I survived the spring exhibition! What is the spring exhibition? Like the winter exhibition, we presented a bunch of projects that we had worked on, although this time we weren’t in groups. The first project we worked on was the Blue sky project. This was a very interesting project, so I’ll go through by talking about each of the phases of the launch cycle in the order we did them in.

The first phase we did was the look, listen, and learn phase. We did brainstorming to find issues we really cared about and would want to fix. I am a hockey player, and I always end up falling on my butt, but the problem is there isn’t as much padding on the hockey pants as you would think, so I hurt my butt a lot and even sometimes bruise my tailbone, so I chose that as my problem. We then had to do research on how to fix the problem we chose, and summarize it. I summarized my idea, a cushioned pad to reduce the impact of falls, as a blueprint:

The next phase of the launch cycle was the ask phase. We had to make an action plan to schedule what we would do and when we’d do it so that we could stay more organized. Here’s mine:

The next phase was the understand phase. This is where we did most of our research, which we had to get from a primary and secondary source. My primary source of research was interview with local hockey players and one of my hockey coaches. I used the feedback from the interviews to improve my idea. My secondary source of research was the internet, which I used to find things like how big the pad should be and what materials I should use. 

The next phase was the navigate phase, where we grouped together all our ideas, and then selected our best ideas, which we would use to make prototypes in the next phase.

The create phase was the next phase, which is where we had to make prototypes based off of all the research and idea grouping we did. Here is what some of my prototypes looked like:

I got some people to test out my prototypes, and used their feedback for the next phase.

The next phase was the highlight phase, where I took the feedback I got and used it too improve the prototype. The original pad was this:

The feedback I got was along the lines of “the padding works, but it falls off too easy.”. I tried it myself and found this to be a problem, so I added some Velcro, and there was my final product:

That was a brief summary of my blue sky project, what I presented during the exhibition is right here. What I actually put in my launch journal is here.

In reflection, the blue sky project was a great experience, because it was cool to actually create something to fix a problem you had instead of whining about it, and it will definitely be useful later on if you are going to be creating products of any kind. That was only one of my projects I had to present however, we also had a science project to do.

As you can see, the science project is about space probes. We had to choose a space probe, find out different facts about it and stuff like that. The main thing it was about, however, was different frequencies and wavelengths. There were questions we had to answer like what kind of wavelength the probe took pictures in, stuff like that. We also had to find a picture and get when it was taken, what it was, how far away the object in the picture was, and what wavelength it was taken in. In reflection, I guess it was good, because knowing about wavelengths and different kinds of light is important.

The third and final thing we had to do was present our time machine. I’ve already made a separate blog post on that, so go and check it out! Anyways, that’s my reflection on the spring exhibition, which as a whole was a very good and educating experience, happy summer vacation!

Well, the the colonizing in a tempest project is over, so it’s reflection time!  For a brief overview of what happened, we had to answer the driving question “how can we use Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and the history of New France to stage dramatic tableaus that help an audience understand the lasting effects of colonization?”. We did research on New France and how to stage tableaus, and the end result was a tableau based on the Tempest that talked about the history of New France. However, apart from the final result, there a few things we did that were really important in answering the driving question, which is what I am going to be talking about here.

The first one we did was an activity on how to be a good anthropologist, and to really assess the documents written by Europeans in New France to see if they were writing it in a sense that they were culturally superior or giving too much ground to the First Nations and excusing everything they did because they didn’t want to be biased on judging them. I feel this really helped us see both sides of what happened in new France, and be fair to the French, British, and First Nations alike in our presentation. This was very important to the driving question because if we didn’t learn about this, we would be probably have been biased in the timeline we did, which I talk about later, and we would probably be biased in choosing what things to include in the tableau. The activities we did is here, we basically had to assess if the author was biased or not.

The next thing we did that I thought was important to answering the driving question was when we had to summarize each of the acts of the tempest into something that we could actually perform as a tableau. Being able to identify the important parts and moods of the scene and summarizing them was vital to the completion of the final product and answering the driving question. If we didn’t do this we probably would have ended up doing things that weren’t as important as we thought, which wouldn’t leave room for more important events. This was an important thing to learn in general as well, because you will probably end up summarizing things for other projects, like we did for our blue sky keynote.

Example of what the timeline looked like.

The third thing that was pretty important was the timeline. The timeline was important because we had to put the most important events in New France, and then put if they were positive or negative and add up to see if the exploration in New France was positive or negative overall. It was very important to the driving question because it decided which events we put into the tableau, which was a vital to explaining the history of New France while being brief as possible. Summarizing was also very import skill here, as we couldn’t include too many things, and learning to summarize things is a very valuable skill. Anyways, that was my blog post on the colonizing in a tempest blog post, you can see the part of the tableau that I was in here.

We’re finally finished with DI, as the provincials tournament was on the 6th of April. Before I start talking about what actually happened, i want to talk about what we added to our presentation. The drone/blimp was pretty much the same, as was the backdrop, but the main changes were to the story. Basically, the group of explorers had been calling in supply drops, but they forget to bring in the supplies one night, so they get destroyed by a storm, and they have to call in another supply drop. But then they find out that they can’t call one in because their radio is broken, so then they have to go find a battery so that they can repair their radio. They take a rover (this was one of the other things we added, it’s a wooden buggy with painted cardboard sides. We were going to play music from a speaker attached to it, but that didn’t exactly work out during our actual presentation.

) to find a battery, but a storm picks up and they have to shelter in a cave. They see a weird crystal, so they break off a piece of it, but then some gas comes out and makes one of the explorers fall unconscious. The second explorer grabs a piece of the crystal, but when she gets back to the base, she finds out that the scientist who stayed behind can use the crystal to fix the radio. Then they fix the radio, get some supplies (this is when the drone/blimp drops our payloads) and then revive their companion. At least, that was supposed to happen. The day before the challenge me and group members Ryan and Brenton stayed up till 12 doing last minute adjustments on the rover and drone/blimp. The day of the tournament, things were starting to go wrong with the drone. We thought we had fixed the drone just before we were called in, and you can see what happened in this video. As you can see, it didn’t exactly work out as we thought it would. The drone didn’t work, and that affected the story, and we didn’t get to show the rover as much as we had wanted to. I am still quite happy with the result however, because without the entire groups quick thinking and improv, it could easily have been much worse. We ended up with third place out of about ten teams, which I think is due in part to that we won first place for the instant challenge, which I can’t talk about here until after globals.

Overall, I am very happy with the result of the provincial tournament, because we placed much higher than I originally thought we would. And from a reflection standpoint, destination imagination was a very good experience, as I grew my teamwork, productivity, and brainstorming skills, as well as my basic understanding of electronics. I also grew some money-management skills, as this was a very expensive challenge to do, but overall, I would try it again, as long as I have a team as good as the one I had this year. That’s it for this post, the links to the members of the group are here: Ryan’s blog, Brenton’s blog, Ally’s blog, Anders’s blog, and Meg’s blog.