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“Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known,” this changed my brain chemistry because if I think how hard science is to learn, what about the person who created it, the people who added all their new findings and knowledge without having any blueprints to follow. New things are being found everyday so eventually couldn’t I find something new, like a new element?

For this unit we learned about the Periodic Table and you may think it already looks complicated but it gets way worse, there’s math involved. From learning how to represent an element in drawing form such as the Lewis diagram or the Bore diagram, to how different elements combine into compounds. The periodic table is interesting because we can see every element on our iPads easily and at the same time their make up our ipad and everything else in the world. 

We haven’t finished our project which is a painting we will create of our element of choice, but we have done all the learning and reaserch for it. I chose fluorine as my element and I was really able to dig deep into the history of it, which brings me to our driving question “What impacts do elements and compounds have on history and modern day society? Fluorine changed our society, it harmed us and benefited us. To show all the work I’ve done I made a poster about fluorine which you can see below:

The process of learning everything was enjoyable and steady which gave me the oppurtunity to really take charge of my work without feeling overwhelmed. Even though we haven’t finsihed yet I loved making this poster of fluorine and I can’t wait to paint!

Bye bye!

What I learn from this experiance is that my dads job is complicated. He works as a manager at Volkswagon, and I thought he just bossed people around but I was very wrong. It involves having a lot of patience when handling work and challenges with either your coworkers, boss and customers. As well as it involves a lot of paperwork to ensure the customer is happy and safe when getting a new car or a repair, but as it turns out some customers are rude becasue they either have too much time or too much money, or both. 

That was my experiance and I learned that my dads job is not for me, but congrats to him. But to show my learning I made a video. I held interviews with some of my dads coworkers to get an understanding of the different jobs that take place to satisfy a customer, I asked many questions, took photos and went back home to edit and bring this video to life. 

I’m going to apply what I learned into my everyday life (school life), which means to be more patient and understanding with people because in the end their just trying to communicate in their own way. 

As I’m climbing up a mountain I can feel all the pressure building in my legs, I feel as if I take one more step I’ll fall all the way down but then I look up.

Welcome back, if you’ve already read my maker post you’d know that we went on a adventuress trip to Alberta. If you haven’t then heres a link to it: https://www.blog44.ca/mikar/2023/10/13/a-trip-though-moving-images/ In that post I reflected on everything we did on the maker aspect of the trip, which were the numerous amount of videos we created.

For the humanities part, our question was “how has the geogrpahy of the west shaped who we are?” And to answer this we created a filed study journal! We blogged, took note and reflected on every place we visited. From Lake Louis, to the Columbia Icefield and all the way back home (which was a long and heinous drive). 

Our book is made up of our own personal answers to the trip, answers to questions and our views on each place. At the start I didn’t like doing the book at all and it freaked me out but once I got the hang of it, it became very easy, so for advice: dont stress about your assignment, the point for the trip is to enjoy the trip.

Overall out of all the things I learned, one thing stuck and it was the word sonder. It’s means realizing that others have lives has vivid as yours. In Alberta while talking to people I really took that word into account as I heard amazing stories like some guys son was a skiing archer. That amazed me. 

But if you’d like to learn about my trip more than the crazy stores I was told then click here:

Thank you for reading and bye bye!

As we rode away in the cold early morning, I wasn’t at all expecting how much work was to be done.

This is my first blog post for grade 9 and nothing feels different at all. But time to talk about my class trip to Alberta. We had two projects one for maker and one for humanities, click here to see the one for humanities: https://www.blog44.ca/mikar/2023/10/17/alberta-through-my-eyes/ This reflection is all about the videos we made either in Alberta or at home. Anyone can say filming is easy but this project was about gathering evidence to answer the driving quesiton, “how might I use the moving image to tell a story?” We made four videos in total, the at home video, Tik Tok, silent and investigative video. Through the process of making each of this videos I learn a different skill every time, which in the end helped me create the best version of my product as well as I can take these skills towards future projects. 

The first video I made was my at home video. I feel I actually got to learn a lot about myself even thought I was making this for other people, I got to learn what I really valued, my hobbies and how I was able to capture these moments. The process of making this video was mixed, I didn’t have a solid plan, more like a vision I wanted to create. I wanted to include cinematic shots of myself aswell as editing tricks but as the due date for this assignment it all came crashing down, but I wanted it to be how I enviosned it. I wanted it to show me. 

In the final stages of editing it all worked out. I was able to take a vision and create it into reality for myself and others to experiance. I was able t capture momnets of myself and turn them into a story about who I am, my values and what inspires me. 

The second video was the silent video and it was a gorup project. My group members were Lucas and Hunter and we filmed at the Three Valley Gap ghost town. We explored together, finding spots where we can film and built our story from there. There was a bit of pre planning such as making a story spine but the rest was us adapting, bouncing off eachothers ideas and collaborating. We spent a fair share of time looking at the rail cars and hanging out in them, they were really cool! Our story we wanted to film was about a robbery but many times we didn’t have either a prop or the angel was weird, but we had to improvise. Another thing was we couldn’t talk in our film, we had to act it all out and looking back on it was quite funny (especially when we had to film running scenes). But whenever there was an issue we improvised and worked as a group to solve it, like when we didn’t have cash so we leafs. In this project I learn about camera angles and how essential they are to tell a story. For example we had to capture our scene but also include background details in our shot so they could tell where we are, such as essentially we had to capture that we were in a bank that was being robbed. Next time I would like to capture more scenes so the duration of the vidoe is longer as well as more close up shots so you can feel the emotion through the expression of the person so it tells the story also though feeling. 

The third video I made was the Tik Tok. This project was very independent in the way that there were barely any instrucitons you were suppose to follow, so in the end peoples videos looked very different which was nice. While filming I learned all about angles and for my vidoe everything had to be filmed in portrait mode. I didn’t actually have a plan at all or a vision, it turned out to be very spur of the moment and then after the trip I compile it. If I were to do this project again I would have made a plan for filing and gathered different ideas for videos in case some turned out to be fails. I did enjoy making it though becasue in my vidoe you can see all the places we went to which were amazing but then as well you can see the reality aftermath of the trip. Overall I liked this video project but if your ever going to do it too, pre plan it’ll save you so much time. 

Last but not least is our investigative video. This video was a way to tie into our humanities project, a way to show our findings and evidence relating to our thesis, to in the end answer our driving quesiton “How has the Geography of the West shaped who we are?” During the making of this project I learned very valuable skills such as how to conduct as interview which was a key point of evidence to support my thesis. I learned how to approach people, ask if they’d like to be interviewed for a school project, their consent to be filmed, and lastly ask and phrase my questions so the interviewee understood and could respond accordingly. The idea of interviewing people seemed weird to me, I have no problem talking to strangers but suddenly when it involved a school project it freaked me out. After seeing all my friends do it, it seemed easy but in the end what really helped me is that when am I ever going to see this person again. So in the end I also learned to become more comfortable interviewing people and their answers really benefited me, as I gained more knowledge and evidence to prove my thesis. 

Overall all the skills I learned while making these videos are essential to make and create a sotry using the moving image. Having a proper plan and ideas can smooth out the process of filming and creating the story, so theres so conflict or dispute in the end. Angles, close ups, positions, body language help show depth, emotion and feeling when telling your story and give your audience a proper understanding. Lastly all of these videos were made to in some way to tell a story about me and who I am as a person. 

Bye bye!

Media. If you think about it this society is heavily influenced by media, and one of the main wyas of media is advertisements. In your every day life probably you’ll see an ad on TikTok, YouTube, on safari, etc, and due to those advertisements is how businesses grow and gain attention. 

 For a project we studied advertising and we’re elected in groups to study a business. The overall main goal was to created a finished ad for the business. There’s a lot more parts to advertising than you may think, but first we need our driving question “How does advertising persuade, sell, and influence society?”

My business that I studied is Kam Meng. It’s located in Newport, Oregon and it’s a family-friendly Chinese restaurant. To begin building my advertisements there are many detials to consider which is why one the things we did was interview an employee from the restaurant. They gave us plenty of information needed for the ad such as what the company values, specific things they want included within the ad, preferred colour palette and other useful ideas for my ad. 

Now that we’re on to building our ad, we need to think about the driving question again. “How does advertising persuade, sell, and influence society?” Businesses use advertising techniques and appeals to persuade, sell and influence their product such as making you feel guilty or making your feel better into buying or investing in something. In class we also learned plenty about ways to present our ad and how that influences the audience. You want something that catches peoples eyes and attention, something that they’ll remember. 

This was my prototype, my very first advertisement for my business. 

As you can see it’s plain, simple but boring and it isn’t eye catching. I redid it again and again. I asked feedback from my peers, my business group and especially my teachers. It took a lot of time and critique but I finished with a finale product I was proud of.

This is my finale product:

Building towards my finale product I made plenty of drafts showing my progress towards my finale. 

Overall getting critique and pushing myself to improve my ad again and again helped me in the end to achieve a way better result. Now onto the driving question “How does advertising persuade, sell, and influence society?” From the all then things I’ve leanfred over this period of time this is my finale answer: advertising uses persuasive techniques to influence society by creating a need or desire for a product or service. It can be effective in selling products by appealing to emotions, using celebrity endorsement and create and memorable slogans. However, it can also be manipulative and misleading.

Spring exhibition 

School years almost done and I’m so happy. As much as I love writing to you guys, I’m happy to get out but before I can let me talk about my business that I presented at the spring exhibition. 

To sum it up, we all got a business in groups to research about and eventually create an ad for. My business was called Kam Meng and it’s a Chinese restaurant in Oregon and fun fact my class actually got to go to Oregon and we actually ate there. It was pretty good, or I’m thinking that because on that trip I was really hungry and personally I thought we were at fat camp.

Before making out finale ads we went through a lot of preparation such as learning all about appeals and advertising techniques as well as pathos, logos and ethos. Also while making my finale product for my ad I went through a lot of drafts because mine just kept getting changed or disapproved. In the end mine did get approved, only because I was way past the deadline and my teachers were mad at me but it was ok. 

Now for exhibition, it was fun mainly because there was lots of sweets but I somewhat enjoyed showing ands explaining my ad to the public. Showing them the work we’d been researching for in Oregon and also showing them what their money had turned into. To be honest the teachers were quite stressed for exhibition and I guess we didn’t help to much either but in the end everything worked out and the rest of the night was fun, but definitely not as fun as the winter exhibition. But I did enjoy getting chipotle.

My finale Ad for Kam Meng:

This is my booth my group built in 4 days, representing Kam Meng:

For our activity we had a jar of rice and you had to guess how many grams it was, and we also had lots of snacks for our public audience.

It’s that time of the year that we’ve all been dreading, and if you haven’t there’s something wrong with you. It’s time for Tpols so welcome to mine. In this I’ll be answering the driving question, “Why do you feel your ready to advance to the next grade level?”

At the beginning of the year, everything for my future was planned, the projects I would do and the places I would go such as the long awaited Oregon trip. But now that I reflect everything my year went very different than what I imagined at the start of grade 8. 

So this is my story of how my first year of grade 8 PLP and my learning. 

Consequences of colonization!

I liked several parts of this project but not all and I’ll explain. The ending result of this project was to create an AR video presentating your reinterpreted art. I had no problem with the learning and creating of this project because I enjoyed making my own art that was somehow related to the original but it was the timing and teaching that annoyed me. When we were suppose to learn how to create the AR video we had a sub so that sucked, but our teachers didn’t explain it either so no one knew what to do and we were so close to the finish line. But a classmate of mine figured how to do it and she ended up teaching the class the day before the due date. Overall I had quite a lot of fun but due to teachers being away and bad communication I did not enjoy the amount of stress there was to finish this project. 

This is my AR presentation of my art: 

Travelogue! Out of every project I liked this one the best because it was for me the most creative one. For this project we had to create a book, essentially a travelogue about a European explorer. I picked Jacques Cartier, and I made a book about his discovery of the New World. Parts of the book had to be authentic but other parts I got to make up such as he enjoyed looking at the stars and using them for navigation. We got to draw, add pictures and personalize the book as much as we wanted. Overall my time management was good for this project and I enjoyed learning a lot about Jacques and his travels, but this is where the fun for humanities ended for me. 

My travelogue:

https://read.bookcreator.com/Yrm5eNHn1vW6EERi32i1UgvExCT2/Z6ZGrTG1QXaM0zytLDZb8g/ZTQpopbLTRWTzEGR59RT3g

Pandora’s box Winter Exhbition: Of course this is here because this project was so much fun I actually chose to attend class. The conclusion of this project was to build a box based off the movie avatar, and it had to have a theme. Building the box was very time-consuming and it needed a lot of materials if you wanted it to look good enough. But that wasn’t the hardest part, the hardest part was you had to memorize the story that went along with your box so that you could tell it to the public during exhibition night. Even though I stayed up many nights trying to build a tree for my box I still really enjoyed this project because I felt it was more of the hands on learning I expected from PLP. After an hour or two of presenting most people got tired and at some point I just took a really long break because I didn’t wanna do it anymore, but I realized I had worked really hard on my box so I stayed for a while after because I wanted people to see how much work I actually put into it.

Winter exhibition blog post:

https://www.blog44.ca/mikar/2023/01/05/winter-exhibition-2022/

Making interesting images: This project was more on the easier side which is probably why I like it more than others. The overall ending of this project was to create a digital scrapbook basically. We took pictures everywhere, as well as we took pictures of our favourite people and wrote about them. I had mixed feelings for this project because at first I enjoyed it, but also, was it important to be learning about pictures when we could be doing some thing else more beneficial? Now reflecting I wish I had more projects like this because now we do big projects, and we no longer have something like this that we can look forward to because it’s soft on the mind at least for me. I liked taking a photo and writing whatever I wanted about it, even if it wasn’t teaching us too much. In conclusion I enjoyed this project because for the week we were doing it, everything was still, no homework not too much effort in class, It was nice to have a bit of a break from the rest of the chaos of PLP.

Cover of my scrapbook (the rest is personal) 

Video game: It’s pretty obvious what we did, we created a video game, but it was much more than that. We had to use code and design our own game showing science, especially atoms. I struggled quite a lot with the coding because I didn’t understand it, no matter how many times the teacher explained it, it just didn’t make sense. I tried and tried again, but I couldn’t get the coding to work the way I wanted and it frustrated me a lot. Eventually, I had an aid help me because I couldn’t solve it on my own. In this project, I started seeing the change in my learning, and I didn’t understand it. I kept thinking maybe I’ll work harder the next project, but same problem happened. I didn’t know what was going on or how to fix it which is where my grades dropped. This project was a real struggle, because in the end I made the bare minimum just so I could pass this project with something at least. 

Here’s my video game and blog post:

https://www.blog44.ca/mikar/2023/05/03/my-science-video-game/

Immune system characters: This project really helped my mind because I enjoy drawing. You had to create little immune system characters invite a little story about how they helped in the human body. For example, you could write about Barbara and she’s a B-cell and she helps the human body by fighting off viruses. It was fun to create a story about a character I had made, but it was also authentic because the reality of the story was true. For my characters I drew them as robots, and they’re pretty cute. This was one of those projects that made everything feel still again. It was soft on mind and let us explore on our creative sides. Overall, I like this project very much and I wish to do something like this again.

Link to my immune system characters:

From the goals I set out in my MPOL I did achieve almost all, I got more out of my comfort zone, I don’t care if I speak in front of people, I’m more comfortable working in a group, but essentially I think I stopped caring about other people and their opinions. That has its pros and cons because at some point you stop caring too much and that’s where all the drama starts.

I wish I could write more about how my year was but that’s not the point of this post, essentially. This is to show my learning and that its purpose. This is just grade 8 and I don’t know what’s gonna happen in grade 9, I’m not sure if I’m gonna keep having problems academically or if something else happens. To answer the driving question, this year I’ve gone through so much already and I don’t know whats going to happen in the future but I’m willing to go through the process with PLP because I feel there is still so many adventures waiting for me in this program.

Wow. This was my first PLP trip and it was certainly different than what I had envisioned. Over the whole trip, we must’ve been to a million places because it felt as if we went everywhere in Oregon, and due to us going to so many places I learned plenty of new things. A lot of the things I learned were about business and the places we went to such as the museums; I especially learned about my business I was researching Kam Meng. It’s a Chinese restaurant and we actually got to eat dinner there one night. We also dove into a bit of science when we visited Yaquina Head. My quest group spent our time looking for different marine life down by the beach. After spenading my time digging in black seaweed I found a spider crab as big as my hand, that was the best part of my day besides breakfast, lunch and dinner. Lastly for any “educational” learning, I got to know new advertising techniques and appeals such as pathos, ethos and logos. For the rest of the things I learned such as how important I valued having wifi or data before the trip and how for next time try not to get grounded before I go on the trip so I have money to buy junk I most likely won’t end up ever using. To wrap it up the Oregon trip was very memorable, from all the drama happening at the back of the bus to falling asleep in the end and having your picture taken, it was fun and I’d go again if I could. 

These are some pictures that were most memorable and appropriate:

This is my book that I completed on the Oregon trip.

Where to start. 

For this project we went from learning about Europeans points of view to recreating a painting in our own perspective, it was a lot. We started off with learning about the Europeans and then how their power was a consequence to others, for those assignments we created a re-interperated piece of art. This was the only part I liked because you got to draw instead of write. The rest we learned about the main consequences of colonization and to show our learning in the end we made a script as well as an AR video showcasing our work. We used AR Maker to show our re-interperated drawing as we presented our learning and our art along side it. Overall this project felt very long and honestly tiring, I hope that next time we do something like this we stick to the main point of it.

This is a link to my video presentation of my art:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/0a8k-WuGVOz0oN69ouykkVAuw

In this project we learned many things such as what is matter and quanatitave and qualitive observations, then we switched it up. We learned about the kinetic molecular theory sand how it contributes to the different states of matter. This was really fun to learn becasue to review our learning we got to play with gummy bears. Technically we weren’t entirely allowed to eat them but we all did. I enjoyed having an inversive project that was hands on. For the final we had to make a game with scratch which showed the composition of atoms. To be honest this was very hard, turns out i’m terrible at coding but luckily there were tutorials. After a hundred years I finished my game and it wasn’t too bad, it was just very funny. In my game there’s a dinosaur and they are a neutron., they have to jump over the electrons that are coming towards them while also trying to collect the protons. The dinosaur also is really cute. Overall I really enjoyed this project and I hope to do something like this again. 

This is my link to my video game

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/842957726