Hi everyone, today I’ll be writing about the project I just finished in PLP 8.

 

This project was based around European settlement and also the First Nations. Another aspect that we learned about in this project is “Continuity and Change”. This is our final project of Humanities In PLP 8!

In this project we worked in groups to create our final product. The final product in this project was an Infographic.

The driving question in this project was “What did European Settlement mean for all the people involved?”

My answer to that is that it effected trade for all those involved. For example, the Europeans received resources to make hats and different fashion, and the First Nations received new foods and modern tools and weapons.

 

To demonstrate my learning, I will be highlighting the milestones/stepping stones that helped me reach an answer to the driving question.

 

The first thing I will be highlighting is the history of settlement and how it effected each side.

 

During this project we had a pages notes document that we regularly updated with information about settlement as a whole. We learned about treaties, relations between different sides, importance of land, and colonization. This info was important because it was a key part of our Infographic. This information was the evidence that supported our thesis on the Infographic.

I found it interesting to learn about First Nations because where I live there seems to be a presence of First Nations culture. Furthermore, this info extends my thinking on previous knowledge that I obtained in elementary school.

 

The second thing that helped me answer the driving question was the Survival Challenge activity that we did. This helped because it gave me an idea of what is needed to survive in the wild. To do this, we created a video demonstrating a survival technique of our choice.

I did this activity with my partner, Samuel and we chose to demonstrate an SOS signal.

Here’s our Survival video!

This video was really fun to make and I would be open to something like this again!

 

The next milestone I will be mentioning is milestone 4.

Milestone 4 was our Infographic about European Settlement.

To prepare for this milestone, we learned about what made a good Infographic. I learned that Infographics must be short and sweet an they also must tell a story.

Also, we brought various drafts and received peer critique.

Here’s my first draft:

The critique that I got was to change the colour of the hat, find credible sources, and center images and text better.

My partner and I took this feedback and started fixing our mistakes.

 

 

Now here’s our final draft!

To make the Infographic better we changed some of the info so that it resounded more with the thesis. We also centred the text and images better.

Now the Infographic wasn’t the final piece, to give the viewers of our Infographic a better idea of what settlement meant, we created a video that explained it.

To create this video, we used the Keynote feature “Magic Move”. This was my first time using it, so it was a quite learning experience!

To watch our Infographic explainer video go to the top of the post!

 

 

 

Every project in PLP is guided by the “Curricular Competencies”.

This project had only 2 competencies, Using Evidence, and Identifying Continuity and Change.

For Using Evidence, I think at first I wasn’t that advanced, however now I think I have improved those skills. I learned to show that growth by practicing on finding credible sources and using evidence that relates to what I’m implying.

 

And for Identifying Continuity and Change, at first I had no idea what Continuity and Change was. And now I fully understand what it is and how to apply it. I learned to show this by doing milestone 2 and by writing a Continuity and Change statement for my Infographic.

 

In Conclusion, I found learning about settlement and the First Nations especially really interesting. It was also good to work on Group work, something that you will regularly see in PLP. Furthermore, it was cool to make an Infographic as our final product.

 

Here’s a picture of my partner and I by our sign!

Thanks for reading!

Hi everyone, today I will be writing about a project we recently finished. This project was called Destination Imagination.”DI” is all about critical thinking and thinking quickly. The main goal of DI is to find a solution to the challenge that you get. There are 4 different challenges; Technical, Scientific, Engineering, and Artistic. Normally, we would present our challenge solutions at tournaments, however due to Covid, we created videos.

My challenge was Technical and my partners were: Cooper, Aaron, Julian, Ben T., and Declan. Our group name was: “Technically Happy”.

Here’s what our challenge required:

 

Now for DI there isn’t just one challenge to solve, there are two. Along with the main challenge there is an Instant challenge. Each group had a different Instant challenge, some challenges were in Presentation format, and some were in  Creation format.

 

Also, to prepare for this “Instant challenge”, we did many practice challenges to get ready. These challenges tested us to work together as a group well, but also in a quick manner. That’s the thing about instant challenges is speed, and if this were a normal year, we wouldn’t have as much time to prepare for the challenge. More on the practices, we acted as objects for the scenery, and we rarely got to use literal objects. This was good help since we had to do the same thing for the real Instant challenge.

 

My group got a “Presentation” type of challenge for the Instant challenge. Looking back, I think that we could’ve been better prepared, however I think we acted our roles well.

 

 

 

 

 

Our first task, which was pretty hard: was creating our own Basecamp Project. Actually creating it wasn’t hard but organizing our work by ourselves instead of the teachers was hard.

 

We then started to meet our challenge requirements and we had to fill out lots of worksheets.

 

I think that it took a while for our group to develop ideas and it was quite frustrating at first.

After many out-of school Zoom calls we had a full rough script to show our teacher. We had many good ideas and a long script which would be good in the long-run because some of our ideas wouldn’t be included.

 

The next step was to do a quick rough run through of the script and present to our teacher. This led us to assign roles for the characters and I chose to be the “guide”.

We didn’t have all of the tools and props at that time so the critique/ recommendations were pretty straightforward. At this time, we hadn’t started any filming we were just going through things and exploring all options.

 

 

In the middle of all of this, we were creating our Team Poster.

Here’s our design;

 

We took a photo with all of us gathered around the poster, unfortunately I don’t have that picture.

 

During the next few weeks, my group filmed the video and worked on the overall visuals of the video. Since our video didn’t have many literal materials, (it was mostly CGI), our work doubled. For example, we created a HUD, a health bar, and different sets. And of course, the editing was very extensive.

Like before, we brought a rough draft and presented it to our teacher. At that point, our video was only 3 minutes long and we had 5 minutes! So we already knew there was more work to be done. Our teacher recommended that we add subtitles since sone of the audio overlapped. Also, that we make things that are happening more clear.

 

During the last week, we added the finishing touches, as well as making a Q&A video explaining the process of our video solution.

In response to the critique that we got, we added an introduction explaining what had happened to this adventurer. That rounded our video to exactly 4:59 out of the 5 minutes we were limited to.

Now finally, here is our video solution!

 

 

And here is our Q&A video!

 

We placed 1st for our main solution and also 1st for our Instant Challenge!

 

 

 

 

 

In summation, I think everyone that did this project would agree that it was a lot of work. However, seeing and being proud of the final product made me realize that all of the work was worth it. Looking back, I think my group and I could’ve gotten more points by making the scenes more clear, and by incorporating more real materials. I also think that we could’ve assigned roles better, instead of putting all of the work on 1 or 2 people. The things we did well was working efficiently, and working well together. We also spent many out of school hours working on this project.

 

Thanks for reading today’s blog!