How to comment

In this post I’m going to be teaching you how to post comments. First you want to look for a promo that says comment or looks like the picture below. Once you’ve found it, you’ll need to write your comment in the comment box. After that you’ll have to type the anti spam word so that it knows you’re not a bot. After that you can put your name, just your first name if you’d like, and then put your email address. After you’ve finished all that, press the button that says post comment, and your set! Feel free to comment on this post, or my blog in general!

Alberta project blog post

We just finished a HUGE project, and as always, it’s reflection time! So, the reason that this project was so big, was because it was the focus of our field school in Alberta. I’m not going to talk much about what happened overall in Alberta, but I will talk about a few locations we went to that were particularly important to my project. It’s about time I talk about the project itself, starting with the driving question: how does place impact who we are? For our launch milestone, we had to reflect on the driving question, and really think about how place affects us. We then had to create something to show our thinking. This is what I made:

It’s basically a few examples of how place impacts you. This wasn’t a particularly big milestone, it was mostly for us to brainstorm answers to the driving question. Our next milestone was called using a lens. Basically, there are 4 different ways to look at something, lenses, if you will. There are the political, geographical, economical, and societal lenses. The political lens focuses on politics, the geographical on the environment, the economical on money, and the social on how it impact peoples social lives. We then were assigned an article, and had to choose a lens to focus on. I got an article on the B.C. wolf cull, and chose the geographical lens. I pretty much just talked about the effect the cull would have on the environment, but this milestone was very important in showing us how to use lenses. The next milestone was pre-trip plan. By this point we had been assigned our groups, and I got the First Nations. That means I was officially doing a project on how place impacts the First Nations, and what has changed over time. For the pre trip plan, we had to do some research on our group, and make up a shot list for a video, which was the final goal of the project, to have a video answering the driving question. Most of the pre trip plan was just written research, but I have a photo of a timeline I made that I can show you.

And after that milestone, we finally went to Alberta! I really want this blog post to be about this project and my learning, and not about random things we did in Alberta, but I feel I should still put a map of the route we were traveling.

As I want this post to stay on topic with the project, I’m only going to write about the places in the trip that were useful to my research. One of the first useful sites we went to was the Banff cave and basin.

I actually managed to talk with one of the tour guides, and got some pretty good information on the kind of things that happened to sites of cultural significance like the cave and basin when the Europeans came. The next site we saw that was very helpful was the Glenbow museum. The place is a treasure trove of First Nations history, art, and artifacts.

I got pretty much all my photos from there, and a great deal of information as well. The third really useful site, and what I think was the most helpful out of all of them, was the heritage park. We started out looking at old buildings and learning lots of European history, but not much First Nations history. And then near the end of our stay we came across a First Nations man in a teepee with all sorts of traditional tools on the floor. Apparently he was there to teach people about First Nations history, and although I wasn’t able to record an interview with him, I was still able to talk to him and ask him some questions. The information I got was invaluable. I got an answer to my every question about what had changed for the First Nations after the Europeans came. I think more than half of my information came from this guy. It sucked when we had to leave the heritage park, because I probably could have come up with more questions, but I still got all the information I needed. The final important site was the Rocky Mountain buffalo ranch.

This was important because as you probably know, the First Nations used the buffalo for many things, and I got to find out what kind of many things they were used for. Leo Downey, the man running the ranch, also knew everything about the buffalo, including the cultural significance the buffalo had to the First Nations. After this stop, I was not short on knowledge of the buffalo. And that’s pretty much all the important stops in Albert, but when we got back, we had to actually work on our video. The fifth milestone was to make a draft of our video and get critique. Here is my first draft, and you can see why I got critique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGDJbfti-yQ&list=UUqJcEm84M1KCsxoCAYY-VfA&index=2

Seeing this critique, I immediately set to changing my video, as it was our final milestone. It was hard work, but here is my final video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaAQxyKMA7s&list=UUqJcEm84M1KCsxoCAYY-VfA&index=5

So yeah, that video was my answer to the driving question, how does place impact who we are, and what has changed? In conclusion of what I learned, I definitely learned the answer to the driving question, and now really know how important place is to me, and all of us.

Math exponents game blog post

So, we just finished a big math project, and this is my project on how it improved my understanding of the big idea and my proficiency in the curricular competencies. So the big idea of this project was “How does math make games more complex, interesting, and replayable?”. So yeah, basically we had to make a card game with math, specifically a certain type of math, exponent laws. That’s not what we started out doing though. Our first milestone was to make a dice game. Just a normal dice game, with no fancy math involved.

I didn’t really understand the point of this at first, but later I realized how it helped me understand the basics of pretty much any kind of game. Our next milestone was a math quiz, to test our knowledge on exponent laws. There wasn’t really anything special about this milestone, it was just a regular old math quiz. However, the next milestone was pretty important, as it was the first draft of our actual game. I had Alex as my partner, you can find her blog here. For our game, we ended up deciding on a card game where you draw and play playing cards on your turn to earn points, all while using exponent laws. The goal of the game is to get to 500 points. However, to spice things up a bit, we decided to add attack cards. If you get one of these cards you can use it on your opponent to stop the, from playing playing cards. However, if you draw and play a brain card, you can play playing cards as normal. The full rules are right here if you care to read them.Our next milestone was a second draft of our game. We had this feedback to base our second draft on:

For our next draft, we did exactly that. We specified our rules so that you just add up the numbers on the playing cards, as opposed to calculating he exponents themselves. We then had another group play test our game, only using the rules we wrote and not using is for reference. They got gist of the game fairly quickly, but were disorganized with where they put their cards, so we put a picture of what the layout was supposed to look like in the rules. Our final rules draft is right here:

The final milestone was to have another class come in and play our game. This went pretty well, and lots of people from the other class had fun playing our game. So, overall, I think our game was a pretty good success, as it was pretty fun, and helped me learn exponent laws in the process. So now I can confidently answer the big idea, “How does math make games more complex, interesting, and replayable?“, in that math makes games more random, and gives more of a sense of chance to games. It can insure that every game you play will have a different outcome. It is also useful for points. And for the curricular competencies, it definitely helped, as I knew nothing about exponent laws before, and now I can confidently say I am proficient in using the exponent laws. And that’s about it for this blog post, thanks for reading!

Spring Exhibition learning portfolio post

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!

colonizing in a tempest reflection

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.

Tpol

Throughout the year I have learned a lot of new things which have really helped me grow as a learner. I’m going to be giving an example of something that really shows my improvement for each subject, and why it is a good example to showcase what I improved this year.

Maker:

Example: DI

DI was something completely new to me, especially the challenge I got, because I had no idea of how a drone worked or how we were going to get it finished in time. But during the final week before DI, I really had to step out of my comfort zone and get things done, and then me and my group had to present our drone/blimp, which we didn’t even know would work. But it ended up working out, and we got third place, and that last week really helped me realize that stepping out of your comfort zone can be a huge help to you, because that way you can accomplish things you never thought you could do before. It also taught me about the importance of being organized and having a schedule, because I had so many things to get done while still juggling everyday tasks. One of the things that I think it helped the most with, however, was my teamwork skills. Our group had quite a few disagreements, and I think our group as a whole learned from the experience. The most prominent thing that helped my teamwork, however, was the instant challenge. In a situation where you have limited resource and time it’s easy to freak out and just blurt out your idea, but I learned to wait and carefully listen to everyone else’s ideas before you talk about your own, and to actually consider your teammates ideas and see if they may work better than your own.

Humanities:

Example: colonizing in a tempest play 

The colonizing in a tempest project where our whole class had to write and act out a play/tableau was huge which means I learned a lot of things from it. First off, some of the activities really helped me look at things from different perspectives and not be biased so that you can see things for what they really are, which is a pretty useful skill. It also helped with teamwork skills, as we had to coordinate what we were doing with our group and work something out that everyone agreed with and then coordinate that with the whole class, and then make revisions. This took a lot of time to do, but as a result the  tableau as a whole made more sense. There was definitely lots of things to be getting done, which helped push the importance of using Things and the Calendar, especially since we had other projects going on at the same time. It, like DI helped me step way out of my comfort zone. I’ve done acting before, but with a whole audience staring at you is way more scary, especially because you had to hold that pose and not move while everyone was watching you. I didn’t mess up or anything though, so it all worked out in the end.

Science:

Example: eyeball dissection

This is another one about stepping out of your comfort zone, but in a different way. Instead of presenting something, you’re literally dissecting an eyeball. Sure, I was grossed out at first, but it ended up being really cool to see the lens and eye jelly separated from each other. It pretty much showed me that you don’t have to step out of your comfort zone for huge projects and stuff, but just doing it in class everyday like doing an assignment in a different way can be a really rewarding.

Math:

Example: Math (I know, 10/10 example)

This year in math we didn’t really do any projects, so I’m just going to talk about math in general. I’ve been doing much better in terms of not getting distracted, but I still get distracted occasionally and have to do the math later. This has taught me that no one is going to chase me down and make me do it, and that if I want to do well I have to keep track of everything myself and stay organized. This doesn’t just apply to math of course, it applies to pretty much everything in life, and is a very useful thing to know.

PGP time machine artefact

For PGP we had to make an artefact to show something we learned in PGP that we wish we knew back in September. We had to choose from our productivity unit, where we learned how to use apps like things and the calendar, our goalsetting unit where we read a book and learned about how to set good goals, and our 7 habits unit, where we learned about a bunch of helpful things from the 7 habits book. I chose habit 3, because not only does it go over of a lot of things in the productivity that helped me out, and adds a few things as well.

For the artefact itself, I made a finger puppet show. It shows how I was really procrastinating before I found out about it, but all the different strategies it showed me like prioritizing and using a planner/calendar helped me be more productive, which is why I wished I knew about it back in September.

DI provincials learning portfolio post

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.

Destination imagination learning portfolio post

The DI regionals happened a week ago, and I think they went really well for us. If you don’t know what DI (Destination imagination) is, there is a website all about it here. Anyways, as I was saying, it actually went pretty well. The challenge our group was doing was the technical challenge on target, where we had to make a flying vehicle that drops a payload in a designated area, all while having a story about exploring a remote place that relates to our aircraft. I was put in a group with five other people, Ryan, Meg, Ally, Anders, and Brenton. First we had to design our aircraft, and we ended up deciding on a quadcopter drone. We decided to build it from scratch, as we’d get more points if we made our own drone instead of buying one. We still had to buy parts for our drone, so we started to find out what we needed. We ordered batteries, motors, escs, flight controllers, and more. We also made a drop system using an electromagnet. We spent while trying to figure out how to make it work, but it kept breaking on us, so in the last three days before the tournament we switched it from a drone to a blimp that used helium balloons, and that decision actually worked out pretty well for us, because it was much easier to build and we were able to for the most part finished in time for the tournament, although our drop system broke at the last second.

For the story we did it so that it was some astronauts exploring an alien planet, and basically they get stranded there and they need to repair their radio, so they go to a cave but a crystal knocks out one of the astronauts, so the other astronaut takes the crystal and leaves the cave, and they use the crystal to fix the radio and call help, and they use the supplies the blimp drops to help the injured explorer. Thats just a brief overview, you can see it in detail in the video of our performance:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eexp-qocm0Q

We also had to do an instant challenge, where you have a few minutes to do a random task, it went alright, but our teamwork could have been better. I can’t talk about the specifics of the challenge until after the global DI tournament, because they reuse the challenges. I still felt like the entire thing went better than expected, because the blimp actually flew, even though we were only working on it for three days, and the story went well, and even though the drop system didn’t work and our instant challenge didn’t go the greatest, we still placed third out of seven teams, which I’m pretty happy with.

Now that me and my group has learned from this experience, there are things we are going to change for the provincial tournament. We are going to fix the drop system so that it, you know, actually works, and we are going to revise the story so that we can earn more points for the dramatic portrayal of the character and the integration of the drone into the story. Anyways, I’m going to be posting another post about how the provincials go after they happen, so bye for now.

It’s the end of the world project learning portfolio post

The end of the world project is finally over! And you know what that means, reflection time. So the projects main premise was worldview, but instead of other peoples worldview, it was about our own worldview and how it changed when we went from elementary to high school. For the first part of the project we looked at the crusades, and how the cultural exchange between the Christians and muslims affected their worldview. We were put into a group and were assigned to read the book of the lion, a book about the crusades. We had to fill out rolesheets for every third of the book we read, the first one I did was draw something that I felt the book reminded me of, the second one was researching something in the book I found interesting, and the final one I did was connecting the reading to things that are happening now, other media, etc. We also had to write a paragraph on how the cultural exchange affected the Christians and muslims and why. The main thing I learned from this part of the project was how many different things can lead to changes in worldview, and kind of helped me understand worldview better by giving me a good example of how it can change. For the next part of the project we had to make a Venn diagram and MindNode that showed the shifts in our worldview from elementary to secondary. For the Venn diagram, we were supposed to take our changes in worldview, our peers changes in worldview, and what the experts thought generally changed in the mind of someone who was changing from elementary to secondary.

For the MindNode we had to make a branch for each aspect of worldview (geography, society, values, economy, time, knowledge, and beliefs) and put things that changed in each of those aspects of worldview.

This helped me brainstorm and think of things that really changed when I went from elementary to secondary. It mostly gave me ideas for the final part of the project, the song. The main reason the project was called “it’s the end of the world as I know it” was because the final part of the project was to sing a parody of the song “it’s the end of the world as I know it” but swapping out the lyrics with our own lyrics describing the transition from elementary to secondary. We had to do a few drafts, I ended up singing it all at once so that the audio wouldn’t be different, and then I turned down the volume of the background song in GarageBand so that I could actually hear myself, the only differences between the drafts was that I improved my singing.

Then we had to mash together the lyrics of everyone in the group. We had to do two drafts, the only differences was that the second draft’s singing was better, and the video was better.

I think this project helped me realize how much actually changed. when I went from elementary to secondary, and really helped as an example to me of how much worldview can change in seemingly small events, and how it can change in several areas instead of just one. You can find the links to my group members blogs here, here, and here.