Monthly Archives: March 2022

The Renaissance: It Wasn’t as Boring as I Thought

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Hey guys, welcome back to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about probably one of my favourite projects in Humanities so far. It’s called The Renaissance: A Change Engine. The driving question of this project was “What significant developments emerged from the past and how do they impact us today?” Obviously, since this project was about the Renaissance, we’re only looking at developments from then.

In this project, our two main final products were a paragraph and a triptych about the societal changes, people, artworks and inventions we considered to be the most historically significant. Here’s my triptych:

The four things I chose were:

-The iconic artwork “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci

-The societal change which was access to libraries and educational materials

-The invention of clocks

-Famous artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci

The all related to modern day things. The four modern day things I would associate with my four renaissance things are:

-NFTs

-Technology which can easily show us information

-Technology that can easily let us tell time (cell phones, smart watches)

-Elon Musk

I am happy with my work on this assignment and I believe I accomplished it.

My other piece, my paragraph, was a persuasive paragraph on why clocks are the most historically significant invention of the Renaissance. Here is my paragraph:

The single most historically significant invention from the Renaissance still lives with us and is used daily by people around the world. It is one of the most universal items in history, an invention that can be recognized by pretty much any person alive who has been born since its creation. What is this amazing, crazy invention you may ask? Clocks. Yes, those insignificant things on your walls that you glance at every 5 minutes waiting for whatever is the most significant invention of the Renaissance. If you disagree with me, read on. If you agree with me, read on. If you have any opinion on this, continue reading, because whether or not you agree with me, I’m going to tell you why I think this. Before I tell you that, though, I’m going to tell you a little bit about the history of time measurement (yes, I know, you’re probably bored already because pretty much everyone knows this or doesn’t want to. But this is necessary for context.) The measurement of time started with sundials. While this was pretty good to use, it was finicky and only worked under certain conditions. For example, it didn’t really work at night, or if it was too cloudy and the light was spread, causing there to be no shadows. Plus, the entire thing had to be unobstructed, so if you lived in a forest, say bye to that! After the sundial came the hourglass era. Yes, yes, very interesting, I know. Anyways, hourglasses just really didn’t do what was needed, so eventually in the 14th century some guy named Peter Henlein came along and finally invented the first mechanical clock. So that’s our little summary of the history of time measurement for you. Basically some random German locksmith came along and said “this isn’t good enough” as all inventors do, and so he made a clock. Moving on, I think that the invention of clocks is the most historically significant invention from the Renaissance because it creates structure in society and life in general. For example, working and being paid by the hour was pretty much impossible at that point, because no one knew when the hour was. Anything on a specific timed schedule couldn’t consistently be done properly. Individual activities had no timed structure, and it was hard to set something up with an “I’ll meet you at the end of the street at 10:35.” Getting an exact time for anything was impossible. The second reason I think that the clocks were the most significant invention of the Renaissance is because they are the fuel of huge multimillion dollar companies today such as Rolex. My third reason is that it is so applicable to the modern day, where crazy new technology is being invented every day (for example, the device that you’re reading this on.) Smart watches, which are becoming more and more prominent in everyone’s daily lives, wouldn’t exist without the invention of wristwatches, and wristwatches wouldn’t exist without the invention of clocks. So, to sum everything up, clocks are the most historically significant invention from the Renaissance because they lead to the creation of so many important things now, and they add a lot more structure to society and to everyone’s daily lives. So, supporters of the printing press being more important: beat that! 

I think I extended on this assignment because I connected with the reader in a unique way without straying from the main idea of my paragraph.

One activity I enjoyed was the Renaissance simulation at the start of the project, where we pretended to live in those times. At the start of the activity, we were assigned a societal role. The different roles were serfs, knights, lords, and monarch. We quickly learned how much your role in society impacted your life back then, even when it was out of your control. For example, I was a lord, and I enjoyed sitting on a comfortable chair, while all the serfs were stuck on the ground.

One big thing I loved about this project was what we learned in using the photo editing app SuperImposeX, since I love technology. During our time at Loon Lake, I learned how to put an image over another and remove the background, which helped me with my triptych.

 

Near the end of the project, we were looking at different artworks from the Renaissance and I learned about a cool feature within Google Arts & Culture. This was the feature that allows you to see a piece of are in AR (Augmented Reality.) Because of this, I got to take a photo with the Mona Lisa.

Now, to answer the driving question. What significant developments emerged from the past and how do they impact us today? One significant development that emerged from the past was the Mona Lisa. It’s well known around the world despite being created over 513 years ago. Another was the invention of clocks. It impacts us today significantly, allowing us to easily see the time and introduce important things for society such as pay by the hour and a base for the huge watch industry. 

Thank you for reading this blog post. I hope you learned something or at least have come away knowing which development from the Renaissance is the most historically significant (hint: it’s the invention of clocks!)

Loon Lake Learning Advance!

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Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog! Today is a more special blog post: I’m going to be talking about my very first field study, the Loon Lake Learning Advance! In this post, I’m going to be reflecting on my learning while I was there.

Day 1

We started this day at school. The assignment of our Book Creator book was introduced to us. At around 12:30, we left the school and started heading towards Loon Lake. As soon as we got there, we went to the amphitheatre and went on our photo walk. I took photos of different parts of nature during this walk.

In order to get to the path, we had to pull a cool rope barge.

After our photo walk, we went on a ‘quest’ to get used to the area. At one of the clues, we took a photo of ourselves as a human totem pole. 

My team for this activity was Daniel, Caitlin, Kira, and Hannah.

After that, we settled into our cabins. I shared a room with Kira, Brooke, Kai, and Gwenyth. Once we put our stuff away, we headed to the gym for a team building activity. Our activities included a few games. For the first one, we had a partner and we walked around the gym alone until Mr. Harris called out a scenario (for example, a frog on a log,) and we had to find our partner and act out the scene. Another game we played was a fun drawing game. We sat in a circle with a small group and had a piece of paper and a marker for each person. We drew one shape 3 times on our piece of paper, and passed it to the next person. Then you draw different shapes on the paper passed to you, and so on. We ended up with some fun artwork.

After we did these activities, we ate dinner. We had some delicious lasagna! Once dinner was over, we had evening fun. I chose to do games night and I had fun playing cards. After evening fun, we had our first advisory group. We called our group the Wolvefishes.

After advisory, we went to sleep, excited for the next day.

Day 2

On day 2, we woke up bright and early to have a delicious pancake and french toast breakfast. Directly afterwards, we had advisory. After advisory, we headed to the forest to build shelters. My group for this activity was Daniel, Callum, and Chris. 

After that, we did our first learning block with Mr. Harris. In this lesson, we learned all about the NAME acronym to determine historical significance: N-novelty, A-applicability, M-memory, and E-effect. I think I did really well in this activity because I was an active listener throughout the video we watched. We had a productive conversation about the NAME technique and events throughout history that I took a big part in. Anyways, after all of these events, I had the DI Sweatbox. Basically this was an activity where way too many kids chill in a room with a painfully hard floor and no chairs to work on Destination Imagination for 2 hours straight. So that was SUPER fun. My team finalized our script and practiced it, so at least the painfully slow 2 hours weren’t completely in vain. After this we had free time and finished the part of the day where we had to think properly with dinner. After dinner, we had evening fun, where I played cards again, and then advisory. With that, we finished our day.

Day 3

We started day 3 with breakfast at 7:45 again. (I call a riot. We should’ve eaten later!) After that, we had advisory as usual, and started our thinking time. Our first non-routine activity was silent ball in the gym. After that, we had another lesson with Mr. Harris on how to mask with the app SuperimposeX.

Next, we ate lunch and continued with yet another DI Sweatbox. We continued practising and improving our script until we moved on to free time and then dinner. After dinner, we had advisory and then our final evening fun, which was a movie night. We watched Back to the Future. After that, we went to sleep our final night at Loon Lake.

Day 4

On day 4 we started our day with breakfast 15 minutes early (seriously, why did we have to wake up so early ahhhh!) After breakfast, we had our final advisory, and then packed up our stuff. Finally, we played capture the flag (grade 8’s vs grade 9’s) and finished everything up with chicken burgers for lunch. After that we loaded back onto the buses and headed back to school.

Overall, I loved going to Loon Lake! I learned all about historical significance, and my knowledge on SuperimposeX is much more vast than before (though I didn’t know anything beforehand.)

Finally, I can’t forget my book! During our time at Loon Lake, we worked on a book in the app Book Creator about our time there. Here it is!