Destination Imagination- Again!

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INTRO

The first time we competed in the Destination Imagination tournaments, we did not do great. We have made so much progress this year since we began working on Destination Imagination, and I know we will continue to do so.

CHALLENGE

This year we were challenged to ‘Design and build a pinball system through which a pinball moves and interacts with 3 machine modules. During the Presentation, we needed to move the pinball through the pinball system for as long as possible.’ We also had to ‘Create and present an action/adventure story about a hero who goes on an extraordinary mission. We  also had to create and present two Team Choice Elements that show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.’ We decided to go with an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ theme, but changed the plot to a version where Alice was the antagonist, and the Madd Hatter was the protagonist, trying to free Wonderland from Alice’s evil grasp.

BEFORE

We went into our first Destination Imagination tournament with pretty much just a pile of recycling. We had a ramp with a (not working) slingshot, a table with a (not working) spiral ramp to roll down into our sound element, a shell chime. Theoretically, the ball would roll out of the chimes onto our (not working) flippers which would (not) roll it back up the ramp to do it again. Obviously, this didn’t work. Our pinball machine was also very ugly, we attempted to spray paint it with some ‘Alice in Wonderland’ themed colours, but without a base coat, it was just more ugly than before.

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CHANGES

Over the course of the three days we were all around during spring break, me and my team completely re-designed our pinball machine. My group and I spent many hours in Ella’s garage building a new and improved pinball machine. We built a strong wooden table with many  parts. It has flippers, ramps, bumpers, and even a slingshot launcher. We spray painted it white and decorated it in the theme of Alice in Wonderland.

RPReplay_Final1712964978

FAIL

One thing that I think is important to mention is how the F.A.I.L. acronym affected my mindset during my whole D.I. experience. Fail stands for ‘first attempt in learning’. Our original version of our pinball machine was definitely a fail- or so I thought! When I began to think about Destination Imagination as a F.A.I.L., I was able to take the next step in making our pinball machine better than ever.

AWARDS

Using the F.A.I.L. mindset, we were able to nab the third place technical challenge trophy, and the first place instant challenge trophy. It felt great to win something, especially after we compared how we did this time to how we did in the last tournament. In the last tournament, we also got third in our technical challenge, but against a lot less people, and we got a high score in the technical challenge as well.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, our Destination Imagination journey has been rocky to say the least, but we have improved. I am thrilled about how much progress we have made, and I know my next journey in the DI program will be even better.

What Time Is It? MPol Time!

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Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

Welcome to my MPol blog post! I will be working on retelling my PLP journey so far. Enjoy!

 

Favourite Projects!🤩

Some of the projects that we worked on this year interested me more than others, like the poem Ebook, the Scratch science game, and the Genghis Khan skit. I can see that I work better on a project when I enjoy it! I feel that I created high quality work on these three projects because they were fun to spend time on and I was excited to work hard.

Poems, Genghis, and Video games📜🕹️🥷

⬜️For our poem e-book, we answered the question, ‘How Might I Write Poems I Enjoy And Show Who I Am’. I found that I enjoyed writing these poems so much more when I chose a topic related to something happening in my life or something that is important to me. I ended up writing 10 poems including 7 different types of poems, and three haikus, about all kinds of things including cows, pigeons, barbies, and miso soup. I loved using Sketches Pro to draw the photos for the ebook, and I enjoyed writing the short and sweet Haikus. I also appreciated the freedom of writing the free verse poems.   Since I enjoyed the process and had fun with it,  I created high quality work that I was proud of.                                                                                                                                                                                                                         ⬜️In science, we were asked to code a game on scratch that creatively demonstrated our knowledge of atoms. I created a game show and a host character named A-tom. He is my favourite part of this game with his silly (and sometimes offensive) replies to your answers to the trivia questions. I am very familiar with Scratch because I used it a lot when I was younger and I also used it to animate my PLP entrance video last year. I was able to use my scratch skills to help my class mates with building their games and I really enjoyed being a helper and a leader.                                                                                                                                                                                                             ⬜️For Humanities,  Tyler, Madeline and I wrote a musical skit about Chinggis Khan, and his role as a leader. It was so much fun to write and film our little skit, and I think our final project was both hilarious and educational. We worked well together as a group and felt great about our work.

https://www.blog44.ca/cecem/2023/11/30/the-story-of-how-i-got-my-face-stuck-in-a-paintinga-work-in-progress/

https://bpb-ca-c1.wpmucdn.com/blog44.ca/dist/f/986/files/2023/11/RPReplay_Final1700254581.mov

My Life In Poems

Welcome to the A-Tom Trivia Show!

Growth🌱

A few of my projects or assignments didn’t meet my standards and weren’t my best work. I can see from my early projects that I have grown a lot since the start of the year, especially in my ability to do group work and collaborate well with my peers. I felt this was a challenge during our winter exhibition and during our It’s (not) the End of the World Project. I could also work on going deeper into my learning with all my writing including blog posts and novel studies.

Group Work👨‍👩‍👧‍👧

During the Winter Exhibition, I struggled with the teamwork aspects, especially when it came to the distribution of work. I was still getting used to collaborating with a team, and relying on other people to do important work made me nervous. In the end it all worked out, and I think my teamwork skills and my leadership skills grew from working on this project.                                                                                                                                                          The ‘It’s The End of The World as we Know It’ song wasn’t my favourite project for many reasons. The group work was problematic, and the singing was painful, but it was a great way to get to know my classmates. This was because everyone wrote lyrics about their worldview and used specifics that represented themselves as both a student and a person. We all worked together as a group better once we got to know and understand each other better.

I found the first few PLP projects very big and difficult. Now that I’m getting better at the technology and have a few assignments under my belt, it’s getting easier. The projects are still challenging but they don’t feel as impossible anymore.

e-iceberg-and-what-time-is-it/

 

 

Going Deeper and Accepting Feedback 🕳️

It was- and still is – hard for me to do the deep thinking that takes my work from good to amazing. I know I can do it.  It is always easy for me to answer the question in a basic way but it can be harder for me to get into the right mindset to go the extra step for unique, deep thinking. My work improves so much every time I do go that extra step, and I try to make an effort to take it, but it is a challenge.

I love writing, and for my blog posts, or my poems, I wrote about things that have happened to me or around me. I need to push myself to go deeper and be more specific about how it makes me feel, or what I learned, or even how I could do better! I am not sure if I do this consistently with my blog posts, but with my poems, I do think that I took this extra step. I believe that you can see this in my poems because they all turned out so well.

For the rest of the year, I will strive to accept feedback more easily and always revise my work. If I do this, my work will be consistently better, and I will have began a new habit that will benefit me in the long run.

 

Learning Plan🖇️

As I look back at my Learning plan, I can see that I have accomplished many of the growths and skills I wrote about. I have definitely improved on my organization, helping my peers, and learning to use my technology. I will continue to grow in these areas throughout the year, getting better at them and doing them more. I am so happy to see how much I have progressed within these goals, and I know I will continue to do so forever.                                                                                                                                                                        I also mentioned that I needed help with things like organization, encouragement, respect, catching up on work, and I have gotten all of them. I also mentioned I was strong at taking feedback, taking responsibility, participation, ethics, empathy, time management, and teamwork. All of these strengths have been tested this whole year in things like the Exhibition, DI, and more, and my strengths have grown and flourished because of this.

F.A.I.L.🚨*

*irst ttempt n earning

This year, even though I have done a lot of things I am proud of, there are many things I could have done a lot better. On March 2nd, 2024, we had our very first Destination Imagination tournament, and not everything went according to plan. Our pinball machine absolutely failed, our script was way too short and mostly improv, and our pinball machine was basically four pieces of cardboard balancing on some wood. Now? It’s a completely different thing. Honestly it feels like we could write a ‘rags to riches’ story about our pinball machine. My group and I spent many hours in Ella’s garage building a new and improved pinball machine. We created a strong wooden table with many  parts. It has flippers, ramps, bumpers, and even a slingshot launcher. We spray painted it white and decorated it in the theme of Alice in Wonderland.  This machine started as an actual fail and became a perfect example of an F.A.I.L.  I am supremely proud of the amount our group improved from the first to second DI tournament.

The F.A.I.L. acronym changed my mindset from a fixed to a growth mindset and helped me look at our first  DI as a way to learn. I will do my best to continue to use this idea throughout the rest of this school year.

https://www.blog44.ca/cecem/2024/03/15/destination-imagination-what/

 

Overall, my PLP journey has been interesting and challenging. I have already grown so much, and I am excited to see where I will get by the end of the year.

AR Makr and Mary’s goat

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For this Humanities 8 project, we were tasked with making an augmented reality, or A.R. movie that uses storytelling to investigate what sparked global exploration and understand its impact on society.I came up with the story to show how a European/White person’s perspective can and should be shifted by hearing an indigenous person’s perspective. If Mary’s goat hadn’t wandered away into the Indigenous camp, she might not have learned their story. She might have continued to tell the same false story that was told to her.

I wrote a story about a girl named Mary who journeys away from home and learns the Indigenous peoples’ side of a story that she had been told by her family.

I worked with the app Sketches Pro to design the pictures and characters, using different styles, colours, and other aesthetic choices to make my drawings. One of my favourite elements is that the second and fourth drawings both have the exact same base but one shows Indigenous people as evil and inhuman, and one shows them as kind, normal people. I created this contrast by adding different small facial features and details like devil horns and hearts.

Of course, mine and many other peoples’ favourite part of my story is the goat. He is a three-legged goat that was a gift from Marys uncle to her for her 8th birthday. Mary named him ‘Trii’ and we all instantly  fell in love.

We also used the app AR Makr to put together our scenes for the story with Augmented Reality/3D effects. I really like making videos and editing them so I enjoyed making this part of the project and learning how to use a new app. I found the augmented reality part very cool and fun to work with.

There are so many hi-lights of this project. We got pirate packs, and learned about colonization. Throughout our time working on this project I learned many things. I learned more about the history of colonization in Canada and the consequences for all people living during that time and today. (From Smallpox and greed to Bevers and loss of culture)I think it is so interesting to think about what drove people to do things, and the long term effects. I also learned how to use new apps like AR Makr and how technologies like this can be used to tell an impactful story.

I wast able to add in my AR Movie, but I am working on a way to add it in- come back soon to see the finished  product!

 

Destination Imagination- What?

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On March second, 2024, we had our very first Destination Imagination tournament, and not everything went to plan…

So what is Destination Imagination? Destination Imagination, or DI as we like to call it, is a school program where teams are asked to solve a problem or create something according to specific rules and details, and then compete against other teams to win. Points are awarded for aesthetics, creativity and how successful your machine is.

In our Destination Imagination tournament, a lot of things happened, both good and bad. We did great in the Instant challenge, worked great as a team, and just had an overall awesome time! We all did great and helped out the team in our own way.

During our Destination Imagination tournament, many things happened, both expected ad unexpected, and both good and bad. We did really well in the Instant Challenge and I feel that we worked great as a team. We also had an overall awesome time! We all worked hard leading up to the tournament and were proud of how everything turned out. I feel like everyone in our group helped the team in their own way.

Of course, not everything was perfect and we had some issues we should work on. We need to do some more work on our script. We should make it longer, flesh out some details and overall we need to improve it. We also need to be better prepared for our Instant Challenge. We should be more open to everyone’s ideas, and we need to work on our teamwork. I’m proud of winning third place, and even though there were only three teams, it felt good to get an award. 

There were also some things that didn’t go well at all. Our pinball machine, which was the center of the entire project, did not work at all. This could be because we practiced with a smaller and lighter ball, or just because we didn’t trouble shoot enough. We definitely need to fix this very obvious problem before the next part of the tournament.

Overall, I am proud of what we did, even though I know we could have done better, and I look forward to doing better in the next part of the project.

Welcome to the A-Tom Trivia Show!

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Welcome to my GAMESHOW, The A-TOM TRIVIA SHOW! In this project, we were asked to code a game on scratch that creatively demonstrated our knowlage on atoms. I chose to format my Scratch game as a trivia/reality game show.

I crated a character named A-tom, who is the host of our game show, ‘A-tom’s game show’. He is my favourite part of this game with his silly- and sometimes hurtful- replies to your answers to the trivia questions. I created his body with the drawing tools we have in Scratch, like the paintbrush tool, and the point select button. I also made a simple animation of his mouth moving in time with his snarky replies, but crating several costumes of him all with his mouth in a different position, like a stop motion. I recorded sound of me and my friends saying both positive and negative things related to or trivia questions. I then sped them up making them high pitched, and funny. I programmed it so that if you answered correctly, you would hear a nice/positive response and if you were wrong you would get a rude/negative response. 

Another thing that I included in my game is the actual trivia questions. I chose about eight questions that spanned from ‘What year was the idea of an atom created’ to ‘True or False, We are made of 7 Billion Billion Billion atoms’. I think that the questions I chose showed my knowledge of atoms while still being understandable to those who knew a little less.

  I also am proud of the way I helped people over the course of the project. I have some history with scratch, I used to crate things on scratch all the time. I enjoy helping people, and the fact that I can makes me happy. I also helped create a studio will most of our classes’ games after we ran into the problem where our games wouldn’t come up after we searched them in scratch. Now, there is a studio titled ‘PLP8ScratchAtomGames’ that has most of our games inside. This makes them much easier to access and it is nice to see them all together.

If I could change one thing about my game, I would probably add more responses to A-tom. I love all of the things he said, but I have so many ideas of other things I could add. I would have added more, and I still might, but to do that I would have to re-start all of the code that has to do with any sound played in the whole game. I also changed the code so that it should be compatible with mobile devices, or if you do not have a keyboard, witch I think is a good touch.  

Overall, I am really proud of my game, and this is one of my favourite projects this year.  

My Life In Poems

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In this project, we were told to write a collection of poems that represent our worldview. We learned all about different poetry terms, and types,  and answered the question, ‘How Might I Write Poems I Enjoy And Show Who I Am’. I found That I could enjoy writing all of these poems so much more if I wrote them about something that was ensuing or important to me. We ended up writing 10 poems, 7 different kinds of poems, and three haikus, all about things like Cows, Pigeons, Barbies, and Miso Soup.

My favourite poem to write was also the hardest one for me to write, the About Me Poem. We had a less specific criteria, and we had more freedom to write it however we wanted, and it was also supposed to be much longer than any of the other poems ever had to be.

We were also told to add in some sort of media along with our poems, and I really enjoyed drawing things in the app Sketches Pro as my choice of media. I am most proud of either the line drawing of myself I made for the About Me Poem, or the pigeon drawings for my Animal Kingdom Poem. Overall, I really enjoyed this project, even if poems have never been my favourite.

The Iceberg- and What Time is it?

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A few months ago, myself and the rest of the PLP community here at Seycove began preparing for the winter exhibition. In my grade 8 class, we were tasked with building our part of the exhibition around three different periods of time: the renaissance, medieval times and our current time period. 

Iceberg Metaphor

While the end result of this project was of course our first exhibition, we wouldn’t have been able to do it without all building blocks that led up to it. This reminds me of the iceberg metaphor that PLP students are always learning about. This metaphor talks about how most people will only ever see and appreciate the little bit of the iceberg that stays above the water, in this case the exhibition, but so much more of the iceberg lives underwater, and most people never see that part. In our case some of the work that happened underwater was the power play post. 

Power Play

In many ways, this project is just a deeper dive into the power play project. For example, in the power play project, we made a medieval portrait of ourselves, including aspects of worldview from medieval and modern times. We then made another portrait, this time with Renaissance and modern worldview. I also posted a version of the paragraph I made to explain the Renaissance art. Finally, we made another piece of art, this time including 4-5 of our group members, and props we created for the live action version.

Time

This project made me think so much about the concept of time. I enjoyed incorporating different worldviews of time into all the portraits but also I thought about how time affects us now. It’s so crazy to think about how humans invented time and how it’s not really real but also how much it controls our lives. 

Time was a huge part of the day of the exhibition. It affected us when were setting up, and when we were performing in the exhibition itself, it affected us when we were cleaning up, and when we were waiting between rounds. It made us more rushed, or tired, annoyed, excited or nervous or angry. Can you imagine what our lives would look like if time was not something we could rely on? And worry about?

Time was represented in every part of this project. At the very beginning, when we worked on the power play project, I represented time in my Medieval portrait with an analog clock and a clock tower. I chose both of these pieces to represent how the way we perceived time has evolved and changed. Next, in my Renaissance portrait, I used a clock from the Renaissance times to represent time. Back then, people had just began to invent and use the clock. 

A Sundial

Clocks have been evolving for thousands of years, and will probably continue to evolve forever. I cannot even imagine what clocks and time will look like in a thousand years. Maybe we’ll have a clock built into our bodies? Maybe we’ll go back to telling time depending on where the sun is? Maybe we will be time traveling!

The sun dial was invented in the 100’s, and was most likely the first time any kind of clock was invented. In the 520’s, the candle clock was invented, and it was followed by the hour glass in the 1330’s. The weight clock in the 1280’s was the first mechanical clock, and it was invented in Milan Italy. From there, more precise clocks were invented, making time more accessible and reliable everyone.

Everything around us is always changing, from life in high school, to how clocks have changed overtime. We will never know exactly what to expect from the future, but whatever it is, I’m excited.q

 

My Face is in a Painting… Again?

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Here is my Paragraph explaining my Renaissance Art!

Learning about the Renaissance helps me reflect on how lucky we are that we now have the opportunity to learn.

Back in the Renaissance times, we read time in a very different and less specific way. It took a while for people to create the clock like it is now, people used sun dials, water clocks, or even just guessed the time by looking at the sky. Nowadays, you can just pull out your phone and see the exact time, or look at some clock in the room. 

It is so strange to picture life before clocks. I doubt ‘time’ was a completely bizarre idea, but it definitely didn’t control peoples lives like it does now. If you did not know the exact time, you could not arrange plans like we can now, or get in trouble for being late like you can now, because ‘late’ was barely a thing. If someone told you to meet up around sunrise, you could get there anywhere from 3am to 8am, and still not be considered late, especially if you think about how much seasons change how time must have been perceived. 

I showed this idea in my artwork by including a golden clock that I took from a painting called ‘Portrait of a Woman Holding a Clock’.

Another thing I showed in my artwork was the society aspect of worldview. Every type of person went to a church, it united people, and was seen as the most important place in the area. Churches had so much power, and so did the people who ran them. In the renaissance times, people were just beginning to be given power for their knowledge rather than for their religious standing. Even though almost everyone was religious, and went to church regularity, the people leading the church eventually began to loose power.

When education became something people wanted, the people who had knowledge became powerful. The church still had very much power, the Renaissance times was when I think that the dominoes began to fall, slowly taking away the power that the church held. 

I showed this in my artwork by including a wing of an angel, from a painting called ‘The Annunciation’

The last aspect of worldview I want to mention is beliefs. In the Renaissance times, people almost completely believed anything that the church said to them, which included their beliefs about the afterlife. People believed in angels, devils, heaven and hell. The church told people that those were the options, and people believed them- and still do. 

Even though we have learned so much in the years since the Renaissance times, some people see religious beliefs as a sort of fragmented reality, and some people see it as just reality. Now, people do not completely base their lives off of what the church tell them, but the Renaissance times still impacts how we live today. 

To show this idea in my art I used pieces of the painting called ‘The Assumption of the Virgin’.

Everything that happened in the past effects our lives today. Hundreds of years ago, someone created a sundial, and now time controls our lives everywhere we go. People wanted power and knowledge, and now, your social value relies on how much you know. The past dictates everything we do, and everything we know.

Sketches Pro, a Boot Camp

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I think Sketches Pro might be one of my new favourite hobbies. It’s user friendly and I love trying out all the tools. There’s an infinite amount of designs possible with this program. For this project, ‘Having fun with drawing’ we made five different drawings that helped us learn to learn sketches pro. 

Word

The first thing we were tasked with was drawing a word. I chose the word ‘Create’ and I made the word with green block letters, surrounded by little green doodles and lines. Making the word was a good starting point in our bootcamp because not only was it a fun thing to do, but it also showed our teacher what skills we already had. I am really proud of what I made, I like the imperfectness of the blocky letters I drew, the shapes of the letters, and the colours I chose. I think I could work on making the letters a bit easier to read, some people had a bit of trouble reading my word. To make my word, I used the pen-brush tool, and the grid ruler tool.

Shapes

The second thing we did was make 3d shapes with shading. I made two purple spheres and a green pyramid. We made these shapes to learn how to draw 3d shapes, and to begin learning how to shade. Shading your drawing adds so much dimension, and I am really proud of how all three of my shapes turned out. tIn order to make the shapes, I used the pen-brush, the sharpe ruler tool, the paint bucket and opacity tool, and the airbrush tool. My favourite is the circle I made using a sort of negative space to show the shape of the sphere. 

Robot

The next thing I worked on was the shape robot. I named my robot the ‘evil green butler’ and made it with a variety of different shapes and shading. I shaded the right corner of all of the different shapes, and added a purple shadow behind it. To make my robot I used the shape ruler tool, the airbrush tool, the blending tool, and the brush pen tool. I am really proud of my robot, and it might be my favourite thing we made in within this project.

Emoji

Another thing we worked on was making our own emoji. I worked on two emojis, an angry bumble bee and a sad face, but I only ended up finishing the bumble bee. This was the most complex thing I made in this project, and I am proud of how it came together.  I used the fill tool, the shape ruler tool, the marker tool, and the brush pen tool. I really like my emoji that I made, but i think I could have made it a bit less crowded. It is almost hard to look at with all of the contrasting colours I used, the bright yellows and the hard blacks. Maybe I could have used more muted colours or simplified the drawing. Overall I am proud of the emoji i made, and there is not too much I would change.

Logo

The last thing we made was a logo for our imaginary business. My business is a robot workshop. The way it works is you put in orders for us to build a robot of any shape or form, and we ask no questions. Some people use our robots to finish their homework, or play catch, but the majority of our customers use our robots to plot the demise of innocents, and like I said, we ask no questions. The robot on my logo is the ‘evil green butler’ which is the robot I created in the third assignment. I actually created two business and logos, but I liked the second one better. To make my current logo, I used the circle ruler tool, the shapes tool, the lettering tool, the colour fill tool, the airbrush tool, and the blend tool. I like my logo and the only thing I think I would change about it is to try and make the lower sentence follow the bottom of the circle. This is probably my favourite thing that I made in this project.

I really enjoyed this project, It was so much fun to explore sketches pro, and I will definitely continue to use the program and hopefully improve.

The Story of How I got My Face Stuck in a Painting…

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Have you ever seen yourself as a Medieval old lady and then surrounded her with symbols of world view? Well I just did. In this project we read ‘The Book of the Lion’, learned about Chinggis Khan, the Haudenosaunee people and their great law of peace, put together an artwork Choice Chart, and then finally stuck my face on the a painting.

THE BOOK OF THE LION

The first thing we did for this project was read ‘The Book of The Lion’, and fill out role sheets about different parts of the book. I am proud of my hard work on the role sheets, I put a lot of thought into all of them, and made sure everything I did was intentional and made sense to me.

Something I’m not proud of is that it’s still a real challenge for me to answer these PLP questions. It takes me a lot of time to get into the right mood where I can understand the assignment and figure out my thoughts. Hopefully it will continue to get easier with each assignment we do.

To fill out the role sheets, we would read around fifteen chapters at a time, and then answer questions and draw images relating to the piece of writing. My favourite image I created was the collage I made that represented the choice Edmund needed to make at the end of the book. It was also the image I had the hardest time with, because of how many things went into the making of the piece. I drew an image of a boat from the crusades, and in the background, I added three images. One is a photo of medieval Europe, one is a photo of medieval Jerusalem, and one is a photo of question marks, to show the decision Edmund needed to make between the two places.

To be honest, I did not really like the book and it’s not something I would to choose to read right now or recommend to a friend. I know that I am not the only person who thinks this, the story wasn’t captivating for me and I didn’t find the characters appealing or relatable. That being said, I understand why this book was chosen for us to read. The book showed the experience of being a knight in the Medieval times and this was all new to me. I found it interesting and surprising to see Edmund change throughout the book. He went from being an innocent teenager to a scarred knight. Similarly to ‘The Outsiders’, this book shows teenagers in situations I will probably never even encounter. 

I can relate this to the driving question because of how it is easier to relate to individuals one on one.  When we categorize people into large groups, it is harder to relate, and its easier to demonize them because we are not seeing their individuality. This concept is as valid today as it was 500 years ago, Even with air travel, internet, etc. 

CHINGGIS KAHN

The next thing we learned about in this project was different historical leaders, and what made them so powerful and memorable. Tyler, Madeline and I wrote a musical skit about Chinggis Khan, and his role as a leader.

I  am proud of the final product of the skit we made, a funny and historical musical short that we created in under entry minutes, I worked well and hard with Tyler and Madeline, and would love to do it again. 

  Something I am less proud of is our time management. We spent half of our time to write half of a script and ended up trashing it and pretty much improvising the whole skit.

 

To make our skit, we learned about Chinggis Khan and how he grew his Mongolian empire, and created peace.

To make this skit, we almost wrote a script, and then filmed ourselves acting out our version of Chinggis Khan‘s story and edited it in both iMovie and Capcut.

We can learn from this part of the past in many ways, one being how we talked about if someone so fearsome and bloodthirsty could create peace, why can’t we?Even though Chinggis Khan achieved peace through force and fear, after he created peace he also valued equality and merit. He created a society based on accomplishment and capabilities instead of family ties, which was a new concept to people in those days. It is also something people think today. 

Chinggis Khan also enforced the idea of not being ordained by birthright, which is something we believe today. It’s a hard task to compete because of biases people have and the system set up in society that values rich over poor. A merit based society helps the society  flourish, witch is something Chinggis Khan proved in his mongolian society.

Another thing that Chinggis Khan did was create a mammoth colonization system, called Yams. I can connect the Yam system to the internet today because all the internet is is a massive communication system. Communication brings people together, the internet and the Yams are one in the same.

Over all, I loved making a musical skit with my friends, it was definitely my favourite part of this project.

RPReplay_Final1700254581 

 HAUDENOSAUNEE PEOPLE, AND THE GREAT LAW OF PEACE

Another thing we learned about within this project was the Haudenosaunee people, and the great law of peace. We were given the choice to show how the great law of peace affected the Haudenosaunee people today however we wanted, and I chose to make a drawing in one of the apps on my iPad. I am especially proud of my work in this section of the project, because of how much I improved my drawing with the teacher’s feedback, taking it from something I was not very happy with, to something I am very proud of. My original drawing, didn’t make a lot of sense, and it was not my best work.

To do this assignment, I chose to do a drawing. I used sketches pro and drew a picture about how the great law of peace effected the Haudenosaunee people today. When we were learning about the Haudenosaunee people, we were taught about how to convince people to pursue piece, they showed how easily one arrow could snap, but when six were tied together, it was much adder to break. I drew arrows to represent the metaphor,  using traditional Haudenosaunee arrows, and colourful lines to represent the string.

One thing I really enjoyed was drawing and using apps like sketches pro. I have loved experimenting with the apps we were given, and I enjoy this aspect of school. 

We can learn about peace from this assignment, how it is not just an idea, but something we can accomplish if we tried. Peace is something we have to put work into, it doesn’t just happen, its not our neutral state. You need to promote and prioritize peace, and not just wait for someone else to pursue it. 

The other thing that this assignment made me think about was the power of symbols. The Haudenosaunee people had one, we made one, but why? Symbols can be solid or metaphorical, and could be used as a positive or a negative. One could be used to convince people to do something, or to believe in something.

An example of a powerful symbol is a a flag, or even a cross.  Both of these symbols symbolize groups of people, and are something people are proud of. People devote their lives to them, people start wars for them. They are symbols and signals, if you fly a Canadien flag, it could just be mean you are proud to be Canadien, but it could also signify the F**ck Trudeau group. People use the power of symbolism to get people on their cause. 

CHOICE CHART

Another thing we worked on was the artwork Choice Chart I think that I could have worked harder to ask Ms. Willemse about the directions or even just read them more carefully, it took me a while to understand what it was supposed to do, and when I did understand it, it still took me a while to do the chart well.

One thing i enjoyed was learning about medieval art, and the stories behind different art pieces.

To fill out the chart, I searched the internet and the app Google Arts and Culture for a photo, pasted them into the chart, and wrote about them.

It relates to the driving question because of how I compared the medieval worldview shown in the art to how it thought about today. 

In the Medieval times, everything was very hierarchical, and there were very clear lines dividing groups of people. Now, living in a society without such clean lines doesn’t erase patriarchy and hierarchy completely. Now, the lines are blurred, and people can move groups, you are not completely defined by your class. It still does create biases that will determine what privileges you may or may not get.

ART

At the end of the project, we worked on putting ourselves in an existing medieval portrait. I think that I could have worked harder to make the different pieces of art fit together better and more aesthetically. A lot of the pieces look like they were just pasted onto the painting, and I could work harder to make them look better together.

One thing that I really enjoyed in the making of the art was learning how to use the Super Impose X, experimenting with it, and then using it for the art piece.

After adding me into the chosen medieval artwork, I took aspects of all of the pieces from my choice chart, and added them into the art. I then added their modern counterpart right next to them.

One thing I thought about when making my art was how our beliefs in knowledge is always changing. People always think, and always will think that they have the most knowledge, because they did at that time. Generally, people are always gaining knowledge, people 500 years ago could probably never imagine that we would have learned so much more, that there was even more to learn.