If you want to comment on one of my posts, there’s a way to do that, and it’s very simple. EDU Blogs is not the best website and it’s a little hard to navigate but once you know it’s very easy to do. I made a little video describing how to do it, and it’s right Here. I hope that you check it out and hopefully comment on one of my posts!
This was one of the coolest things I’ve done and it turned out super cool! I made it on Avachara. It was a really cool website and it was super easy to use and it was very fun customize my avatar to look like me. I had a lot of fun with this and I now know how to make an avatar which is a skill that will likely be useful later in life.
For this last project in humanities we learned about the Renaissance and we made a song. Our driving question was who or what has challenged your worldview in the transition from elementary school to high school? Now you are probably wondering what correlation those two things have and don’t worry… so did I. At first I was extremely confused, but I realized that the song was about the transition from elementary to high school, and we were learning about the effects of the renaissance and what it caused, so that’s the connection. Both of those things are about being exposed to new things and how that broadens your mind and the way that you think.
Competencies:
There were two competencies that were assessed for this project. The first one was create, which is pretty self explanatory. It is basically how I used skills to create what was being created, which in this case was a song. I think that I did pretty well on this aspect of the project because I used a lot of my iPad skills to create the song. The second competency that was assessed was cause and consequence. This one confused me a little because I wasn’t too sure how I was being assessed. I think it is how we showed cause and consequence with our song lyrics, and if that’s case I think I did pretty well on it. I really had to bring my experiences from my transition and put them into the lyrics. The cause was moving from elementary to high school and the consequence was all these things that were increased like homework and just work in general and so on.
For this project we made a song! The song was really fun to make and the lyrics we’re also really fun to make because we can make some very silly lyrics and I got a few good laughs out of some of my lyrics and some of other peoples lyrics. Our song was basically a parody of REM’s It’s The End Of The World As We Know It. The lyrics had to be about the transition from elementary to high school. Here are my lyrics for my song:
As I said earlier I really enjoyed making these lyrics and as you can probably tell I had some fun with it. For the actual song it took me not too long to record but there was a few microphone interruptions and I had to fix them which took me a little while. If you want to listen to my song it’s right here:
The next part of our project was to make a group song with two other people and combine our lyrics. We then had to make a video with all photos of all of us from grade 7 or 8. The making of the slideshow was really fun because I got to see a bunch of photos from my past and from my friends past. For this project I worked with Logan and Nate (Nate’s blog and Logan’s blog). Working in a group was helpful because when we are writing the lyrics if somebody had a verse that they didn’t like, somebody else would have a verse that could replace it. In other words working in a group improved our creative process. This is our song and video:
Overall, I think this project was very interesting and I learned a lot about the renaissance and making music. This definitely made me think about my worldview and how much I’ve changed over the last year. It was very nostalgic looking at my old photos and choosing which ones to put in my video. This project definitely help me with the competencies, which were create and cause and consequence. And lastly I think this project help me learn about how our world was shaped, because of the renaissance, and how my world was shaped, because of my worldview.
For this last project in scimatics we learned about area and volume, and made 3D object in a cad program. The program I used was Shapr3D. I used this program because it allowed me to do more, and it was fairly easy to use. For this project I made a goalie stick in Shapr3D. We had to design our object for either maximum surface area or minimum volume, and I designed my stick for maximum surface area and minimum volume so that the stick would be light and still have a lot of area to save the puck with.
Competencies:
The competencies that were assessed this term were applying and innovating, reasoning and analyzing, communicating and representing. In more simple form how well we worked and how focused we were, how well we did the math aspect, and lastly how we showed the math aspect. For the first competency I think that I could’ve done much better. I was definitely a bit distracted during class, and I need to work on it next term. For the second competency I think I did a pretty good job at. The math was not too hard and I think that helped a little bit but I enjoy math so I think that was the main reason, and I’m pretty happy about that. The last competency started a little slow because I was unprepared for our presentation. I realized this, so I edited my presentation and it upped my mark for that competency and I was really happy for that.
For the actual model I think I did a pretty good job making it realistic.
This is a comparison of my model, and a real goalie stick. At the end of the project we were supposed to 3D print our model, but unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to 3D print mine, so mine didn’t end up getting printed.
Overall I think that this project was really fun and interesting, and in the future this project will help me a lot with math skills such as the Pythagorean theorem and calculating volume and surface area and volume.
For this term in Maker we competed in a tournament called Destination Imagination. Destination Imagination is a competition where you are required to come up with a solution to a problem that was given. There were different groups, with different problems, and that’s what I think made it really interesting because every group had a different thing that they were working on and it was exciting to see what other groups were coming up with. To name a few different groups there were technical, scientific, fine arts, and my group which was improv. The improv challenge was a little different than all the other ones because it’s improv and we didn’t know exactly how our script was going to go until we were doing the challenge, whereas everyone else had a script that they planned out before. I think our challenge was less stressful than everyone else’s in some ways, but more stressful in other ways. It sounds very strange but I think it’s pretty accurate because there was much less stress on getting our stuff finished before the tournament, but there was much more stress on the actual presentation because we didn’t know what it was going to be until we were doing it.
At first I was not looking forward to DI but after doing a tournament and looking back on it it wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it was going to be, and it was actually pretty fun watching all my peers compete. I think that our group worked pretty well together and I was happy with how the performance went.
The challenge was villain and superhero themed, where the superhero has an underwhelming power like having a built-in pencil sharpener, and the villain has a real power and the hero had to overcome a conundrum that was chosen, and defeat the villain with their underwhelming power. We also had to add sound effects into the skit which proved difficult.
The first thing we did when we got the challenge was read up on the rules of DI, and then read up on the challenge. For the first part, they gave us around 20 different powers and we had to choose ten, or two each. I chose animal communication and super speed because I thought they wouldn’t be too hard to show in a skit. Next we had to research our powers. I watched Ant Man for animal communication and the Flash for super speed. Once we did that we were each given one major part of the challenge to become a “master” at. The thing that I had to become a master at was the underwhelming power that the hero had. I had to research in depth about this aspect of the skit. For example I had to know exactly what elements of the underwhelming power gave more points, like the fact that the creativity of how it was used was worth more than how accurately it was depicted. After that it was a lot of practising with random conundrums and powers. Practising was really fun because some of the conundrums that were given were super funny and made a very interesting skit.
When the day of the tournament came around I felt pretty nervous but also prepared and like I knew what was going to happen. The first thing we did is our instant challenge and unfortunately I’m not allowed to talk about because it is against the rules of the tournament. But luckily I am allowed to say what an instant challenge is. It basically is a side challenge that is different than the real challenge. It takes less time and nobody knows what it’s going to be until you are in the room and the judges are explaining it, hence the instant part of it. I think that our group had a small advantage because we already had practice with thinking on the fly. I think it went really well but that’s all I’m allowed to say. For our actual challenge, we got mind control for our villain power, our conundrum was school isn’t let out over summer, and our underwhelming power was that the hero could solve any puzzle with ease.
I think that we can improve on our performance in many ways moving forward to the provincial tournament. One of those ways is to improve our sound effects. We also need to be a little bit more enthusiastic and energetic. The last big thing that we need to improve is using our prep time efficiently, because we only have two minutes to prepare and if we use that time unwisely our skit could be much less interesting. If you want to see the video of our presentation it is right here.
Overall I think that our performance was very successful. I had a good time at DI and working on DI, and I think this project improved my teamwork skills substantially.
I think that Star Wars is just like this project because in the beginning it seems all fine, but then it looks like it’s going to go horribly wrong and end very badly but it all works out in the end. On a serious note though this project was a very fun project and was one of the more interesting projects we’ve done this year. For the project we had to research one question we had about Star Wars and really go into depth researching the question and figuring out the answer.
At the end we had to present it to anyone that wanted to come see it in our winter exhibition. Basically anyone that wanted to come to our plp winter exhibition could come and view our project if they wanted to, which was kind of scary but also kind of exciting. My question for this project was our bigger ships or smaller ships more effective in battle. It took me quite a while to figure out the answer to this question, but eventually I got it done in my LAUNCH journal:
Launch journal
I think that this project helped me as a learner in many different ways. The main thing I think it helped is my researching skills. For this we really had to find stuff about Star Wars and make sure it was true, because Star Wars is fiction and people could make up things about it. After a lot of my research I came to the conclusion that smaller ships if there are more of them were more effective. There are multiple reasons to support this like they are faster and more manoeuvrable etc. This research took me quite a long time and I was pretty proud of myself for coming up with a conclusion and I think I did a good job of researching and finding out the answer to my question.
The final stage of this project was to test a question in real life and see if the research you did online matched up with the experiment you did in real life. For my experiment I used paper airplanes, one of a big Star Wars ship and one of a small Star Wars ship and threw them and see which one went farther. Overall I think this experiment was inconclusive and there were multiple variables that could’ve affected it. One of those was that they both weigh the same and if they were life-size they wouldn’t have. At the end of this experiment the small ships ended up going further so it didn’t match up with my research but I think that was just a coincidence. Here’s a video of me throwing them and measuring how far they went. Again, I think this was a very inconclusive experiment but it was kind of fun to do just to see how far they went. These are photos of my paper airplanes. The first one is a tie fighter, and the second one is a star destroyer.
The exhibition was a very scary and nerve-wracking experience, but it was definitely exciting. A lot of people came over and talk to me about my project and at first I was really nervous for anybody to come but after about a half an hour to an hour I really got the hang of it and I think my presentation was really good by the end. After a while exhibition was actually really fun, and was good practice for presenting to people that I don’t know. Overall, I think that this project was super fun and pretty different from anything we’ve done this year, or even ever!
This project was a scimatics project, and it was very fun. The first thing that we did was do a mind map. The mind map included what we already know and what we want to learn about matter. This only took us around a day so it was not a big part of our project. The first big thing that we did in this project was a gemstone identification challenge. For this we had to find the volume of a gemstone that our teacher gave us and match it up with known volumes of gems stones and see if ours lined up with any of the examples. This was a pretty fun activity and I enjoyed it. After that we drew two atoms and one molecule for the next part of our project which was coding a game on scratch. Here are the drawings that I made:
The first two are atoms and the second one is a molecule. Before the final thing, which was designing and coding our game, we had to plan it out. My plan was to make a game where atoms are falling from the sky and you have to catch them all in order to win. After that stage we actually got to code our game, which was very fun. If you want to look at or play my game click Here. I think overall that this was a very fun project and I got to express my learning in ways that were interesting and exciting. I also think that this was a super cool way to learn and I hope we do more things like it in the future.
This project was a humanities project about the Middle Ages and it was a pretty short one. We started this project by reading a book called The Book of The Lion.
The book was a little bit of a slow one—most people that were reading it agreed with that. Although it was slightly boring it was only about 400 pages long so it didn’t take a long time to read it. It was about a boy named Edmund who became a squire in the Middle Ages. After the book ended all we had to do was discuss themes and then we were basically done with The Book of the Lion. Although the book was a little bit slow, I thought this part of the project was pretty engaging.
The next thing that we did was a character letter where we pretended to be somebody from the middle ages writing a letter to somebody else and it was very interesting because you could really become the person that you were pretending to be. I think that this help me understand fully what it would be like to live back then.
The last part of this project was a presentation about one aspect of life back in the Middle Ages compared to today, which we had to research and then present. We did this in partners and my partner was Nya. (This is her blog: Nya’s Blog) The two things that we researched were astrology and handheld weapons/combat strategies. I think that this was good practice for research because it wasn’t very difficult. One thing that I learned that was pretty interesting about combat strategies was in the middle ages a strategy that they had was to go on a hill near the city and just shoot arrows in the sky and hopefully hit people. They later got rid of this strategy because it was pretty ineffective and wasted a lot of good arrows as you might be able to imagine. For the presentation I think that I was a little bit nervous and I should’ve done a little bit more planning.
Overall I think this project was very interesting because it help me understand what life was like back in the Middle Ages. In particular and makes you think about the fact that peoples lives were much more expendable. And on the topic of comparing life now too fast then it’s interesting to think about how they would’ve dealt with the Black Plague because now we are dealing with the coronavirus but today we have a better understanding of how disease is spread and how to prevent them from being spread so it is less concerning than it would’ve been back in the Middle Ages. I think that it was helpful to learn about life in the Middle Ages compared to life now and it helps me appreciate what life is like today.
This project was probably the most fun project that we’ve done so far to me. As you can tell, this project is about Star Wars and lasers. Well not completely… we learned about triangles, and the Pythagorean theorem, and hypotenuse. That was the “learning part,” and it was pretty easy as long as I payed attention to what we were leaning. In total this project took about a month and a half. What we had to show for our learning in this project was a model of a machine from Star Wars. That’s how it’s related to Star Wars, but the lasers come in when we had to make a right triangle using a laser and mirrors. This proved to be more difficult than it sounded because we had to put the laser and two mirrors in the exact right spot at the exact right angle. We built a TIE fighter which was probably not a good idea… 
That’s a photo of a TIE fighter, and as you can see the middle part has to be supported by the thin wings on the side. That proved to be a very tough obstacle but we managed to work through that and we made it work and now here’s the final product:
I think that it came out really good. The reason we did this project and built the ships was for our winter exhibition. The winter exhibition is a show of our work for the last 2-3 months and the theme is Star Wars. We have other projects with Star Wars themes that we will also be presenting. We’re presenting for anyone that wants to come! I think that this is probably the most fun project we’ve done so far this year because of the fact that we got to build a TIE fighter and model it from Star Wars!
Well first things first, what is impulsivity? Impulsivity is when you do something before you think about what you’re doing. For example, if you get mad at a video game and punch your computer and break it, that’s an impulse. Then later, you often regret doing it. In Oregon I controlled my impulsivity almost all the time. I did this by always thinking before saying and or doing anything. If I made enemies on this trip it would not be fun… that’s why I made sure I thought about what I was about to do. I figured that as long as I think about what I’m saying everything would be fine. This worked out just as I thought it would, and Oregon was really fun because of it. A few times I got a little angry though but not to the point of me doing anything bad, it was only in my head, which is exactly what controlling impulsiveness is. On the Oregon trip almost nobody couldn’t control their impulses, which made for a really good time. Over the whole time we made a book that had everything we did in it
