This post is going to be a bit different from my usual learning portfolio posts, because instead of reflecting on a project, I’m going to be reflecting on my week. This will become a regular part of my blog now, so expect one before each weekend. But for this week, there are a couple of things that happened which were pretty important. The first was the conclusion of our first project of the year, which was about identity, podcasting, and more. However, I’m going to be writing an entire reflection post on that project, so I won’t write about it again here just to say the exact same thing in a couple of days. So for that reason, and the fact that not much happened in the final week of the project anyways, I’m not going to talk about it too much in this post.

However, there is another project I’m actually going to be talking about, that we just started this week. It’s called “The Greatest Canadian”, and that’s exactly what we talked about in the first class of the project. We started off by defining great, and then as a group we had to come up with some great people around the world. I thought of Stanislav Petrov, who I had been reading about earlier that day.

He was an officer in the Soviet military, and was operating a nuclear early warning system that malfunctioned, and said that the U.S.A had launched nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union. Had he relayed the information, there probably would have been a nuclear war. But he did not relay the information as he was supposed to, as he believed that the U.S. would attack with all of their weapons at once, so he marked it as a false alarm. He ended up stopping a nuclear war, and that certainly is a big accomplishment, but does that make him great? Well, the class agreed that great people were known for certain attributes or things that they did, so I do think Petrov classifies as great.

However, the project is about great Canadians, and the next thing we did was learn about a few examples of great Canadians. Apparently, there was a tv show with the same name as our project, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

It had a goal similar to ours, identifying people in Canadian history who were great. We watched part of an episode about Terry Fox, which helped cement our understanding of what people thought of as great and why Terry was considered to be just that.

Now that we knew what we could define as great, we got to look at the project plan and see what we were going to do with such knowledge. Well, apparently our podcasts from the previous project were not a one off thing, as we are going to be making a podcast episode in the near future. The subject of this podcast episode? Well, the greatest Canadian. The project plan also mentioned an interview, which I assume will be part of the podcast episode we are making. However, we don’t know what the interview would be about yet, so I started thinking about the other parts of the episode, and it’s a good thing we did that entire project on podcasting, or this project would probably take an extremely long time. I think my skills have definitely improved on that front, so my main problem is coming up with someone who I truly think is the greatest Canadian. I did quite a bit of thinking about it, but I couldn’t really think of anyone outside of the obvious Canadian heroes like Terry Fox or Wayne Gretzky. I’m sure I’ll have more time to do research and think about it, so I’ll have to wait until next week to write about it. That pretty much sums up my thoughts for the week, at this point I’m just looking forward to what’s in store. So, that’s about it for this blog post, see you next week.

We just started our first project of the year, and it’s all about identity. We started out by doing some research into what identity actually meant, and our group narrowed our definitions down to “Characteristics determining someone or something”. We settled on this definition because you’re different characteristics combined gives you a unique identity. After making a definition, we had to compare it to the actual definition, which is “The fact of being who or what a person is”. It was pretty interesting to see the similarities and differences between our definition and the actual one, and I think we ended up pretty close. We also talked about changing ones identity, and how some people may find it easier to do than others, which could be a part of their identity in of itself.

While this was happening, we were encouraged to think about our own identity, and we ended doing a double exposure (A photo over another photo), which we then made into a gif with things that are important parts of our identity. Here’s mine:

In the gif, you can see the main image of me with smaller images appearing around me. The main image shows some trees overlaid onto me, and this is to represent an important part of my identity. It represents my love for the outdoors, and how I like to go on hikes to new places and look for old paths in the forest by my house. All the smaller images phasing in and out of the gif represent some of my hobbies and other things that make an impact on my identity. And not just anything, but things that have stuck with me for a long time, like reading or acting, that are just as important to my identity as my age or family.

So, in conclusion, I have learned a lot from this project so far, like how different people perceive identity, and how they affect or are affected by it. I even did some reflecting on my own identity for this project, and realized a few things about myself that I hadn’t really thought of before. It was also fun to learn how to do a double exposure, which created a unique way of showing some aspects of my identity. That’s about it for this blog post, but not this project, so stay tuned for more!

We just finished off our last project of the year, which was about WW1. It’s kind of crazy that the school year is pretty much over already, but then again, it has been a crazy year. Moving on to the project, it was about WW1, with the driving question of “How can exploring stories and text help us understand the impact of WWI on Canada’s identity?” So let’s get right into the project.

One milestone that I think really showed my Comprehend competency (What literacy skills am I using to read, listen, and view texts for understanding?) was the book pages we had to create. For this project, we were creating a whole book on WW1, and each of us were doing a couple pages with a certain topic and a soldier. My topic was WW1 propaganda, and the soldier I did was Private George Lawrence Price. I had to do a lot of research beforehand and use different literacy skills to understand the complicated topic that was WW1 propaganda, which I think demonstrates the Comprehend competency pretty well. As for the soldier I had to research, it wasn’t as complicated if a subject, but I did have some trouble finding out more information about him.

As I mentioned before, everyone had to do their own book pages, which ended up being compiled into our very own WW1 book! Some of the topics are very interesting, so I recommend you check it out.

Another part of the project that I felt was very important wasn’t actually a milestone, but it was a separate thing we were doing alongside our main milestones. It was our book chats, where we had to read a book about WW1 and then discuss it with group members every week. There were several different books, and the one I got to read was “Generals Die in Bed” by Charles Yale Harrison. The book is about a Canadian soldier sent to the front to fight in the trenches. It’s actually a pretty good book, so I won’t spoil it too much here, because I recommend that you check it out.

The reason that I think this part of the project was so important is because the book provided a perspective of the war from the position of someone actually fighting it in a filthy blasted trench. I feel like this book also provided a great example of our second main competency for this project, Take Historical Perspective. The Historical perspective competency is about overcoming your current concerns, beliefs, and values to understand those of people during WW1. This book was perfect for using the competency, because it provided a realistic perspective on someone who was in the war, which really helped me understand what it was like for those people. I also think the book also helped me get an answer for the driving question, because reading this book helped me understand how the war impacted the Canadians that went to fight. This is just one example, there were lots of other articles I read that helped me understand how the war changed Canada, and how it helped it become it’s own country.

So, in conclusion, I learned a lot more about WW1 then I knew previously, and just how much the war helped Canada onto the road of becoming independent. That’s about it for this blog post, see you next year!

Hi and welcome to my Tpol, my final presentation of learning for this year. Today I have to answer the driving question of “Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?”. So, let’s get right into it, starting with my thoughts on certain subjects and projects. For humanities, there was a project which really stood out for me, which was the Star Wars project we did for the Winter Exhibition. I had a great time with this project, and I think that this is one of my best examples from humanities. This project involved writing a short story, which we would then combine into chapters of our overall story. We used a lot of different competencies during this project, and I think I did well because the topic was so engaging. We also got to present our work at the Winter Exhibition, which was an added bonus, which you can read about here.

Another project that I think is a good example is Destination Imagination. I definitely improved from last year, which is for a couple of reasons. This year I got a subject I was more experienced in, Improv, and a good team as well. We did alright at the regionals, but we got to reflect on some of the core competencies afterwards, one of which was about seeing things from another’s perspective. This helped me consider the other actors in the scene, and made it easier to give them openings. This strategy helped give us a new direction to go in, and I think it is one of the reasons that our provincial performance was successful. You can read more about my DI experience here.

A project that I think shows some places where I can improve is the Scimatics project Metaphor Machines. In this project, we had to create a Rude Goldberg machine that represented the scientific method. Overall I did decent on this project, but there were a few competencies I didn’t do as good as I could on. I kept getting distracted with other things and leaving parts of the project for the last minute, and I think that ended up hurting some parts of the project. You can read more about the project here.

Now that I’ve finished talking about the subjects, I’m going to talk about some of the goals I set at my MPOL earlier this year. The main goal I set for myself was to stop procrastinating. Unfortunately, although I did improve a bit, I don’t think that I have met it yet. I learned that I am a great procrastinator, and sometimes I just blitz through assignments right before the due date. Obviously that’s not a good thing, so I’ve been trying to avoid it, but I do find myself doing it every once in a while, so while i don’t think I was completely successful, I do think that I am improving. Another thing that I keep doing is where I get stuck on something, and then I kind of give up and get distracted by something. I’ve been trying to combat this by taking breaks every once in a while to refresh my brain so that I can come back at problems with a fresh start, and it’s definitely helping, but I haven’t fully eliminated the problem yet. Something that actually surprised me is that I usually have a negative mindset towards assignments that are confusing or large, because I start to feel that it’s a hopeless task. Obviously it isn’t, and I have to trudge through them all the same, but it makes the experience hollow and once I do finish, I don’t really feel like I got anything out of it. I’ve been trying to combat this by just reassessing the situation and taking things on with a more positive mindset, and I definitely think it’s helping.

So, in conclusion, I’ve learned a lot this year, and I’ve done a good job most of the time, but there are definitely some times where I could have done better. However, now that I have more experience dealing with these problems and I know the effective strategies to combat them I can smash them next year. So, my answer to the driving question is “I will use the strategies I have learned throughout the year to combat any familiar problems that I come across next year.”. Well that’s about it for my Tpol, thanks for listening.

Hi there, and welcome to my post on the DI Provincials. If you haven’t seen my previous post on the DI Regionals, I highly recommend you read that first so that you know more about the challenge, and DI in general, but in a quick summary I was in the improv team with my fellow teammates Noah, Malaika, Jude, Emily, and Rhiann. We had just finished the regional tournament, which turned out all right, but it gave us a lot of ideas on what we could improve on for the upcoming provincial tournament. Except, there was one small problem. Now, you may have heard of a certain virus called Covid-19. Well, that virus just so happened to close down our school, R.I.P Destination Imagination 2020.

Except, our teachers refused to let Destination Imagination D-I (Ha…) and they came up with a novel solution, we could still do DI, but through the mystical power of the internet! However, this still posed a few problems for us, who were still getting used to the program we were using to communicate online. We didn’t have that much time before the online tournament, so it was up to us to meet on our own time and come up with solutions. The first major problem we decided to tackle was acting. How were we supposed to act on camera? Well, this one was actually fairly straightforward, we would just say lines normally in front of our cameras when we got a cue to do so. Except, that brings us to another one of the problems we had from the last tournament, our cues. Now, our cues were mediocre, but there was still lots of room to improve. To help combat this problem, we decided to use a narrator again, which was me, again. We did this so that I could give obvious cues and progress the story of things were taking too long. Obviously the problem isn’t fixed by simply having a narrator, so we did some practice runs together to help make sure we were catching on to and giving cues. However, this brings me to our final and possibly biggest problem: the sound effects. Now, if your remember from my last post, we had amassed a boxful of sound creating objects for our previous tournament, so it shouldn’t be a big deal, right? Well, we left all of it at school, which is current closed, which leaves our sound keeper Noah without a way to actually fulfill his role. We ended up doing a sort of mini version of what we did to come up with sound effects at the beginning of DI, and eventually Noah had found enough things that he could work with. We did some practice with our cues and all the new sound effects, and we were actually looking pretty good! I thought we had overcome all the obstacles that had come our way, but I was wrong, because I had forgotten the biggest challenge yet, which was the presentation itself.

The online event was scheduled like an actual DI tournament, with a spreadsheet that had all the presenting times, and even an instant challenge. Eventually, it was our time to present, and it was time for all of that practice to pay off. I was actually pretty nervous at first, but all things considered, it went pretty smoothly, and everyone preformed well, just like we had practiced. The instant challenge also happened to be a performance challenge, and we did pretty well on that as well. In fact, after all that, I feel that I went from developing to accomplished in my Research and Understand competency, because we had to look at the challenge from a completely new perspective to solve our problems and come out on top. In conclusion, I think we greatly improved even due to the new challenges we faced, and that I managed to meet the competency for this project. That’s about it for this blog post, make sure to stay tuned for more!

We just finished our latest Scimatics project, and once again, it’s reflection time! This project was called Metaphor Machines, and it was about Rude Goldberg machines and circuits. A Rude Goldberg machine is basically a machine that does something in an over-complicated way, and we had to put an electric circuit in ours. We also had to make our machine represent the scientific method, which is why it’s called a metaphor machine. This was a group project, so my group members were Thomas and Liam, and we focused on the machine itself first. We started off by making a path for a marble to travel through out of metre sticks. We added a lever mechanism, and we tried to add a pulley system, but it didn’t end up working out, so we had the lever end at a switch instead. Then we started working on the electrical circuit, which we wanted to connect to the switch at the end of the machine so that the marble would hit it and activate it. We had to reposition the switch, but we got the marble to hit the switch and turn on the lights at the end. After that, all we had to do was connect it to the scientific method. We had already planned out what we were going to do before we built the machine, so we labelled all the pre-determined parts with something that represented a step in the scientific method. Then we had to make a video showcasing our machine, and here is my group’s:

https://youtu.be/HjSWAA3WE9I

After the machine was completed, we had to update our project start mind map, but by some nefarious mechanism, mine was destroyed (My iPad broke and some of my files got deleted, including my MindNode ones.). I did learn the answers to some of my questions that were originally on my mind map, for example, I learned how circuits would tie into our machines, and how we would be using the scientific method in this project. There were also some core competencies to reflect on for this project, which you can see right here:For questioning and predicting, I feel like I met this competency, because my group managed to finish everything, and usually worked efficiently, although there were a few times where I felt we could be more focused. For reasoning and analyzing, I felt that I met this competency, because we finished our final blueprint with a grid scale and all the measurements we needed. For planning and conducting, I feel like I have met this competency because my group managed to incorporate our circuit into our metaphor machine, and we made a circuit diagram with all the required information… at least that’s what Thomas told me. And for the final competency, scientific communication, I feel like I have met this competency because our video showed how our machine worked, and also had a voiceover explaining how it related to the scientific method.

In conclusion, I learned a lot about circuits and Rude Goldberg machines, and refreshed my knowledge of the scientific method. It was also pretty fun creating the machine and the circuit, and I hope we will be able to do another project with this much hands on building in the future. That’s about it for this blog post, stay tuned for more!

Destination Imagination has returned! It feels like such a long time since I did it last year, but the time finally came, so here is my reflection on the 2020 DI regionals! My experience this year was a lot different than last year, starting off with the challenge. Destination Imagination is split into different challenges, and last year I did the technical challenge, which usually involves making some kind of mechanism. This year, I ended up doing the improv challenge, where you have to act and come up with things as you go along, which is a lot different from what I did last year. I also had different group members from last year, my group members were Noah, Rhiann, Jude, Malaika, and Emily. I’m pretty much done talking about last year’s DI now, but if you want to read about it in depth you can read the post I did on it here. Back to the this year’s DI, this year’s improv challenge was pretty interesting, it was called To The Rescue and it was about superheroes. The skit we had to do had to have a villain who uses a superpower to cause a conundrum, and then the hero steps in with and saves the day with an underwhelming power. The villain’s power, the conundrum, and the hero’s underwhelming power are all randomly selected, which is the improv part. On top of all that, we also had to enhance our skit with sound effects. There were also few more minor details that are covered in DI’s official video on the challenge, which you can check out right here.

Our group started off by doing forms. Lots and lots of forms. They covered thing like which materials we could use to outlining the challenge requirements, but the really important ones were the ones that had to do with the elements of the challenge itself. Since the randomly selected villains power came from a pool of about ten or so powers, we had to research them so that we would know everything about whatever power was selected during the challenge. However, the conundrum and hero’s power are a different story, because while the villains power comes from a preselected pool, the conundrum and hero power can both be anything, which helps buy into the improv idea. To combat this, we came up with random powers and conundrums to use during our practice sessions, which I’ll get to in a bit. While they were a bit boring, all these forms helped us understand everything about the challenge, which gave us an advantage at the end, so I’m glad we did them. There was still a big part of the challenge we had to focus on before the tournament, and that was the sound effects. We were allowed to have a box with a bunch of objects in it as our sound effects, nothing electronic allowed. We were thinking of having different people make the sound effects during the performance, but eventually we decided to have one person do them for the whole skit, which was Noah. For the actual sound effects, right off the bat we started coming up with things that could make basic sounds, but in our early practice sessions we realized there were still lots of situations where Noah couldn’t really make a sound for. To minimize those situations, everyone had to come up with items that could make a sound corresponding to every villain superpower, and then bring them in for our sound keeper. The last big thing we did before the tournament was practice. We came up with random conundrums and heroes powers, and a random villain superpower from the pool. This way, we would never know what was coming and would have to go along with it, like we would have to in the actual challenge. After doing a lot of these random skits, we started to realize what we needed to improve on the most. There were a few minor things, like not talking over each other, and making sure you face the audience. These weren’t that hard to overcome, you just had to think about what was happening from your scene partner’s or the audience’s perspective. Then there were more major ones, like our lack of sound effects. While we had gathered all the sound making objects we needed, we didn’t really give Noah much time to put in sound effects, which could cost us a lot of points at the tournament. We started to practice giving really obvious cues so that Noah would have time to put in sound effects, and it took us a while to actually incorporate it into our skits, but we worked it out eventually. We also had a problem where we would drag out one thing because nobody knew what direction to take the skit, and then before we would know it our time limit was up. We decided we needed a narrator to give context to our scenes, and move the scene along if it started slowing down. That narrator ended up being me. It took some practice to get used to, but eventually I started to feel confident with my role and the ability of my team. We had started out pretty bad, but the practice had payed off and we had improved a great deal. We were going to need everything had learned though, because after all that time we spent practice the tournament was knocking on the door.

On the day of the tournament, we had our instant challenge before our actual challenge, which we did pretty good on it, giving us a needed boost of confidence. Then the time finally came, and we went in and did our performance that we had practiced on for so long. I think our challenge actually ended up being pretty good, because we got a bunch of sound effects in, we didn’t have any awkward pauses, and we managed it work with the challenge elements we were given. Not that it wasn’t without flaws, we ran out of time at the very end of our skit, although it didn’t ruin our skit because we were pretty much at the end anyways. Personally, I think I did my job as narrator, although I think I could’ve sped things up a bit in parts where it started to drag on. Despite the flaws, I still consider it a success, because now we have an even clearer idea of what we can improve on, and I also managed to demonstrate the Research and Understand competency. I feel that I demonstrated it when researching the challenge and practicing, for example when we were considering how our performance would look to the audience and judges, or when we were practicing to think from our fellow group members perspective so that we could play off of what they did better, or to give them opportunities to do actions or make sound effects.

Well that’s about it for this blog post, I’m sure we’ll improve a lot in the provincials, so stay tuned for that!

We just finished another project, and now it’s reflection time! This project was called “Let’s Get Riel!”, with the driving question of “How can we present past actions and decisions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust?”. In case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t spell real wrong, because Riel is the last name of Louis Riel, who was a big focus of the project. You probably don’t know who he is, and we didn’t either, so we read this comic book about him throughout the project, creatively titled “Louis Riel”.

We’ll talk about Mr. Riel more later, because our first milestone actually had nothing to do with Louis Riel. Our first milestone was a current event that had to have happened fairly recently. After some research, I decided to do a particular incident which was part of the recent Wet’suwet’en protests, which I found quite interesting. Current events are always fun to do, and I think this milestone is a good example of my Connect competency, because I got to read about other people’s thoughts on the issue while researching it, and eventually got to form and write about my own opinion.In the next milestone we got to find out what the end goal of our project would be. We were put into partners, I was with Holly, and we had to choose our own event to analyze and decide if it was ethical or not. We also had to create our own driving question, and some images that represented our event, which would then be posted on a class instagram page. Holly and I started out by choosing an event to analyze. We ended up choosing the Douglas Treaties, which we had to research, and then put all the information we found on a worksheet. We found out that the Douglas Treaties were a bunch of treaties signed with First Nations tribes on Vancouver Island, except they were pretty dubious, and nobody knows if they were legit or not. This made a pretty interesting topic, as the whole project was about ethical dimensions, and I think that this was another good example of my Connect competency, because me and Holly alike had to discuss our perspectives of what we had researched.

For the next milestone, we started to work on the prototypes for our Instagram images. I had come up with the idea for a kind of internet “phishing scam”, which is kind of what happened with the First Nations during that event, because they got scammed. I also realized that phishing sounds like fishing after Holly informed me, and the First Nations were promised fishing rights that they never received, which I thought was quite clever.After receiving feedback on our prototypes, Holly and I finished our final drafts for milestone 4, which we ended up sharing to the class. We had created a total of three images, as well as an Instagram caption to go along with them.I think this milestone is a great example of the Understand Ethical Dimensions competency, because we formed and shared our own opinions through the images we created. We supported them with evidence we gathered from our research, and in turn we showed our understanding of ethical dimensions.

Hey, remember Louis Riel, that guy I was talking about at the beginning of the post? Well, we had been reading the book throughout all the other milestones, and found out that he was a Métis leader who opposed the Canadian government and ended up being executed, but we got to form our own opinions on the ethical dimensions of the events in the book in the final milestone, which was a literary response. I really enjoyed this milestone, because I had developed some of my own opinions while reading the book, and now I got to write about them. I also think this is another excellent example of the Understand Ethical Dimensions competency, because I got to read about a historical event, form my own opinions and support them with research, and show my understanding of ethical dimensions.This project was a short one, but I actually really enjoyed most of it. I found the book quite interesting, and it was fun to write about my own opinions, as well as creating the images. I hope that we get the opportunity to do something like it in the future. That’s about it for this blog post, make sure to stay tuned for more!

We just finished up another humanities project, and as always, it’s reflection time. This project was about a big part of Canadian history, the Canadian confederation, which helped create Canada as we know it today, and it had an appropriate driving question: “How and why did Canada develop into a nation?” We started off by learning the history behind the confederation, and what ended up happening, but the cool part about this project is that we actually got to rewrite history a little bit, and have our own conferences on confederation. We were put into groups representing the different colonies at the time, and I ended up being in a group with Alex, Finn, Holly, and Ryan. The colony we represented was Canada West, which is now known as Ontario, and at the time of confederation was right here:

After learning about some of the history behind the confederation, we had to write a response to what we had learned explaining the factors leading to the confederation. I thought this milestone was worth mentioning because it is a great example of the Evidence competency, one of the main competencies for this project, which is about evaluating evidence to see if it can support a historical conclusion. This milestone was all about doing research to find the main factors to confederation, and is pretty much the perfect evidence for this competency. This milestone was also pretty fun to do, I found the documents we were given to read very interesting, and I enjoyed breaking them down and putting them into my response:

The next two milestones that I thought were particularly important is the preliminary proposals and our final commercial. The preliminary proposals were basically conditions our colony had if we joined the confederation, but the ones we made had to be historically plausible. The preliminary proposals weren’t as important as the final commercial, but they were still essential in getting to that final product, and they still tie into the Create competency a bit as well. It was actually pretty interesting coming up with conditions that would help us and others, which made it an enjoyable milestone as well:

The biggest milestone we did, and the one that in my opinion was the most important in my learning for this project, was our final commercial. After we had done our preliminary proposals, we all watched the other colonies demands, and then we had to adjust ours so that they would work better for us and the other colonies, and what we ended up deciding on went into our commercial. The commercial was basically a video explaining our conditions, but we also had to make some effects with a green screen. Before we actually made the video we had to make a screenplay, which we finished quite quickly. Then we got to actually making the video, where we would say our lines in front of the green screen, and then edit it together with green screen effects to make our commercial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqs4CjiZbw4

I think I learned a lot from this particular milestone, because not only did I get insight into how people make group affecting decisions like the ones we made during our final proposals, but I also think this milestone is a good example of how I used the Create competency for this project. The Create competency is about what literacy skills you use in things you create, and this milestone helped me improve my speaking and and acting skills, as well as learn an entirely knew skill, the green screen. Since we do a lot of videos in PLP, I have a feeling that I’ll be using the skill of green screen editing sometime in the future. Now, you may be wondering by this point, what happened after the commercials, and was confederation was achieved? Well, only two colonies signed, and we weren’t one of them. We decided not to sign in because we felt that not enough of our conditions were met for us to join. So even though confederation wasn’t achieved, I still learned a lot from the project as a whole. I learned how to properly use a green screen, I improved my speaking and acting skills, and I learned about coming up with and agreeing on ideas that benefit everyone, which is something that is done in the real world, and I think this project helped me realize just how hard it is to do. And for the driving question, “How and why did Canada develop into a nation?” Well, for the why, I think that it was because it was good all the different colonies, and even if they didn’t sign on right away, they did later when it benefited them more. You can see more about the specific ways it did this in my “Why Confederation?” response. Well, that’s about it for this blog post, Destination Imagination is coming up, so stay tuned!

 

We just finished up another Scimatics project, and this is my reflection post on it. This math project was called Like Terms, the math in question being polynomials, which are a type of algebra. The project was a bit different from previous math projects we had, because we got to choose our own groups, and even make our own driving question! I ended up in a group with Thomas and Noah, and right off the bat we knew we wanted to do something with Minecraft. We thought of Minecraft right away because we knew that all blocks in Minecraft are one cubic metre in size, and we thought about using the measurements from the blocks to make a polynomial. After some thinking, we came up with our driving question “How can we show how games involve polynomials?” To answer our question, we decided to make a sort of game within Minecraft where you build a structure and then calculate the perimeter. It took a while to actually build the arena and the structures, but it was still fun to do. Then we got around to the math part, and we calculated the perimeter for the two structures we created and made that into a polynomial equation, answering our driving question in the process. Here is some pictures of the math we did:

And here are some more pictures of the structures that we built:

Before I wrap up this blog post, I want to talk about the core competencies for this project, and how me and my group did on them. The first competency was the understanding and solving competency, where we had to show that we understood polynomials and like terms. I understood the math pretty well, and me and my group showed our understanding of the concept in our final project presentation, so we ended up getting an extending mark on this competency. The next competency was communicating and representing, which was about the quality of our presentation. We got an accomplished mark, because although our presentation was good, we didn’t practice presenting it, so it was a bit rough, and we also didn’t include any exponents in our presentation. Another competency we did really well on was the connecting and reflecting competency. This competency was about connecting mathematics to other areas, and having personalized and original work. We got extending in this because we had a pretty original idea, only one other group did something related to video games. The final competency was the applying and innovating competency, which was basically about if we used our class time efficiently or not. We got accomplished for this competency, because for the most part we were on task, but we did get distracted a couple times. In conclusion, I learned a lot in this project, but it was still really fun to do, because we got to make our own groups and driving question, which I hope we can do again sometime. That’s about it for this blog post, stay tuned for more!