud of in maker class was part of the “Power of a Pencil” (find that post HERE) project. The part that I want to focus on is the first milestone A.K.A. name art. The reason I chose this piece was because I was so invested that I even decided to take my time and add to the original and send the second version in. I thought that overall that project let my creativity come out a lot and help me make something that represents myself.

This is the final piece of art I made. I’m very proud of this one!

PGP: PGP definitely isn’t a conventional class. Every month or so a PGP meeting is help where we discuss something important. A part of PGP that I haven’t really used as much as I want to is Things. Things is a great time management app that has a bunch of features built in to help you stay on-track. I try to keep up with things as much as possible but a lot of the time I forget to look at it. I’m looking forward to the PGP meetings ahead of me to help me learn new strategies to keep on top of the game!

This is the Things logo!

Now, for the part where I reflect on my work! (Yay)

This first half-school year in high school has been a huge ramp up in terms of work, but I like that I have to work hard to get better at something like this. Of course, with learning comes FAILure the FAIL meaning “First Attempt in Learning” I have had many of those, but of all of them the piece of work that I am least proud of is definitely my first business advertisement. It was a train wreck and I had no idea if it looked good or bad but I think that over this first half-year I have definitely improved and learned that FAILure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And now, for the final part of this post! A question! One for myself, or whoever’s reading this.
What new strategies can I use to help further my understanding of what I’m learning?

Thanks for reading this far!

-Keenan

 

 

 

 

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An average post about laser mazes

Hello again! Yes, I have returned… However, the SBC is over all of these posts will be post about my classes! Anyway, lets get right into this post!

This post is about the latest project that my class has completed. It was called mazer tag. To start off this project we did a fun little activity where we hid our target and took turns shooting our teams laser at the target using a laser pointer and a mirror. My team won (of course) and we moved on to the next activity. The first milestone of this project was a mind map with all of the questions and facts we knew about light going into this project.

Here’s an image of the mind map I made!

The second milestone for “Mazer Tag” was a quiz on the Pythagorean theorem. The Pythagorean theorem is an equation that can be done with a right triangle.

Here is an example of the equation.

The third large task we were assigned was a poster for our school’s winter Star Wars themed exhibition celebrating the release of the new movie Star Wars the Rise of Skywalker. In this poster, we had to show the laser maze that we created, along with the formulas to find the third side of the triangle (the hypotenuse).

This was my group’s poster.

The fourth task for this project was to design your laser carrier. When I say carrier I mean the Star Wars object that is meant to house your laser maze.

[insert sketch of laser maze here]

 

The fifth thing that we created in this project was, of course, the actual “laser maze” here’s a picture!

This is the laser maze my group made. It’s a venator class star destroyer from the clone wars.

The final milestone included writhing this project is the Star Wars exhibition. (That’s the day im writing this post) the exhibition is a fun, exciting event where we decorate our rooms and present our projects. The laser maze happens to be one of those projects this year!

 

Now I’m going to be talking about my performance according to the curricular competencies.

 

Communicating and representing: this competency was about showing formulas and math in understandable, and correct forms. I did this by creating a clear, informative, and easy to understand poster explaining the formula regarding the hypotenuse of my laser triangle.

 

Applying and innovating: this competency was about teamwork. I did well with my team by effectively finding jobs for everyone to do at most times and completing my share of the project on-time.

 

Questioning and predicting: The last competency for this project was based all off of personal interest towards the target subject. I think that I performed well on this competency by showing that I was truly interested in the subject at hand by doing research not only on the Star Wars aspects but also the math and science part too.

 

Anyway guys, thanks for reading this far into the post and I will see you guys in the next post! (It might be about the exhibition)

-Keenan