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Destination imagination

Destination imagination where do I start. Have you ever met someone who thoroughly enjoyed participating in a competition, with kids of varying ages (90% younger than you) and getting stressed because all 13 people in audience did not laugh at your joke, and the “appraisers” who are actually not “appraising” but brutally judging your work, are wearing hats that make you feel claustrophobic in a gym, because I haven’t, not yet.

Im glad I was able to share that paragraph above with you, reader, even though I am super hard on DI, there are a few things that surface that will help in the future, lets get started.

Destination Surrey.
Time 8 am
Saturday April 7th

*disclaimer: I had only been home for 2 days, and jet lag was hitting me hard. Getting up at 7 on that Saturday was the most dreadful thing*

I was lucky in the fact that I did not have to haul the back drops to surrey. Melika’s dad was able to take them in his glass van. I am 2 characters in our story so all I had to take was the clothing that I needed, and food. Speaking of our story I should explain it to you. It is a little confusing so read carefully.

There is a boy, Richard, he falls asleep in class while learning about electricity. (There’s a test at the end of his class) He wakes up ( in his dream ) and is on a planet called phoebe. On phoebe there’s a fidget spinner ride, and he really wants to ride it. He has to take a safety test, and while this is happening, there is another guy that shows up at the planet. This guys name is Millard ( he’s the only one there with a name that doesn’t start with r) (foreshadowing). Millard gets a tour of the park, and Richard goes back to his test, but then Millard takes all the magic from the dream land, and if he leaves with it then the whole dream land will be ended. So everyone goes to find him, and he goes right to Richard, they have a talk and solve all of there problems, and then everyone finds Richard hanging out with Millard. Millard apologizes, and then he rides the fidget spinner, and then it is Richards turn to ride the fidget spinner, but his teacher is trying to wake him up. But don’t worry, when Richard did the safety test for the carousel, the safety test was all about the things on his actual test, creative right. Well he writes the test and he gets everything correct and has a great time. And thats the story. Not my proudest moment, a little to confusing for an 8 minute performance, but I did feel our story was a creative way to express our challenge.

Another part of the challenge was our team choice elemnts. For our first team choice element, we made light up masks to make the separation between the characters that were part of the dream planet, and the guests.

These light up masks were made to look like sleep masks to make the dream planet all the more relatable, to the viewers. They ended up mostly causing a whole bunch of commotion. It turns out that you can’t have any sort of electricity/wires in your presentation, or something like that. In the end they let us preform with the masks, but that only dragged our total mark up by a tiny amount…
Our other team choice element was our drums, which were not appraised, but absolutely butchered when it came to marks. I thought that these drums were going to be a great source of marks and that the appraisers would like like them, a lot, but no such luck. The drums main purpose was to bring up our marks, it was also there to, well there was really no other point of them.

To complete this presentation we needed backdrops. Remember we had two separate scenes. One in the classroom, and one on the dream planet of phoebe. These back drops took a lot of time to make, but thanks to the handy work from, Melika, Kailey, and I, we got it done. Melika and Kailey painted the cardboard that would work as the visual aspect of the backdrop, but then it was up to me to figure out how to make them actually stand up. I worked on different shapes that would benefit the structure in different ways, in the end I ended up with a wood frame with 3-4 vertical pieces between each side. Now this would not stand up on its own, so I added four triangles in each corner. To keep the whole shape up. This technique worked really well, and the appraisers really liked my handy work.

Now reader you must remember that we had already participated in a competition, a month earlier. We placed third in that competition, and I found that position really nice, and I thought our team was very deserving of that spot. In our most recent competition we placed fourth, which was also last. I was mostly to blame for that spot. I had been away in Australia for the whole week, and so my team didn’t get much practice time. Which we showed in our presentation, sadly. I think everything in our presentation went well, but our acting faltered, which rewarded us with fourth.

I would like to share with you some things that I learned the hard way during this experience.
So lets get started.

Minimalist, not maximunist. What I mean by this is don’t go overboard. The simpler the better. Also if you focus your work on the making the few items you have better, you would end up with a stronger presentation, and the appraisers, might even appraise it. Also you wouldn’t have to haul all the half wited props to and from the competitions. An example of using your time to efficiently make your objects the best they can be, is The Droplets. The Droplets made there whole presentation visually satisfying, and kept it to a minimal for props. But even though they had minimal props, every prop was perfected, it was an art. There presentation could have gone on for an hour longer, and the only thing that would eventually make me get up, would be the weights clanging against each other as Logan dropped them on the structure. It was satisfying to watch, all the matching colours, the clear story line, everything was there.
That’s what I call appraising!

To end this blog post I would like to say thank you to my team, for giving there best in the competition, and thank you to our teachers, I guess, for forcing this experience upon us. I know I’ve been extremely hard on it throughout this post, but it taught us all unique skills that we may need for our futures. Things like handy work, and writing, also acting skills, such a as acting on the spot, becoming a character and many more. I am not completely fond of the outline of DI, but I must admit that it does strengthen some skills that may need strengthening!

Anyway thanks for reading, and I hoped you learned something about the PLP renounced, Destination Imagination.

 

 

Destination Imagination 2018 regional tournament

Alright, so I’m going to save you the time of reading the whole 2000 word blog post and give you the highlights right here, its like shmoop,

the websites that summarizes the book that you defiantly dont want to read, but for my blog post! Lets start…

Highlights of the Destination Imagination regional tournament
Wake up at 7 on a Saturday
March into a gym with 74 other teams at 8:40, mostly younger children
Wait around for 3 hours, while other teams brag about the fun of having the presentation over
Practice for 30 mins at 11:00
Waiting to get on the stage, and one of the DI people tell us that our team choice element is probably not going to elegable to use
The DI person is just kidding and I am now shaking
About to present and our other team choice element is actually not a team choice element
Finally we present, the speaker stops working, and decides to turn off and on throughout the presentation.
Finish presentation and I am finally calmed down by 1:00, an hour after we finished.
Do absolutely nothing productive for another hour and a half.
Meet at the instant challenge at 2:20
Fill out our forms, loose one, we find it and run up to the instant challenge
*&*^%*((&$^#%^$#%@$$%*^(*^(%#%$!#!$^%*%()&%($&^$@%$#!$!#^
(not aloud to talk about the instant challenge till may)
Wait around till 4:45 and venture into the gym for the awards ceremony.
Become the most embarrassed I have ever really felt, when I receive a text from my dad, who is sitting on the bleachers below, asking if he can join the just dance group on the floor, or if its to embarrassing
Award ceremony starts and it takes a while to get to our category, but we end up getting 3rd and that makes the whole 10 hour day worth it. Heres a video of us receiving our medals

Ok now I’m going to go into more detail, and talk about how my team and I made it to that third place spot!

This is my first year in DI and I was shocked! It can be crazy stressful at times! The first step of DI for us was our team placement. I was grouped with, Melika, Marshall, Kailey, Daniel, and Luca. The next step was to figure out our challenge and really try to memorize it!

We were gifted with the Unlikley Atraction challenge, in this challenge we had to create an attraction that opperated in an unlikely location. Our unlikely location is planet Phoebe (a dream planet), where our main character travels when he falls asleep in class. Our attraction on the other hand, is a fidget spinner. Don’t ask me why, I honestly think it was just one of those really great ideas in the moment and then all of a sudden you got a blue fidget spinner as your ride! I do love our ride though, and I think it portrays our individual creativity!

Next step was script, we brain stormed ideas in class about what our story was going to be about and what the problems and resolutions were going to be, so I decided since Melika and Kailey were painting the backdrops, and Daniel, Marshall, and Luca were mapping out the fidget spinner, that I would take the task of writing the script. Just like usual me, the script turned it to be way to much and we ended up cutting out at least half of it, oh well, its better to have to much then to little! 

We then had to put all the steps together and create a creative, but informative play, which on the first test run through, we did not succeed in! We failed on our test run, and I could practically feel Melika shaking! We knew then that this was actually pretty serious business, and our casual way of getting out work done, might not get us onto the podium. Another thing that this practice run showed me, is that we have to put in work, and so its pointless putting in work you know is going to fail, when you could put in the same amount of effort and do an amazing job! 

Anyways we ended up forgetting to do our team choice elements till last minute, talking about amazing jobs, but I worked really hard and completed 4 masks equipped with lighting with the help from Daniel. These masks played a part in our presentation, because we wanted something to diffencite the normal class room from the dream land, also we chose masks because they are like sleeping masks. And it makes a nice connection to our story!

Our next step toward presenting was a ton of practising. Any free time we had we were running through out lines, working with staging and blocking, which exits were for when, and how much time you could have for costume change (definitely did not nail that one!) and after we have practiced endless times we were prepared to present!

Destination aimagination snuck up on me, and all of a sudden it was Saturday! The beginning of the day went along slowly. I watched some of the seycove teams, like the constellations, and ending on a high note, and I was super proud of both of there teams, you guys did amazing jobs! My team met at 11 to practice yet again. And then all of a sudden it was our turn and we were up on the stage. I was pretty nervous to preform in front of all my friends and family, but I had to keep telling my self that after eight minutes it would all be done for a month!
The timer started and we set up our backdrops and props on stage. My line was the first line and once that one was over I felt much more comfortable up on stage. We switched scenes and all of a sudden our team choice element stoped working. Don’t worry it wasn’t the masks, it was the music. We had created a personalized soundtrack to resemble the nonchalant noises on planet phoebe, but it was cutting in and out. It was a shock to all of us because the audio had worked well in all of our test runs, and the one time it counts it decides to falter. Anyways we pulled through and finished our presentation within the time frame, and I personally think we did really good!

https://youtu.be/Swb6buZedsU

We then had another few hours to kill, and I wasted my money on junk food from the cafeteria. I also watched a few improv teams, and boy does that require courage! I was told I had to meet my team at the bottom of the stairs at 2:20. We headed upstairs to our instant challenge, but I can’t tell you what went on in the instant challenge room until May, but don’t worry reader, you didn’t miss out on anything important!I wasted some more time and then all of a sudden people were ushering me into the gym for award ceremony. I stepped into the gym and people were dancing to just dance. I think it was nice for all those people too let loose after a long day of competition, but it was not my way of letting loose! Anyway me and my friends were sitting on the bleachers watching the just dancers, when I received a text from my dad who was on the bleachers below. His text read,

I didn’t have the heart to tell him yes so I just went replied, “go ahead” I was saved though because just dance ended right after sending that text and my father did not have time to get up and dance! Now it was award time. There were quite a few categories before us, and I was really happy watching seycove take home the W in almost every category. Go seycove! Too soon it was our category.  I was extremly nervous. It was a shock to hear our teams name being called up for 3rd place, I was so so happy! I was super proud of my group and it made the whole day worth while!

 

Now DI is not all fun and games, and there was a lot of room for improvement, so I would like to mention these items with you.

Improvement

Obviously our music was a major step back, but personally I think that the sound producing methods, were not up to par. We lacked points in that category, and if we up those points we may have slid into second!
Another thing we could improve on is our instant challenge. We got the lowest score for our instant challenge and I think that our team has the capability to win this category. For next time we just need to figure out what give the most points and focus on those items, not spend time on things that will not reward us in the long run!
One last thing that me and my team can improve on for the next tournament would have to be our improv skills. Some times during presentations something might go wrong or there might be a mess up in the script, so I would feel more reassured if my team and I prepared for these mess ups, by creating little signs to say you’ve messed up, or adding in extra sentences to help ease the conversation along!

Anyways thanks for reading this!
Adlih

 

Recently in science 9 we covered the topic chemistry. We started our chemistry unit with creating a mind map, within this mind map we discussed things that we knew about chemistry, and some questions that we wanted to answer by the end of the unit. This is my first mind map.

 

It’s a pretty bland mind map, but it did cover all the questions I had! Now that the term is over we had to make an end of term mind map as well. This end of term mind map had to cover the questions that we had, and had to expand on what we learned! This is mine.

 

It’s a bit less bland, but it really help me to focus my thoughts, and remember and refresh my memory! In this chemistry unit we also learned all about the different bonds, (ionic and covalent). Let me explain what a covalent and an ionic bond is!

Covalent : a covalent bond is the bond between two, or more (most of the time) nonmetals. This bond is made by the elements sharing there electrons to create full valence shells. An example could be carbon and hydrogen. Carbon and hydrogen each share one electron to create a full valence shell. 

Ionic : an ionic bond is when you have 2 charged atoms that are bound by the attraction between there opposite charges. And so usually when a metal binds to things it create an ionic bond. An example of this sharing of electrons is sodium and fluorine. Sodium has one electron on its valence shell, and fluorine has 7 instead of 8 on its valence shell! They create, a perfectly (explosive) pair!

We also learned about matter, different blends of substances, (compounds, pure substance, and mixtures), and we learned about valence shells and ions.

We then took all of this information and used it to create a video that portrayed the connection between the atoms with an ionic and covalent bond, and how the connection could be compared to things around us.

 

For this project I was paired up with Isabelle, and we chose to show the covalent bond between sodium, and fluorine.

There connection would be shown as friends, who come together to stand up to a bully. The next step was to write a short story with the bond that you chose. I’ll put the story below.

We finished up the script and started to plan for the video, part of the criteria for the project was that it could not be filmed, and people could not be the characters in the video, so we had to be creative. Isabelle drew each character out nicely so that you could see the electron shells and you could see the individual personalities.

 

We then took these drawings and placed them in Explain Everything where we had our backdrops. We then used screen record and recorded the little elements going around, and doing there things!

The next step was to take the clips and edit them in iMovie. It was a bit hard because iMovie continued to crash while I was editing and I kept losing all the work that I had done, but it ended up working, and I was able to edit and complete the video! My video is below! I hope you enjoy!

Part 1

Confederation

In humanity’s 9 we have been learning about confederation and the people who made it happen, so I though I would give you a quick recap of what went on to unite this beautiful country!

Our story begins in the colonies of Canada, because at this point Canada was just a group of mini country’s and there leader was the queen of England. Now these colonies were covered in problems. Some had to many people, others had no money, some had access to ports, they also had a raging enemy just below them. All in all these groups were in need of change. They had parliament meetings but people could not meet at anything. The main reps were John. A. MacDonald, and George Brown.

These two men had it out for one another, and would never have joined forces without the help from George’s wife, Anne Brown. Anne told George that he was being silly and that there was more at stake than just his pride. Now the men were able to communicate and end the dreadful war between them. They were able to agree on confederation and the building of the railway. And all of a sudden a tiny tiny country was born. There were other colonies that would join confederation but at the beginning it was just Canada East, Canada West, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Our little Canada…

Part 2
Heritage Minutes

In humanity’s recently we have been making our own heritage minute videos. Heritage minute’s are minute long videos that pack a bunch of information on a topic. Our heritage minutes had to be on someone or something that was around at the same time of confederation and had a major effect on our society today. So my group, which consists of Kailey and Robin, decided to do our heritage minute on Anne Brown, the wife of George Brown, and a mother of confederation.

Anne Brown was a mother of confederation because she pushed her husband to become allies with John. A. Macdonald instead of enemy’s. And because of her work we have one country not two separate ones! Anyway after we had done the research on Anne Brown, we had to make a storyboard.

 

Our storyboard failed to show truly what our video would be about but it did help us figure out what to use to portray the story. After we had that down we needed to move on to figuring out a script, ( our first major deadline ) and filming logistics. Our plan for filming was to have the narration as Anne Brown reading the letter she was writing to George, and have clips of what she was talking about on the screen and once in a while flash back to the writing. We mostly stuck to the plan, but throughout filming we tweaked a few things. After we had planned all of the shots that we wanted we headed back to our script, to make sure it was ready to be in the film. We had had a rough draft of our script but now we needed something that would make the video clear and concise to the people watching. Kailey finalized the script and I was amazed, it sounded so good and fit the video perfectly. Now it was on me to edit the clips together, I tried my best to make the video fit to the standards, and I think I did ok! I made a first draft that did not have voice overs or music but it did have titles and all the shots were in place. It was 4 minutes.

I guess its better to have more shots, than less! But I knew it was going to be a tough job to cut down the video to 1 minute, so I got to work and it turned out that I was mostly wrong, it didn’t end up taking that much time and when I was done I was able to watch it and only have 1 minute go by not 5! So now we had to move on to voice overs. The voice overs were done by Kailey, since she was Anne. Our first draft of voice overs were a little crackly, so we put it as top priority to fix, because that day was our first showing to people out side of the class. We were showing the heritage minutes to Mr. Braum’s humanity’s 9 class. It was pretty stressful, and I was nervous to get the peoples opinions. Ms. Maxwell handed each person in the class 2 slips of paper that had some questions regarding the videos on on it, and what feedback they would give us. Our slips came back with really helpful feedback and it helped us to progress and adapt our video to the viewers!

We then had the weekend to fix and edit the video to bring it to a higher level of satisfaction. On Monday there was another due date, The Outro Competition. I dont know if you’ve ever watched a heritage minute but at the end of the video it will fade to some shots of other heritage minutes and then pop up with the logo and some information about the makers of the video. Historica Canada’s one goes like this

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Now that would be extremely hard to create for a group of kids in grade 9, but some kids were able to pull of a really good remake version. We had a vote on which one we liked the best and ended up picking Daniels. This is Daniels

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Pretty good huh! I was super happy at how professional it made our videos look, and much alike it was the the Historica Canada’s. Now that we had an outro we were practically finished. Just editing and fixing all the tiny things, the voice overs were redone, and sounded much much better, and we refilmed a few clips. The final product was sitting right in front of me and I am happy to say that I was proud of all the work that had been put in, and that it was all worth it in the long run. There were a few thing that could have been avoided, and I thought I would share some with you!

Part 3
Things that we learnt

Filming logistics. It is a very good idea to have knowledge of what your story is about, and how you plan on filming it, before heading out into the field and filming. Because when you don’t know what to do while filming it is just a waste of time. And knowing what your filming and where helps you to feel organized an on top of things. Our class did a sheet called filming logistics and it was very very helpful. I am definitely doing it for all of my filming projects!
Script. I think I have this problem every time that there is a script involved. I always write to much and in way to much detail, and then all of a sudden it’s impossible to edit down… Well anyways I did this again and it was hard for me to work with my script that was in such detail, so I had to spend extra time editing and revising, when I could have been planning for filming or maybe even watching TV! So when writing a script try to keep it to the most important things and keep it interesting!
Voice overs. This wasn’t that big of a problem for my group, but it would have been nice to have it perfect in the first draft. Things we learned from this were: – don’t record when there is movement around you, it just causes for crunchy noises. – only use the mic on your earbuds or an actual mic to record, if your just recording without either of these then there will be a lot more noise filtered in. – add emotion into your voiceovers, with out emotion it sounds like your just reading it off the paper, but with emotion it really feels like your there!

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I hope you like my video!

Till next time

Adlih

 

Math blog post

Recently in math 9 we have been planning a trip. Our trip could take us anywhere we wanted to go but we had to stay on the land, so no boats or planes! I am also aloud to bring anyone I want with me, so Isabelle Hūmenny, and Luca Jacoe, will be joining me for my trip. We were also given 10,000 (imaginary) dollars to complete the trip. Our trips had to start in NYC and after that they could go anywhere! So let me tell you about the most amazing trip that I am about to embark on, fasten your seat belts because its about to get crazy!

PART 1

My Trip Plan

My trip begins in NYC, like everyone else’s, and the final destination is Mexico City. But its going to take around 90 hours to get there so my first destination is Philly, or Philadelphia as its properly pronounced. But before I can get to Philly I need a vehicle to get me there, and the vehicle I chose for this trip is the 2009 Gulfstream Yellowstone, or a RV.

Now that I’ve got my vehicle and location, I’m ready to go! It takes 1 hour and 55m to get to Philadelphia and when I get there, I plan on going to the Please Touch museum and doing some shopping on south street.

I have a pretty big day of driving the next day so I should limit my day in Philly. I will stay in Owego camp for the night.
The next morning I have an 8 hour journey to Charlotte, Pennsylvania.

In Charlotte I will spend the night in McDowell Nature Preserve Campground. The next morning I am traveling for a startling time of 9 hours and 54 minutes! Crazy! I am traveling to Memphis and I probably wont spend to much time there, I’ll be pretty tired! But for the night I will spend my time in the Graceland RV park.
On the fourth day of my travels I will be headed to Dallas.

It’s a shorter trip than the day before but it will still take 6 hours and 56 minutes. I will explore Dallas a little bit and then head to bed, because I’ll be beat! In Dallas I’ll stay in the Northeast campground.
The next day I will leave Dallas and head for Laredo, the drive will be 6 hours and 29 minutes and I’ll have my jams playing the whole way! I think I would like to explore Laredo so I am staying in a very central campground called Camping Laredo.

On the sixth day I went from Laredo to Monterrey. In Monterrey I stayed in La Aldea. It takes 8 hours to get there and I will definitely need to rest up before the final leg of my journey!
The next morning I will be traveling from Monterrey to Mexico City, in Mexico City I will spend one day there and I will stay at Las Estacas, and then on the way back up I will do the same thing again!

PART 2

Costs

Now that I’ve finished my trip plan I need to explain the costs of gas, lodging, and food. There was 3 choices for what you wanted to eat, you could have $200 per day for high quality cuisine, $100 per day  for healthy nutritious meals in a family dinner style, or $25 per day for fast food kind of meals.

I chose to spend my extra money on family style cuisine, to stay healthy and happy throughout my trip. The next choice was where you wanted to stay over night. There was Luxury Suites for $500 per night, Hotel Rooms for $100 per night, or campgrounds for $25 per night. I chose campground because I have an RV and it would be a waste to spend money on a hotel! And lastly the was the choice between high quality duffels, designer bags or plastic bags. I chose plastic bags to save me money! Since I know my food and lodging cost I have to figure out vehicle costs. My RV costs $150 per day. For my trip gas is a big part of it and to figure out how much gas I need, I have to figure out my miles per gallon. My RV has 8 miles per gallon, and I am traveling 5694.4 miles. So the gallons of gas needed would be 711.8. Acording to the ILLEST ROA TRIP OF ALL TIME gas costs $2.80 per gallon. So that would mean that I am spending $1993.04 on gas! That’s a lot! I had to graph the costs so I could see how long I could spend on the trip.

Now that I had the graph, I had to support my concept with some math. I had to figure out an equation that would tell me exactly how much money I would spend each day on food, lodging, and gas and vehicle costs. My equation for food and lodging costs is 375 y. Y is the amount of days, and it is the variable in my equation. For the vehicle equation it is, 150 x + 1993.04. X is the variable in that equation. Below is a photo of the equations and steps I used to figure out the amount of days I can go for.

Part 3

Sponsorship

I had the lucky chance of getting 3 different choices for sponsorships. Pepsi,  Coca Cola, and Snapple. All three of these sponsorships cater to varying lengths of trips. The graph below will help to see that.

As you can see green ( Snapple ) would benefit a longer trip, where as black ( Coca Cola ) would benefit a shorter trip, and red ( Pepsi ) would benefit a medium trip. Since my trip is 15 days long, I decided to choose Pepsi. But I wasn’t just able to stumble upon this graph so I should explain my steps to this final product. I started with the equation y=mx+b. I then took the information about what costs were on which days ( in the black in the photo below ) and I graphed them on the graph above. Once I had finished graphing the costs, I needed to find the slope. To find the slope you must divide rise buy run. Rise is the amount that changes vertically from point a to point b, and run is the amount that changes horizontally from point  a to point b. Now that I had the rise and run, I divided and I received my slope, or m in the equation above. The rest of the equation just fell into place after replace the variables with the information I had received. If you want to dive deeper into the mathematics of this the photo below is all my work on this question.

Anyways  thanks for reading my trip outline and I hope you enjoyed my illest road trip!

adlih

Metaphor machines
Recently in scimatics and humanity’s, we ( my group consists of Lucas K and Kiefer H ) have been making metaphor machines. What is a metaphor machine? You might be thinking, well thats what I’m here to explain. A metaphor machine is a Rube Goldberg machine with metaphors for each of the steps.

For example if a ball roles down a hill it could have a metaphor for country heading down hill. Or if you have a pulley it could be a metaphor for a leader rising while another leader falls. Now that you kind of understand the metaphor machine, you might be wondering what our metaphors were based off of. Well have you ever heard of the Haitian revolution? Maybe you’ve heard of the French Revolution. The American revolution might ring a bell, but I am here to inform you about the Russian revolution. For the machines we used revolutions as our metaphors and our machines had to explain the revolution. Now you might be thinking what is the Russian revolution?

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Before I dive into the Russian revolution I wanted to add the definition of a revolution to help people understand this concept.
Definition of a revolution ; A sudden, complete, or marked change in something. This is the definition of a revolution by dictionary.com . In my own words a revolution means change, someone fighting the unright circumstances, creating a movement. It also means an adjustment in the system. You never hear about the revolutions that could have happened, or the revolutions that almost happened, you only hear about the actual revolutions, this means the “almost” revolutions were stoped by people with high power and the people got what they wanted. This was not the case with the Russian revolution.
The Russian revolution all started in 1905, when thousands of innocent people were shot. Bloody Sunday, was one day where poor innocent people were protesting there working conditions. The Tsar was away this weekend and his guards were on duty. The guards opened fire on the unsuspecting people and many died, here is where the revolution began. People were sick and tired of being bossed around so they started a revolution, the revolution did not really catch until 1914 when World War 1 started, people started to form protests and groups, and in 1917 the Soviets and the Bolsheviks forced the provisional government to abdicate. This was a big step for Russia. The provisional government had ruled russia for a long time and so change was a big thing. It was like the recent victory in Alabama where judge Moore did not win even though he was stated to. It shocked many people but it was the right move for the state. This kind of thing happened to russia many years prior, though in russia it was much more gory. After the Soviets had taken over, the Bolsheviks rose within them, and became the head of russia. The Bolsheviks needed a leader and thats when Vladimir Lenin rose up.

Vladimir Lenin was an author, and he majored in law. He was a very controversial person though, some people found him as a leader and a role model for removing the Tsar from the government and for helping the working class, but others cannot see that same side of him. Vladimir also lead many mass killings and he was a very persuasive leader, this leaves people with mixed ideas.
1917 another war broke out. This was the beginning of the Russian civil war. This war proved to show people the worse side of Vladimir. 2-3 million innocent people were brutally killed through out the five years that the war lasted. This showed people what kind of ruler they had, and would continue to have. In 1922 the Russian civil war ended and the Soviet Union began.

Vladimir was only able to witness the Soviet Union for a short amount of time before passing away due to his poor heath later in 1922.

Now that you know what happened throughout the Russian revolution, you might want to know how our machine used these times as metaphors.
The first step of the revolution was Bloody Sunday, so to represent this we had dominos falling down. We chose dominos to show Bloody Sunday, because the dominos are a metaphor for all the people who fell as they died protesting.

The second step in the revolution was World War One. A metaphor for the beginning of World War One, was a book falling. This symbolizes the quick snap that surprised many when World War One started.

The book lands on a wire completing a circuit. This triggers a pulley, which is a metaphor for the soviets rising to power. The pulley also raises a red flag symbolizing the rise of Vladimir Lenin, which is a red flag for the rest of Russia.

When the flag goes up it knocks a ball down a ramp. This is a metaphor for the provisional government falling down, and how russia is going down hill.

The ball rolls down and hits a cup full of confetti, and knocks it into a fan. This is to represent all the people who died in the Russian civil war. The confetti is people and the fan is well, bad news.

Though the fan does blow open a flag, representing the beginning of the Soviet Union.

So thats the end of my revolution project, I hope you learned something new about the Russian revolution! Below is the final video for our metaphor machine!

 

PLP 9 recently had a mini exhibition, where we had to create a inquiry question about Star Wars and I am here to share mine with you.

If you have watched Star Wars, you might have seen droids. You might have also seen droids fighting wars, but were you ever sad or emotional when they died? Thats what I set out to answer for our mini exhibition this winter.

My question is, when battle droids are fighting wars instead of people, is the purpose of a war lost with the use of droids?

I used the PLP inquiry star to explain my project in steps so the inquiry star is below.

Connect and Wonder

People can argue both sides, so I started with the droids, and tried to find more about peoples connections to there appliances. You can find some pretty crazy stuff online, I sure did! But I did end up finding an answer for my question. My search took me to YouTube, where I saw peoples connections to these household items, people were connected to washers, dryers, toasters, vacuums, cars, etc. These people would be devastated if they lost those items to a so called “war”, more than just loosing their money, they had an emotional connection to the items, like people have an emotional connection to family or friends. I decided to do a poll in class the next day, to see if my classmates had the same vision on there appliances. I asked them which one would have a more powerful emotional impact, losing there family, or losing there phone and social class. I was not at all surprised with the outcome.The survey showed that everyone in the class would rather lose there devices and social class, than there family or friends. It was not a completely fair question and the answer felt rigged, and it had not helped me answer my question, so I decided to find someone who majors in war trauma studies to help me with my question.

Investigate

I only had to email one person, his name is Marvin Westwood and he works at UBC.

Dr. Marvin Westwood created a program, run through UBC all over Canada, that helps people returning from war to ease back into there daily lives and also to help them coop with PTSD. I set up an interview with him and was super nervous, but soon realized there’s nothing to be nervous about. Dr. Westwood was very kind and answered all of my questions in depth and shed new light on concepts I hadn’t really thought that much of. Before having that interview I totally thought the purpose of a war was lost with the use of battle droids, but Dr. Westwood showed me key points that were new to me and and it changed my mind. I now needed to brainstorm what my arguments were for either side of the question.

I had asked everyone else but I hadn’t asked my self, I needed to figure out some strong arguments for either side of the question, it took a while but I got it done, and it showed me depth into my question, and I now felt that I had the information to answer the question.

Construct

 

Before I get the chance to actually answer the question I have to construct something that demonstrates my learning. For this portion I created a poster board, even though the teachers did not want poster boards, I thought mine displayed what I learned in a creative manner and it was not redundant! As well as having the poster board I also had a little BB8 mini figure that I created using my brothers soccer ball and some paper mache.

 

The BB8 figurine was there to support the concept of droids and artificial intelligence while also attracting attention. The poster board took a long time to build and BB8 also took a long time to build, so I did not have a lot of time to build the Star Wars playing chips, but I was able to find a little bit of time, and they turned out great! I needed Star Wars playing chips because at the exhibition it was my plan to ask people what there input on my question was. I also had to make a loop of some of the Star Wars droid clips and add them to my presentation! I wanted to do a lot more but I had to tell myself that this was enough!

 

Publish

The night of the exhibition came and when really really fast. I am not kidding, I felt time flying by! Though the setting up did take a long time. The teachers had divided the grade 8 and 9’s into two groups, the Dark Side and the Light Side. I was on the Dark Side and my group got the library, Yes! We turned that boring library into an area of dark force.

 

 

Inside the Dark Side we were divided into mini groups that were based on our questions. I was in a group with Luca (grade 9) Marshall (grade 9) Daniel (grade 9) Taylor (grade 8) and Jackson (grade 8). When the time came to be finishing up on the preparations our area looked amazing! And then just like that people stared filing in! I was so stressed out and I had no idea what to say to all the people, I thought it was going to be much simpler to explain to someone my question, but it was really hard! People were losing interest in my boring presentation, so I knew that I had to change something. I decided to lower the philosophy content and make it more relatable, talk about movies with wars, and how it makes you want to cry, and how when a droid dies nothing happens. I included things like the best clips of my interview to keep people interested. This helped remarkably and all of a sudden people were into it and asking questions and adding there input and, to be honest, I was amazed. People really cared about my project, I have never done an exhibition before and nothing I’ve ever done was like this, like a science fair on steroids! All the work was worth it, and I felt really comfortable talking to these people about my question.

Sure there was the few people who were a little odd, like the guy who refused to take part in my question because it included war, and then decided to ignore me, or the boys who pretended to be listening to me but were clearly there just to watch the droid wars on my iPad. But the people who cared made it 100% worth it! A special thanks to Chantal Jacob Zanker, who made my night worth it!
Like I said at the beginning, the night ended really fast and all of a sudden we were cleaning up. I almost wished there was more time, too reach out to more people, here what they have to say, but my throat thought differently! The only thing that got me through the night was Vaderaid, and that barley even worked because we almost ran out! (Vaderaid is just gator aid with a sign that says Vaderaid)

I left school at 8 o’clock and was very happy to be done with Star Wars work (I thought until I had to write this) but I was also really happy at how it turned out, and would not be to mad about doing another one!

 

What was the beginning of steampunk and where did it start, and why was it created?

In Ms. Maxwells class, we are investigating deeper into our topic of steampunk. We also had to create a question about steam punk and investigate it further. The question I ended up with was, what was the beginning of steampunk, where did it start, and why did people create it? I began my research with history of steam punk, where I learned that the word steampunk was first derived from the book Morlock Night, by J.K. Jeter. Jeter used the word to describe a genre of fiction which is based around the advances that came with the discovery of steam, and its technological side.

Nowadays we use the word to describe a artistic movement, not so much the technology with it. Though J.K. Jeter was the first to use the word steam punk, people had been writing and talking about it for decades. Jules Verne, (I’m sure you’ve heard of him!) had been using the aesthetic of steampunk way into the 1900’s. As well as H.G. Wells,

who wrote The Time Machine in 1885. Now that we know what the beginning of steampunk was, I wanted to know where steampunk started and why it was created. I’ll start with the first question, where was steampunk created. I looked everywhere, but could not find a website that told me where steampunk first evolved from, it seems more like a movement than anything. That got me thinking, if its a movement where has this movement gone? New Zealand popped up pretty fast. Apparently one quaint town in New Zealand, became the steampunk capital of the world.

In the article they mention the movement of steampunk taking hold in 2010 and turning a normal town, into the steampunk head quarters. Another search told me that Atlantis US is the most steampunk city in the United States. I could not find much more that that so I moved to the next question, why was steampunk created? What I found was, steampunk was created for people who enjoy to mix the past with the future and wear it. Steampunk is also based on class, and anyone can be the rich Victorian age person they want, without being a rich person in our world today. Another thing is steampunk is economic, it shouts reduce reuse and recycle, and is a very cool way of presenting it. All of these reasons, make up the very iconic steampunk, and finish off my what, where, and why, questions about steampunk. Thanks for reading!
Adlih

Is there anyway a ruler could prevent a revolution from happening after entering stage 1?

Well you may be wondering what “stage 1” is so let me explain. Stage 1 consists of
-economic crisis
-sense of government injustice
-weak rulers and half hearted reform
-intellectual opposition
-class division and antagonism
-and lastly military victory

So my question is could a -really good- ruler turn a revolution around?
In the past things like class injustice, or economic crisis lead to dramatic revolts, but we are not really taught about the revolutions that never really happened, and that is what I am searching deeper into.

In 2009-2010 Venezuela had a financial crisis, where a number of banks were taken over by individual bankers. At that time 12% of bank deposits were heading towards people that were unnamed, and unidentified. People started to get upset, but did not revolt, yet. The government in time, arrested 16 bankers, and issued arrests for over 40 men who had fled the country. This is an example of a revolution that could have happened, but was stopped by a healthy government.
Another example is automotive industry crisis of 2008-10. During this time there was an energy crisis, in which the fuel price was raised up. Which means that people wanted to buy cars that had better fuel economy. This pushed automotive brands like Ford, Ram, and GMC, to the edge, because these brands live off the sales of trucks and suv’s, and trucks and SUV’s have very bad fuel economy! The people then turned to smaller cheaper brands like Mitsubisi, Volkswagen, and Fiat. The bigger brands then had to adapt and create better cars for the fuel crisis. I know it is not human adaption, it shows that a singular crisis can have a chain reaction. It also shows that the car company’s are reactive, and pay attention to there customers, just like a healthy government.
On the other hand, we have had weak rulers in the past, (and even in the present!) John, the king of England was one of them. John was the second born child and so he did not inherit a lot of what his father, Henry the second, had when he died. Richard, his older brother, became king and ruled quite a lot of land. Now poor John was given a nickname that really stuck, and that was, John Lackland. John Lackland did not appreciate that name. John needed to become king. When Richard was in jail in Germany, (talking about weak rulers!) John Lackland tried to take the throne, he did, and became the new king of England. He was terrible! He married for the second time and it started a war. Now John is quite a loser and so he had lost a lot of the land he had started with, such as Normandy, Anjou, and Maine. He was hurt and needed to show the people what he could really do. This required money, and so taxes shot up. The people were upset and created the Magna Carta. Now this is where it gets tricky. John created economic crisis, government injustice, military loss, class division and well he was a pretty weak ruler. So he created a revolution, the Magna Carta. The automotive industry crisis dealt with the high cost of fuel and so the people went against the high fuel economy truck and SUV’s and went with cheaper vehicles. This is an act of revolt as well, but it does not count as a revolution. The Venezuelan financial crisis included a well oiled government taking care of some barons making money off of peoples cash deposits. I do not believe that this qualify’s as a revolution but the country had a economic crisis. So that answers my question, a country can enter stage 1, but turn itself around before further trouble. But it brings up a new question as well. Could a country have one problem from stage 1, but strong everything else and be safe? The ratio would be 1 to 5. I guess it will be a question for the next time I sit down to type endlessly for an hour or so. So until then

Good bye

Adlih

2+2=4 -1 that’s 3, quick maths

In math 9, we recently had to create a math card game that covered BEDMAS. (Brackets, exponents, division, multiplication, addition, and subtraction.) And I thought I would share my game with you.

My game has 4 different characters on the cards

Flinstone’s

 

Winnie the Pooh

Mickey Mouse

 

And Garfield

 

The Flinstones card symbolizes that it is either simple addition or subtraction worth 1 point. The Winnie the Pooh card shows that it is multiplication or division, worth 2 points. Mickey Mouse is worth 3 points and is questions with brackets. And lastly Garfield is exponents, worth 4 points.

The game works like this. You can have as many players as you want, but no less than 2. Everybody will have a set of cards, face down so all you will be able to see is the characters. Now when playing this game you must keep in mind which one is the easiest and which ones are harder, because before you flip the card you must know where it is going. The card can go above, below, on the left side and the right side of the prior placed card. Now after placing the card you have to answer the question that it creates. If you place the card above or below the card prior you are creating a fraction, but if you place it beside it is just a simple equation. After answering the question, say you put the card above the prior placed one, you would multiply the points on the side, but if you put the card beside the prior card you only get to add the points! Keep track of your points on an extra sheet, and you are set to play! Have fun!

Below is a simple video about how the game works!

https://youtu.be/NqqF0OSVgBg