What’s up everyone…hello and welcome back to this blog! This project was about European exploration, pirates, and the effect it had on the world – past and present. As you may know, every project has a driving question, so for this project, ours was “What was the impact of global exploration?”. Throughout this post, I will be taking you on the journey of this project, as well as telling you where I took risks, where I think I had a First Attempts In Learning (which means to FAIL). I will also be sharing my overall thoughts and opinions on this project and the answer to the driving question. Also – stick around until the end of this post for the super cool final product of this project…

One of the most important Milestones that we did was Milestone 1. This is where we first started learning how to use AR (augmented reality) Makr which is a really cool and simple app where you can make 3D objects and place them in real life (within your iPad of course). In here, we learned about story spines which is basically the “Once upon a time” type of format. So, we had to make a really quick and short AR Makr film about anything that we wanted, using the story spine of course. Mine followed Larry through his death by paint fumes (I talked about Larry and his tragic death in one of my other posts, click here to read more about Larry’s life and death). This Milestone taught me the importance of having a beginning, middle, and end. It also taught me the basic skills of AR Makr (which I would develop later on in this project).

🏴‍☠️ Why is pirating so addictive?

🏴‍☠️ They say once you lose your first hand, you get hooked!

Next, was Milestone 2. This is where we built our knowledge of cause and consequence, which is what our whole (very short one and a half week) project revolved around. Cause and consequence is basically the idea that there is an underlying issue, then there is an immediate cause, then the “event”, whatever that may be, then the immediate consequence, and then the long term effect. All of these things that I just stated connect to the age of exploration because the age of exploration was the main event! And it had a bunch of underlying issues and long term consequences that you can see in the diagram below:

Milestone 3 was the last and most important Milestone that we did. During Milestone 2, we had many lectures in which took a lot of notes that we would use in this Milestone. Anyhow, now you might be wondering what was Milestone 3? Well this Milestone would be the final project!    This is where we came up with our story spine and objects that we would put in our final AR Makr video. I think that by doing the story spine and voicing over in my final video, I showed that I was had developed my speaking skills.

🏴‍☠️ How did the pirate get his Jolly Rodger so cheap?

🏴‍☠️ He bought it on sail

I think the most risky thing that I did was deciding to draw all of the images in Keynote. I had never used Keynote to draw pictures, only to make slideshows. But in the end, my images turned out amazing. This risk definitely paid off!

Our final AR Makr video had to re-tell the story of European exploration. We had to use objects that we had drawn in Keynote (as I talked about above). I had to redo my video multiple times due to location errors (likkkke the shot I got in front of the dumpster that had to be re-done) and some technical issues (like the whole video deleting itself), but overall my final video turned our pretty poggers (if you don’t know what poggers means, click here). I think I definitely showed that I was an empowered learner here because I used AR Makr and Keynote to create a story that not only was informative, but was also aesthetically pleasing.

As I sit here and ponder the answer to the driving question; I find that it is not as straight forward as one might think. The questions, which is “What was the impact of global exploration?” is actually quite complicated. However, my simplified answer is that because of global exploration, America now produces 1/3 of all the worlds food because of the trading that happened between the Europeans and Indigenous peoples. It also forced Europeans to think outside the box and build new technologies like ships that could sail across the vast ocean that they were exploring. They also came up with new developed tools like the sextant, which replaced the astrolabe in order to sail more efficiently.

🏴‍☠️ What did the ocean say to the pirate?

🏴‍☠️ Nothing, it just waved

Overall, I really liked this short, sweet, and informative project! It was fun to get to learn so much at once. Although obtaining all this new information so quickly was a struggle at times, I ended up learning a lot! Did you know that before Christopher Columbus got funding from Queen Isabella of Spain, he got rejected four times from other countries?! I didn’t know that! Did you? Feel free to comment if you did! 

Best wishes,

-Dana

P.S. I know I’ve been keeping you waiting…but below is my final video. Enjoy!

P.P.S. To all the future PLP Grade 8’s doing this project *whispers* there may be a special treat at the end…

Hint: 🍔🏴‍☠️