Category Archives: Big project

A valley surrounded by mountains (Loon Lake)

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For the past week we were up at Loon Lake for a field study. I would say that out of all of the field studies this one has left the most lasting impact, not from the views or food but from everyone being friends. If you don’t know from my other posts, the program I’m in goes to different places once a year or so to learn in different places and give a new way to learn outside of the classroom.

 

You might think connecting this trip to my VMV that I made earlier in the year would be hard but it was quite easy. The first connection I’d make is to the communication  section where I really improved. I talked to people that I wouldn’t really talk to in my daily life like some grade 8’s and my other classmates. I also would like to connect my collaboration section with collaborating with different people. Some examples were in the challenges where we had to hold up a bowl of plastic balls only with our legs or where we held up a tight rope and we would walk across it so we don’t fall.

Connecting to the last bit, a challenge that was really fun was the trust fall where we had to fall off a table into each others arms. At first I didn’t really want to do it but by the end when everyone else went I decided it was a good idea. I feel this really helped me come out of my comfort zone and with a little fear of heights it was kinda scary. On the flip side for with some actual work we got a work book and had to make a poster about some of the important things in your life. I felt this was pretty fun with doing a personality test, pairing up in partners to do activities, and much more. Here are the things I did.

This trip was really fun but there was some bits that I struggled with like the high ropes course. You might think it would be because of the height but it was because of a recent rugby injury where I tore a tendon in my leg. I couldn’t put a lot of pressure on it so I couldn’t get up the ladder. Through this struggle I missed out on some stuff but still managed to overcome it and have a good time. 

To close out I would like to answer the question “How did this field study change you as a learner and as a community member?”. I feel now with all these lessons I can talk to different people in school and different social situations. Thank you so much for reading this post and hope you read some more.

Atomic Habits: Learning intentions

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Hello and welcome to another learning intention post for another project. Unlike the other project where it was about WWII and the harsh conditions back then, this is about ATOMIC HABITS. 

What can I achieve in this project 

Well it’s more of a what I want to achieve. To help me with this I will connect this to my VMV that I did at the start of the year. I think I can show creativity and agency with create different habits and goals through this project. This ties into the driving question 

“How can improving by just 1% each day help me take responsibility for my learning, strengthen my habits, and create balance and purpose in my future career and life?”

Like I mentioned earlier with making new / renewing habits that can make my life better. For the rest of the project I hope to listen attentively  and stick to my work. The main thing we’re doing is ready the book Atomic Habits by Sean Clear. From the last habits book I read I can Confidently say that I don’t like this genre of book but from the intro it sound alright. 

Thank you for reading and am excited for what this projects holds in the future 

TPOL’s! End of the year

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Hello and welcome to my Tpol. I will start of with the POL declaration.

“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

Now there are many things I will talk about today but the main question is “How have i grown as a learner.” This is reflected by many things including quality of my work. If you go back to the start of the year and compare it to my work now you can see some differences. My work felt rushed and I knew I could do better. Now going to my work from the past couple of months you can see that it is a bit more thorough and enticing. A good comparison of this would be my animal farm infographic to one of the more recent projects in maker the 7 habits where we had to do 3 post and make 3 videos about the habits.

Post 1

Post 2

Post 3

Now an extension to this has been my work ethic. I have been mostly on top of things when it comes to timing’s and submission which I have gotten better with this year. Now after saying all this you can still see my final comic book is not submitted but I am very close to finishing just needing to finish a bit more drawings. But despite that I have been getting my things in.

Another big thing about work ethic was DI. We had to work a lot to get our machines and scripts done for the competition. This was hard to do with the fact there were some work you had to do with you’re team and some solo work. Overall this is one of the more harder things I’ve done this year.

Now in my MPOL I talked about my VMV where I had some stuff to improve on which I believe I still can my if you look at what’s on it you can see that some things I put down as hard have come more easily by the end of the year. Like submitting and working harder.

My Learning Vision Mission Values

Thank you for listening to my Tpol and would like to hear some questions.

SHARPEN THE SAW: post 3

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Hello and welcome to the final post of the 7 habits. In the last 2 posts I talked about the first 6 and now I will talk about the 7th and final habit “Sharpen the saw”.

There are many ways to sharpen your mental saw like for example exercising and working out. That’s from one of the four ways with the other 3 being Heart, Soul, and Brain. 

Now a lot of people can relate to these 4 topics including me. I use these in my day to day life like playing sports. I play rugby and on occasion with my friends I play soccer. I also go to the gym to build muscle. Now due to these I also relax a lot which for me is watching sports. I watch hockey, football, and sometimes rugby (the sport I play). There is also some other stuff  I do to relate to these like keeping close relationships with my friends and family. Like playing games with my cousins and playing sports with my friends. I don’t really do anything spiritual in my life but that’s just me.

Sharpen the saw is a metaphor for improving things about you if need be which in my personal opinion I relate to the most. 

Now for the final video I was not here for the filming so sadly I am not in the video. But I still think its pretty good. if you want to read the entire book and get a more in depth look in on the 7 habits I suggest you read “The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Teens”.

Now like any project there is a driving question to answer, this one was

What does it take to be a highly effective person?

there could be many answers to this question but to me the answer is be active.

My fabulous Mpol

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Hello and thanks for listening in advance and for coming to my Mpol. I’m going to get right into it by starting with my Vision Mission and Values.

After doing this earlier in the year I said that I would like a good job, a big one being a trade job. I didn’t exactly say this in the picture but after talking to my Mom about it this peaked my interests. I also talked about getting better at listening which I would say personally that I have done.

Now I have had a lot of setbacks and challenges in this year so far but also have had a lot of success. Like a main one and a pretty fun one was wiring circuits to make them light up a bulb or just produce electricity. This eventually built up to making our own version of operation which I don’t really know how made work with some suspicious wiring. Another big thing was our Running a Remake where we had to recreate a short film off of YouTube. This involved skills that I am pretty good at like editing. Of course that wasn’t my only role in this whole thing including the editor, sound designer, and the main monster. 

 

Mentioned earlier I said I had some setbacks which I did. Like for example making an entire machine for the winter exhibition ( with a group of course ) which was pretty hard. We had to make it so everything would go off properly and lining the parts up so the ball wouldn’t fall out. Another smaller thing was from the project we most recently finished where you had to sew different stuffies together. As you would expect I’m not really that good at sewing. But people said it looked good so I went with it. 

Now this post was pretty short so I hope I drag it on for a bit when a I present but thank you for listening to my Mpol

My absolutely cool T-POL

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The POL declaration

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

To start things off

It’s not hard to realize that I have indeed really grown since the first few days of school if you look at some of my newer work compared to my older work. This was achieved by setting some goals to keep me on track. For example I have to finish something by a certain timeframe. That kinda worked, I’m not the best person for being proficient but I can still get something done.

To add on I would say I’m resilient. No matter how bad a project was I still try to fix it to the best I can. I stride for just an okay on most assignments this mostly happens in science with almost every assignment being okay. Another thing is that I come to class ready to learn. I come with the material that we were supposed to do a couple days or the night before. I am on time and don’t miss classes only if I’m sick. You must be asking why I am saying all these things well you had to choose some of these topics from the PLP success behaviours. There’s a bunch of category’s to choose from but 2 had to be from agency. Here are those success behaviours now.

Growth

I talked a little bit about growth at the start but I am going to talk about it more now. If you look back on one of the first things we did In maker becoming a PLP learner and all the drawing you had to do and some of my newer things in humanities like the ads where you can see an improvement on my technical skills. You can see where my editing skills came in handy from one of our projects where we did a small portion with super impose X. For the first draft of the ad I proposed the original photo where the sky was completely cloudy and the water was grey. With my handy work I added in a new sky and water. Although it doesn’t look the best I think I did a pretty good job.

More work ethic

Again I talked about this at the beginning and i will talk more about it here. There are so many things that want to distract you from doing the work at hand and might give into these things. But if you start doing it habits like work for a certain amount of time then have a break for 5 minutes it really improves your work ethic.

A highlight of the year

One of the good things to happen this year was winning second and first place in DI. For this my group and I needed to build a machine to launch a beanbag a certain amount of meters. The first tournament we won first in this category but only won second in it the next time around. The thing we got first in was the instant challenge for being the engineering team with the best teamwork and I can’t really talk about the other thing.

I hope you liked my T-POL and the end

What is colonization to you?

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Unlike my last post that had a little bit of colonization in it ( other post link ) this project is fully about colonization. Perhaps I should talk a little more about “What where the consequences of colonization” which was the driving question to this project. There were many consequences being land taken away, residential schools, and even some good ones like would we really be hear today without it.

In this first part I will talk about the land. When the Europeans first started building in the Americas it was 1608 and the city in question was Quebec. When Samuel de Champlain went to the America’s he didn’t think of it just for trading he saw a fresh start from Europe. This began many wars and treaties I will talk about later. In just the span of 100 years almost 50% of Canada was owned by the Europeans and now almost all of Canada is owned with some exceptions of refuges for indigenous people.

Now I will talk about the wars. The first major war taking place was the one between the Europeans and the Iroquois. Now the Europeans had other indigenous tribes as allies for the war so they had more people. The Iroquois were severely unmatched by the standards of how they only had wooden weapons while the Europeans had guns. This war came with lots of death and the torturing of how many. This war lasted between 1688 – 1697. The war that came before this was the beaver war. What turned from gathering pelts turned into a Great War. As many more Europeans came many more beavers were being killed.

With the decline of beaver population came the hunger for more pelts. From this war beavers almost went extinct which was not very good. From this war many died from the years 1609 – 1701. Mainly the Iroquois died from the addition of guns.

Later on in 1831 residential schools started popping up. Residential schools were made to strip culture away from indigenous people resulting in a lot of death. Residential schools were one of the things that most impacted Canada with gradually finding unmarked graves. These schools lasted from 1831 – 1996 so just about 165 years before the last one was burned and destroyed.

 

Now with all this new found knowledge we were put into groups of three to eventually present a slideshow. This slideshow needed to include some strong factors of colonization like ethnocentrism. Here are the links to both of their blogs, Sven’s blog, Cole’s blog. These partners went on for a while creating notes in one shared document for 2 or 3 weeks. This Was real fun because we got to pick our groups, well got to suggest some people for the teacher to decide. I think my group did pretty well and I will post the slideshow at the end of the blog.

After we finished the presentations we got pretty much the final task to make a 2 slide slideshow with 3 words on each. The upside was we got to use notes to help remember what we are talking about. To my knowledge I think my friend and I did a pretty good job. Forgot to mention that it was an individual slideshow not in groups like the other one. 

So in this post I talked about some properties of consequences of colonization and long lasting effects. I do hope you liked this post mainly of colonization and I will see your in the next one. 

Consequences of colonization

A surprise post. MPOL’S

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Words of wisdom (declaration)

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

What was first

Now First we have probably the most important project and one of my personal favourites the blogging challenge. After every project we have to wright a blog post about the project and without this project there wouldn’t be any blog posts which is really sad. This project taught me how to format and how to make good blog post ready for review. This project also told me how to make the blog besides from the posts which is the most important part. 

My favourite thing I’ve done🎮

My favourite thing I’ve done was indeed my scratch game which was really fun to code and. Build.

Continue reading »

A silly pirate story.

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A plundering beginning 

Having to make 3 blog posts in 1 week is very time consuming and a long process. But in this project I’m going to talk about a project that was just OK and thankfully not that much homework this time. But besides that in this project we learned about how European explorers got to the America’s and a little about pirates. A very interesting topic to write about and could even be converted into a story. So the very first thing we did in this project was we had to right a paragraph of more about a made up pirate or Viking story now of course I chose to write about a pirate. The story I think was about a pirate cursed by a wizard can’t really remember but I think that was it if not I don’t really care.

Gadgets and gizmos 

The next big thing we did in this project was learning about different items they used to navigate the open ocean. These items included a compass, a astrolabe, a cross-staff, and the back-staff. These items were important to sailing because they were using the stars to navigate before then. It gave them a sense of direction to get to their destination in the times of old, the cross staff and others is kinda like gps when there were no satellites to give off signals or modern technology to help them. Another revolutionary item for the time was a sailing ship in the name of the caravel.

Different types of ships

Now the caravel was different to all other ships because the caravel was smaller and had a shallower keel, also having triangular sails. This was important to sail upriver of against a current of water, also with the sails attached it was much more maneuverable and could sail closer to shore. Even more facts because the sails were triangles the caravel could move super fast beating all other ships by far which was very helpful to getting to destinations fast. Now with other ships they were big, bulky and very hard to sail upriver or against a current so why even get other ships.

The cause and the consequences

The next thing we did was we learned a bit about the cause and consequences of explorations. An example of this is the Europeans needed new materials, they traded pelts with the first people (this would be short term consequence), this lead to the Colombian exchange of all new spices and animals (long term). Now these consequences were mostly good but some we pretty bad like trading slaves and converting people to Christianity. If I keep talking about these this post will be too long so here’s some pictures.

The invention of my story

Now we knew that eventually we would be writing a story with it being 4-5 minutes long which is kinda a long time for a short story. So we started off writing a story mountain with enough detail to it that you could use it the full story. Now after that bit that I had to redo a couple of times it was time to make pictures for our final video. This process took some time of tracing and finding good photos to trace that goes with the story. So after all that work I went outside one sunny day placed down all of my pictures on an app called AR maker that we had to do it on. I filmed went home and recorded voice lines. Finally I was done and here is that video.

The big driving question🏎️

Now the question is How can we use storytelling to investigate what sparked global exploration and understand its impact? Now by telling story’s of different lands it could influence more people to go exploring thus leading to most of the world being found.

The road to Destination and imagination

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The very start

Now that the first tournament of this project “the regionals” is over, gone, dusted we have to make a what I assume to be a pretty long post for how long the setup was for the tournament was so I’m going to get into it. To start things off in I think December we got our challenge types and teams where we met all our team mates and started planning. We had about 30 minutes to look over the rules and see the dimensions that we needed for the item. Now I haven’t exactly told you what challenge option my team and I got, we got probably the most fun challenge engineering. For engineering this year we had to make a launching device that launches a pretty heavy bean bag about 14 oz so kinda heavy. To make this device we had a budget of $200 to buy all of the materials including props and materials to build with, plus paints.

The grim reality of meeting up.

A couple months into the project our group had to meet up regularly to build the device and make props. Now I missed a lot of the meeting because I was sick A LOT but at the very end a few weeks before I did come to the meetings and dress rehearsals. At these meetings I was told that they made the modular device and some other important props during these meeting’s but I really couldn’t do anything about it seeing that I was on the verge of death. Plus one of the times was a dress rehearsal that was at the school and was kind of disappointed that I couldn’t come and help. Now taking place a little more than half way way to the tournament which was on a Saturday taking up the entire day which I was not very thrilled about that but I’m going to talk about that later. Now things were getting serious, one of our group members created a script for all of us and luckily I only had 4 lines :).

Scripts and robots.

Now about a week or two after getting our lines one of our group members said we had to miss the tournament to go to another tournament this time for skiing and I had to take the burden of his lines. Now up to six lines with 8 sentences which was very disappointing seeing now that I had to memorize a whole new set of lines. Now with little less than a month until the tournament I actually was free of my relentless sickness and started coming to meetings. In said meeting I worked on memorizing lines and cutting cardboard to make props. When mostly other members of the team started working on the robot costume it was short but complex task. Having to gather a big cardboard box and paint the entire thing then putting cool decorations on it like a ball that lights up when turned on which was pretty cool.

 

The big day

After months of planning and practicing lines it was finally time for the tournament. For my costume I had to wear all white and a dress shirt that I wasn’t too thrilled about seeing that I had to dig it out of my closet. Now arriving at school at 8:30 AM ON A SATURDAY I was very tired and hadn’t memorized all my lines so I had one last run through and it went well. Now with about 30 minutes to go we had to move our props into the room where we were presenting we had time too watch the first team go which was interesting to say the least. Now finally going up and presenting to the appraisers the final presentation and I think we did pretty well.

The verdict

 Now with our presentation being at 9:40 am and the award show being at 2:30 we had just under five hours of doing completely nothing. When it got to around 11:00 am my friends and I went to go have lunch then go play soccer which was amusing. Then after just walking around for a couple of hours we all had to go to the gym to see who won in each division. In engineering and rest of the challenges there was 2 classes intermediate and senior, senior being the older kids. After waiting a while they finally got around to engineering and you won’t believe if I told you. We got first place which was very cool. So finally I got to go home around 3:00 pm and finally get some rest.