Hello again, to whom ever decided they wanted to search me up online and look at my blog. I am starting to get comfortable and used to creating these posts, as I’ve had a bit of practice creating a few already, which I guess feels good. This posts main focus is to recap my overall understanding on the Manhattan project, what my class and I have learnt over the first few months of school, and assignments or projects that we have created to reflect our learning. Over all, as a class, we have accomplished a lot, so you better get comfortable as I will be taking you back in time. All the way back to the beginning of the school year in September.

POOF.

Okay, imagine it’s September again, a time where I was just a vulnerable, and confused newbie in the PLP learning environment. I may have looked as if I knew what I was doing with my new snazzy iPad and all, but I was completely clueless when using the technology to learn. Anyways, I was finally apart of the HPC 11 class, a class for high performance learners, and I felt very special. During this time of the year I had one and a half teachers (rip Mr Hughes), who started off our learning by introducing us too what life was like in Los Alamos during the time when the Manhattan Project was taking place. The over all understanding they wanted us to take out of this unit was to be familiar with the social and cultural events of the atomic age, the evolution of military technology, arms race, and Canada’s role in international conflicts.

We were assigned reading from the novels Atomic Frontier Days, written by John.M.Findlay and The Age of Radiance, by the author Craig Nelson to further enhance our understanding on the topics of nuclear weapons and technology. We also watched many insightful YouTube videos, and documentaries to further our knowledge on radioactivity, which were all very interesting. Who doesn’t love Nuclear physics am I right! To be completely honest I think I learned more science in a few flight classes then I had in any previous science course I had been in. After understanding the science behind the weapons used during the Manhattan project we then focused on the important figures who were heavily involved in the project, and the locations used as sites for the project through a series of power points created by our teachers. This meant a lot of note taking WOOT WOOT…

All this note taking did come in handy in the long run though, as we wrote in class essays to portray each of our individual understandings on the topic. These notes were also very useful when we were given our first official assignment in flight, which I was very excited and nervous for at the same time. We were assigned to create a character card on an individual who was a part of the Manhattan project. The criteria was to explain who they were, what they did on the site, and how they contributed towards the outcome of the project. In class we wrote letters as well, pretending as if we were workers on the Hanford site, working for the Manhattan project. We had to pretend we were writing to someone we knew back home about what we’ve accomplished and seen. I wrote mine to my best friend of course, Ms Willemse, and my own understanding on the Manhattan project grew immensely from these assignments which was great.

The weeks went by really fast in the flight room, and soon enough Ms Willemse and Mr Hughes introduced the class to a group project that we would be working on, and it’s main focus was on the Manhattan project. The criteria for this assignment was to create an engaging and informative short film that would be able to tell a story of some aspect of the Manhattan project using historical perspectives, from those who were involved or affected, to over all reflect our understanding on the Manhattan project. We were shown videos as examples of what our projects should look like, one in particular called History in Five. The videos format focused on one overall idea by presenting five smaller topics that connected to the idea as away of presenting the information gathered. From there on the class was split up into groups of five, and were strongly encouraged to get started as soon as possible.

My groups first priority was to choose a topic, and split it into five subtopics that we could each work on. It took us some time, but we ended up choosing the topic of discrimination within the Manhattan project. We then split this general idea into five smaller topics, for example, my topic was to research about women who worked on the Hanford site, and how they responded to discrimination. As during those times people were very sexist, and thought very highly of men over woman. I did some research and found a few successful women that worked at Hanford, focusing on one in particular, Leona Marshall. She was a scientist, which was not very common for a woman, but she was very good at her job as she worked alongside a large group of men. Before we could start working on our projects, Ms Willemse and Mr Hughes made each group pitch their ideas to see if their topics would be strong enough. It took my group a couple of goes, but this concept really made us think through our ideas and plans for this project more before talking to our teachers which ended up preparing us better before getting started.

Shortly after being introduced to our projects, Ms Willemse and Mr Hughes began to talk about the first trip we were going on this year. Our class was the first class to go on a trip this year, and even though it was only three days long I was still very excited. The HPC 11 class was going to Portland Oregon, where we would be attending Reed College for a tour of their reactor, going on a tour of a National Historic Park about the Manhattan project, and visiting the B Reactor. Sooner then later we were on the bus to Portland, and it was a great time. Not only was our class able to bond over the three days there, but having the opportunity to physically see and experience historic sites where in which the Manhattan project actually took place was incredible. I felt that I was able to learn so much more about the Manhattan project than I would ever have been able to just reading information out of a text book. My group was also able to benefit from this trip a lot too, as we talked to the tour guides and were even able to interview a few of them to gather more information on our topic. I took many pictures on the trip as well that we could possibly use in our video, and we also attempted filming some scenes for our video at the B Reactor, but didn’t end up using them.

I think that my group benefited a lot from the trip, and were able to incorporate the interviews we took in our video to back up our information. As we returned back to North Vancouver, my group decided to begin working on our scripts for our video. Mr Hughes assigned us a rough draft video hand in spot on Showbie, where we would have to finish a rough draft of our video by September 30th. My group was kind of scrambling, but we managed to all make our own scripts, film, and throw a video together by the due date. Our feed back from our teachers wasn’t too harsh, but we had a lot of work to do still. Like most groups the plan for our video was to film ourselves speaking in front of a green screen, and then editing in a backdrop afterwards. First off we had to shorten all of our scripts, because they were all way too complex and long. Mr Hughes told us the idea is to have little bloopers of each subtopic, so we did not have to write too much, but instead just narrow down our scripts to then focus on the key points for our subtopics.

By the looks of it you would probably think we were all ready to start filing our second draft, but you thought wrong. Instead my group decided to change our whole plan for the video, and do the complete opposite. Rather than filming ourselves talking we decided to have no speaking at all, or have any of us actually in the video. The boys in our group convinced everyone that this would be a better idea, and showed the group examples of videos that follow the same format online. Surprisingly they actually seemed to work quite well. I agreed to taking on this new layout for the video, not because I had no choice, but we needed to get started. This new plan for our video cut down the length of our film a lot compared to other groups, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. By October 5th our second draft was due, and considering we changed our whole plan the video we handed in was still very rough. For this draft we were forced to watch our video with Mr Hughes where he happily sat their and picked us a part, but over all someone had to tell us what we needed to fix. Going back to the drawing board we took in mind what Mr Hughes wanted us to revise, and that is what we did. For example, we changed the colours and fonts of texts to make our video look more appealing, transitions were made smoother, and more pictures and videos were added. The third draft for everyone’s videos was due on the 21st of October, and my group decided to have both Ms Willemse and Mr Hughes watch our video once again to see if it reached their expectations. Ms Willemse of course was able to pick out some grammatical errors in our video, and before we handed in we made sure our wording was fixed. These videos were going to be shown to all of the people and tour guides that had helped us in Portland, which meant these videos had to be amazing. My group could only hope we met those high expectations.

All in all, Teva, a member in my group, handed in our third and final draft to Showbie. I can honestly say that I felt very relieved when my group finished this project, because we had been working on this video for a long time. Even though I was happy that we finished the project there are still many things I would change if I were to do a project like this again. First of all, I feel like my group especially could have stayed on task more with our project, and could have been a lot more organized. For example, we could have given each group member a job they could work on each day, and possibly could have organized our own time line for when certain parts of our project should be completed, which would have kept us more on task. I think my group could have also panned out the layout for our project a bit better, as we ended up changing our whole plan for the project very last minute, which made completing our video more difficult then it needed to be. For myself, being a newbie I felt that I couldn’t contribute as much as I would have liked towards the project, as it involved video editing skills which my group didn’t have enough time or patience to teach to me. Hopefully next time I will be able to help more on editing when needed in order to help out my group members more.

Now it’s November, and our class is focusing on World War One, which I find very interesting. Not interesting enough to right another one of these blog posts though, hint, hint Ms Willemse.😅