Grr Matey

Hey y’all, Max here. 

Pirates are usually shown as Charismatic, adventurous scoundrels. But after learning all about them, I can most definitely say that this thinking is almost completely false, and that there is a whole lot more underneath the Pirate iceberg. Despite this project only lasting roughly one week, I believe it was very informative, and more enjoyable than other, longer projects. 

One thing I almost forgot to include in this post was the viewing of the 2013 action movie, Captain Philips . Our class watched this movie in our schools theatre to prepare ourselves for the argh matey project. The movie was great, and received fantastic review scores, but if I’m going to be honest the movie taught me how pirating has evolved to modern-day, but that’s about it. It also taught me to stay away from the Horn of Africa if I am ever on a cargo vessel. 

Valuable advice and great movie. 

One important thing to note before I get too far into the summative blog post is that the title is misleading. Yes, there may be pirates involved, but the most important knowledge I gained from this short project was actually about the Europeans, and how they inadvertently discovered a whole continent. Now, back to the story. 

This project began with quite a few pirate stereotypes ( actually, the pirate stereotypes continued throughout the whole project ). One of the first, and most eye-opening things we did was destroy the foundations of some Well-aged Pirate stereotypes. 

Here are three popular ones :

1. Cool eyepatches? Only used when a crewmates eye was gouged out, or lost vision.

 

2. Jolly Roger? Not fashionable, this flag flew when a pirate ship approached another ship, and was willing to spare the crew. ( If the pirates flew a red flag, the opposing ship wasn’t as lucky. )

3. Walking the plank? Never. Pirates usually kept prisoners as hostages, and if they needed to dispose of someone, throwing them overboard was a popular method.

4. Parrots? Okay, yes, pirates actually did keep parrots with them, and that is very respectable. 

After we learned about pirate stereotypes, we learned about cause and consequence. Cause and consequence is most commonly shown as a tree or chart that examines a certain event, and shows what caused it, and what the consequences are of the event. This idea could be generally related to any event that happens, and I thought it worked particularly well with the Pirate/ seafaring exploration topic. 

The medium we would eventually communicate our final project through was the app AR Makr.

The app uses augmented reality to be able to project images onto a flat surface, and allows the user to do a variety of limited things with their images and creations. I had a lot of fun using this app, especially since you can project your own photos, and do things with them.

AR Makr is the program we used to do our final project, which was to make, and tell a short story about a part of the European exploration. For my video, I decided to focus on Christopher Columbus and his discovery of North America.

Age of Exploration 

Curricular Competencies: 

Empowered Learner: 

Empowered learning is about properly using the technology that is available to us to create the end product. For me, I believe this was first demonstrated in this project when we first used the AR Makr application, and then again when we made the final European Exploration AR Makr video. 

Analyze Cause and Consequence:

Analyzing cause and consequence is being able to see why an event is important, in the past, when it happened, and in the aftermath. While the web of cause and consequence is the medium we use to communicate throughout the whole project, milestone 2 really brought this out, because we had to make a chart of cause and consequence leading to, and after the event of European Exploration ( “ European Exploration” is rather vague, so I interpreted it as the period of 2 – 3 years before Christopher Columbus “discovered” North America, and the 2 – 3 years after Christopher Columbus “discovered” North America. ). 

Discussing, Listening, Speaking:

This is a pretty simple competency; it requires us to show proper verbal skills. This is best shown when I did the filming for the final AR Makr video. This was harder, and more time-consuming than I thought, because I did all the voice recording in the classroom, instead of outside, and it took me roughly 30 minutes of recording in a quite space to be able to put the audio over the video, and then cut it all so it fit within the time limit. 

To conclude, the Argh Matey project has been a fun experience, that was maybe too short. I enjoyed most of it, and there weren’t really any bad parts. So, this brings me to the end, where I can answer the driving question which is:

What was the impact of Global Exploration ?  

Throughout the entire Argh matey project, we have been learning all about what events happened that led up to, and what happened after, Global Exploration. More importantly we have also learned about what the consequences were. If you think about it, European Exploration is what allowed civilizations and advanced societies to prosper on North America, which has allowed countries like the United States to become one of the most powerful Nations in the world. European Exploration changed the world for the better, or did it?

The consequences of the European Exploration were disastrous for certain groups of people. Death, disease, and a demolition of culture all came in the wake of European Exploration, which also included one of the most brutal forms of slavery. So if I had to answer the driving question, I would say that while there were some remarkable achievements, and great discoveries made by European Nations, there were also terrible consequences, that many people overlook.