The annual tulip festival a beautiful show of affection between two former British colonies. Every year in may tulips are sent from the Netherlands to Canada. In 2016 over one million tulips were on display in the Canadian Capital. The tulip is the Netherlands national flower. This demonstration is to show appreciation for Canadians role in liberating the Netherlands during the Second World War.

Our class was asked to research a topic about WW2 that we looked into during class and create an inquiry question. Here is my inquiry question- Was there a long lastin
g change in relations between te average civilian of the Netherlands and Canada and is their still a cherished relationship today?

The relationship between Canada an the Netherlands affect the average Canadian in some way. Today there is about one million people of Dutch decent who live in Canada. One being my teacher, but Ms. Willemse is the odd man out when it comes to Dutch occupations. The Dutch have brought many of their expertise to Canada ecspecially in agricultural. The Dutch and Canadians also have an exceptionally strong military alliance. They buy and sell many military equipment for example the Netherlands sold Canada 100 Leopard tanks. Canada and Netherlands also fought together in Afghanistan.

Canada and the Netherlands are both founding members of NATO and many other peacekeeping treaties.

The two countries also have strong trade realations. The Netherlands is the 8th largest destination for Canadian exports.

Both Canada and the Netherlands promote studying and working in the other country. They do this by offering special visas that make it easy to study and find work. This demonstrates respect for each other’s culture and practices because they hope those who studied and worked abroad bring their knowledge back to their country.

In some way shape or form most Canadians are effected by the relationship with the Netherlands. This realtion may be culturally, business or military and is appreciated by most Canadians as we help each other become wealthier, safer and happier countries. So to answer my inquiry question there is a cherished relationship between Canadians and Dutch wether we realize it or not.

We are moving forward with world history in class and we have just done World War 1 so what’s next? World War 2 of course. We just had one horrible and costly war so let’s have another one. To research World War 1  we created a journal entry to delve deeper into the life of a soldier. For World War 2 we are doing the same thing.

I had to choose a soldier from Canada. With the help of this website I could easily find a soldier. The website also provided a lot of detailed primary sources of wartime documentation.

The soldier I choose was Beazley Vincent Williams. I will show you my journal entry then explain my descions I made to configure my entry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were few things I found in the documentation that I used to structure my entry.

First I found that one of his passions was reading.

 

Second I saw he was religious.

 

 

Thrid I discovered his occupation.

 

Finally I found that he had a wife and a child at the time of his death.

 

 

In my journal entry I tried to portray the thoughts of a religious soldier struggling with the evil actions of Hitler. I refer to Hitler as the devil and the world he created  as hell. I also demonstrate the destruction of France by saying its other worldly and painting the picture of the destruction of towns.

The biggest difference I found between the life of a soldier in  World War 1 and 2 is the technology and the hatred of different ideologies. Communism, Fascism and Capitalism are all so vastly different I could see why it was so hard to see eye to eye with the enemy. These ideological differences allowed hate to spread like wildfire between the different alliances. The best way to describe the role of Ideology in World War 2 is that it played the same role religion played in other wars.

 

I have been assigned to develop an inquiry question on the topic of the 1920s in Canada or the Great Depression. I was thinking about the most interesting things about what we have learned. By far the most action packed event was the day or two after the stock market crash. Descriptions of people losing everything in the market and some people in so much distress they committed suicide. We also read a short story by Sinclair Ross called The Lamp at Noon and the did a great job of representing what the life of the average Canadian was like during the depression. So I concluded it would be an interesting project to write a short story of the stock market crash. My inquiry question was : What was it like for those who were rich before the depression and whats was the diffrence between the rich and poor? Here is my short story about James Riordan a real rich person who was affected by the stock market crash.

Continue reading →

Conscription is Not Fair! This line still rings in my head as I am writing this two week after the exhibition. Why is conscription not fair? Well this is the question my group answered and portrayed at this immersive flight exhibition. Our assignment was to create an immersive walk through experience with the topic of conscription in Canada during 1917. The conscription forced men in Canada to go to war if they could fight, even against their will. This created some problems though as many Canadians didn’t want to fight in the war especially the French Canadians. The French Canadians didn’t feel French or British but Québécois. The Québécois felt they had nothing to do with the war as they didn’t feel connected to France or England leading them to prominent protests. The French protest is what we made the bread and butter of our experience as it was easy to represent and gave a little pop to our project. We used the protest as a climax to our story and built everything else around that.

First Station

First we had Matthew our Canadian sergeant and our two Québécois engage in some heated banter. We made sure we established the major point that no one wanted join the war because it was dangerous and that the Québécois really didn’t want to join the war and all they had to do was say no.

Second Station

Second we had my part which was a political speech which demonstrated the unrest within the Québécois people as Borden made enlistment mandatory. This lead to a semi engaged protesters protesting against conscription.

Next we had Anatolia describe the roles women had in this debacle and show how Borden leveraged the new found women vote to get conscription past.

 

 

Our final piece of our emersive experience ended where it started with Matthew getting people to join the war and now with conscription passed the people had no choice but to join the war. But once again Matthew is foiled by the sly Québécois as Cashel and Zak explain the large loop hole that allowed around 80% of men to be exempt of the war because of occupation or religious belief.

 

Overall I think our exhibition went well as we were able to tell the not so interesting story of conscription in a more interesting way. Our group was able to keep the audience engaged and having both Cashel and Zak as narrators/tour guides really helped keep the story as one piece instead individual sections. We could of improved on our scenery a bit, but other than that everything went as well or better than I thought.

Hanford Washington. You might be saying “Where the hell is that?”.
Well it’s in the very bottom right of Washington, away from everything.
Why am I talking about Hanford you might ask, well that’s were plutonium was made for 60 000 nuclear weapons.

Currently we are studying WWI and WWII so this was a perfect field trip to enhance our learning.
Our class took a trip to Hanford but we took a few stops along the way. We drove through Washington, to Portland, Oregon, then went back up to Hanford, Washington. This trip was an awesome experience. All the Flight trips give you a great opportunity to learn hands on.

We saw not just one but two nuclear reactors, the Oregon and Washington environment, and the once great Hanford nuclear complex that is nothing more than museum now. This trip was an awesome experience to stand in the foot steps of history.

 

Hanford Washington was one of three major facilities of the Manhattan Project the other two being Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. Hanford was developed to create plutonium. To create plutonium you need a reactor and our class went to that first full scale reactor to produce plutonium. I went and stood at the B Reactor the forefront of science at the time. It was a place that changed the world forever, and I was standing there looking at Enrico Fermi’s and America’s Reactor that created the plutonium for one of the bombs that ended WWII.

I didn’t just go to the B-Reactor and soak in all this information and keep it for myself. My group members and I have created a video on 5 topics that tell the story of the B-Reactor. Our video is on the topics of the science behind the reactor. My section focuses on the physical reactor itself. I talk about the massive magnitude of the reactor and try to explain some the physics behind the reactor. My 4 other group members were Nash, Maria, Cash and Tom you can read about their learning experience on their blogs.

This project was an improvement on previous documentaries I have done, but there could of been a lot more improvements. For this video we were able to get a lot of good footage of the reactor in the limited time and restrictions. All said there was some flaws in the filming. A lot of clips were to specific. What we should of gotten is just more general images that we could use for any scene instead of trying to get the perfect shot. Our project would of been better off if we took big panning shots of the reactor, the cooling system, and the outside of the building. It’s really hard to plan out what exactly you are going to say before the trip, because you don’t know what you are going to see exactly. Some positives of our footage was the interviews of the experts. We got them to answer a lot of questions so we had a lot of footage to choose from. I tried to encourage the guides to say things I already knew the answers to so I could get some specific sound bites, but it didn’t work out as well as I would of liked it. Next time I will develop my question keeping this in mind. Without further a due my groups video.

(Video)

Both the project and field trip were chock-full of learning opportunities. I learned so much about the Manhattan Project, Government Power and the narrative of atomic science that changed life forever.

 

Two months, seventy-nine days, sun and fun gone in a flash. I will give you a peek into my joyous summer. We start with a 10 hour drive from my home to peaceful Prince George with me and my cousin doing cabin things.

This trip was highlighted by the creation of a six foot crossbow. Yes a six foot crossbow! To create the machine we used an industrial rubber band as my power. We used 2×4’s to create the cross and drilled it all together with screws. The most tricky part of creation was the launch mechanism which we ended up using a bent nail to catch the string. Which we then spun around to release the string and fire the machine.

img_0010

We did multiple attempts trying to launch the arrow as far as possible.

img_0003

img_0009

We where able to get it to fire to around the yellow slide.

Had some fun with it too and tried to launch a golf ball. I had the idea because my grandfathers good friend would hit golf balls off the deck almost across the lake. His name was Bryan so that’s who I named the machine after.

img_0004

First attempt was a major fail but, we improved our design.

img_0012

Our project turned out well but, this wasn’t a problem free creation. We had a rubber band break on me so we had to use different size rubber bands which made the arrow fire slightly to the left. We hope to improve on my creation next year by buying the same size rubber bands and making the entire thing bigger. 10ft?Also We need to enhance the arrow, it was light so it lost velocity quickly I will need to add a metal tip to the arrow next year.

Now this was just a peek into the keyhole of my summer where I also played basketball went to L.A, Hornby Island and Thetis Island. My summer is now over but I didn’t regret one moment.

First I will say this was an awesome school year. PLP is one of the many things that have made this an awesome year for me. Now onto my SLC. For this conference I will show you two pieces or work. One I am proud of that shows effort and growth and one that I could of done better on.

Alright let’s start with bad news something I could of improved on. I had a lot of options when choosing this one. Almost everyone of my projects I could of improved in some way. I ended up going with my LBS about the Selma bridge. This was not best work for multiple reasons but I have learned from mistakes and will improve on them in the future. My first problem was my plan, unlike my other LBS I really winged this one. While I was in Selma all I knew was I was going to do something on the bridge. So I didn’t have an image of what I wanted the video to look like. I didn’t have the background information on the bridge either so I didn’t know what parts were interesting so I could film certain things or ask certain questions that would enhance my video. I will definitely try to avoid that situation again by being more prepared so I can act on my feet armed with my knowledge. This was due to a lack of effort which would of been easily avoidable. It is shame as well because I was able to get some great clips but didn’t do enough of the little things to make this project great. From now on I will try to be more prepared when I enter a new environment so I can get the full learning outcome and experience.

 

 

LBS A Name Worth Keeping

 

 

Now let’s Move onto the good news a piece of work that I am proud of. This is a little bit of recency bias, but I went with my blue sky project, the Basketball Moon Boots. I am proud of this project not because of my final product but of how much I learned during the creation of it. I acquired new skills and information working with actually products such as silicon and making molds. I also learned about the commitment it takes to make something new even if it’s a variation of something else. This project took 20+ hours and I ended up with a really big silicon shoe. That silicon shoe was nothing to laugh at though. It worked but could’ve used some improvements for sure. Also working with Nash, Roger and Warren made this experience really enjoyable. That is one of the reason’s why it turned out pretty well is because I really enjoyed working on this project.

Blue Sky: Basketball Moon Boot

 

Now it’s time to talk about my goals. Ooops! It seems I didn’t make any goals last SLCs so here I will appease you with one of my personal goals. Well I have cut down on wasting a lot of time which has been a goal of mine. I have cut out video media consumption which has been a really positive for me. NO youtube, netflix or video games unless it is for school. This has given me more time to work on my school projects and basketball. That is one of the reasons I think I have had a successful 2nd half of the year.

That is the conclusion of my SLC and a great year in PLP and school. I would like to thank  Ms. Willemse, Mr. Hughes, my parents and my brother for helping me learn and enjoy this year so much.

 

 

My Blue Sky Design Project

Ok my problem is near and dear to my heart. The problem is I don’t want to ruin the bottom of my  nice basketball shoes by walking outside. Many other basketball players share the same problem. The current solution to this problem is taking off your shoes and wearing slippers. This gets a little annoying sometimes when you forgot your water bottle in the car.  You already have your ball shoes on and you don’t want to untie your shoes grab your water bottle come back in the gym and tie them up again. My solution to this problem is the basketball moon boot. Keep your basketball shoes on step into the moon boot and make your way out the car. Once you grab your bottle walk back in the gym take of the moon boots and you don’t have to untie your shoes.

How did I make it? Well first I have to introduce you to Warren my mentor for this project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z69uCI06th0

Warren was an awesome mentor. He helped me understand what I could and couldn’t do with the materials I had. Warren taught me how to use many of the tools and products I would us to construct my boot. Warren also suggested solutions to problem’s I would face during my design process.

To create my Moon Boot.

I cut a shoe in half.

Made a box for my plaster mold.

Mixed the Plaster.

Submersed the bottom of the shoe in plaster Paris.

Cut the plaster out an inch around to make the plaster replica of the moon boot.

Sand it down to make it look nice.

Suspended the plaster moon boot over 24 hour set silicon to make a mold.

Next I used the mold to make the actually moon boot which I made of silicon as well and that was my final product.

My product worked ok but I had to use Velcro to keep it on. It would be better if it was just a friction fit on the shoe. If I were to make a second prototype I would make the moon boot smaller so it fit on the shoe tight so I wouldn’t have to use Velcro to keep it on.

I learned a lot while completing this project. I learned about a silicon molds and construction of molds. This was an awesome experience one of the best I have had school related as everything was new to me so I was learning every moment.

I have learned that the name of the Edmund Pettus Bridge is a lot more than just a name. It has such a significant meaning to many people. It demonstrates that people have the ability to change their mindsets and the Edmund Pettus Bridge reminds people of that every day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrM4BUi4n5w

               That idea of the name Edmund Pettus standing as reminder is interesting and important to me. The idea to change the name of the bridge isn’t the right thing to do. Just like the people who walked across the bridge on the marches I don’t think changing the name to something new and political correct is better. I believe that’s nicks and scratches gives something more value. That’s why if you give the Edmund Pettus bridge a new name it takes away some of those nicks and scratches and it loses its meaning, value and story. Through my investigation behind the name of the Edmund Pettus bridge I gained new perspective of the importance of bad history. We need not to change history by putting a sliver lining around it. We need to keep it as a reminder of what could happen if we act incorrectly. I gained a valuable life lesson from this project which is quite rare for a school project.

 

While I was on the southern experience trip I was fortunate enough to indulge in Nashville Hot Chicken. Ms. Willemse, Nash, Jackson and Spencer joined me on this chicken extravaganza to Hattie B’s. When I arrived at Hattie B’s I loved chicken by the time I left it turned into a more love hate relationship. This change in attitude stemmed from how hot the Shut the Cluck Up Chicken was. It burned me inside and out, forehead, lips, tongue and stomach. Once I got passed the heat I realized how delicious the was chicken. I couldn’t eat another piece of chicken once I left Hattie B’s but I sure enjoyed the one’s I ate. Hattie B’s gave me an extra spicy taste of Nashville.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kVv6HelfA4

 

I thought my LBS turned out well. It was easy to create because I filmed a bunch of great video clips. Other then learning about Nashville hot chicken I learned the valuable lesson that having the right resources makes things 10x easier to create a video or a project. From now own I will try to make things easier on myself be gathering the right video clips and not be hesitant about filming when the opportunity arrives. Instead of creating video in post production which is a lot harder.