Hello Everyone, welcome back to my blog. I have been very inactive on this page over this school year, and that is due to the lack of assigned posts I’ve had. I apologize for the inactivity, and without further ado, let’s get into it.

Recently, in our Humanities endeavours, we’ve covered the topic of Government. In school in the past, we’ve gone into the various types of government and how that has shaped different historical societies, but this year we’ve gone into depth on the Canadian government. We explored the ideas of voter demographics, government structure, and what happens when you vote. We started this by reading The Lord of the Flies to gain an understanding of themes such as human nature, society, civilization, power, and morality. It provided us with valuable insights into human behaviour and societal dynamics. Additionally, its allegorical nature allowed for discussions about broader issues and themes relevant to both the past and present.

Going through this book, gave us some basic knowledge and a very interesting perspective to take with us on our journey through the Canadian government. I learned how to manage my time, reading at least 20 minutes a day to finish the book in time. Additionally, recording all my thoughts, notes and questions in real-time, proved as an effective mode of retaining and being able to discuss topics covered. Showing this through our little “book convo” gave me an insight into how others viewed this text and helped me gain an understanding of new perspectives and ideas that might have not spawned in my thinking.

After this, we moved to the Canadian perspective. Looking at voter demographics to see how few young people are voting. This set the ground for the idea of our project Who Cares, Why Bother? This asks who should be concerned and involved with Canadian politics, and why should they bother. We did this in a very inward fashion, to understand our demographic and where they stand. As it turns out (from our Kahoots), our class didn’t know all that much about Canadian politics, and nobody seemed very fussed about voting. This gave us insight into our target audience for the project and set the basis for the rest of our learning. 

Finally, we moved into groups to make a video on the stucture of canadian parliment. We took our knowledge from lectures vidoes we’d watched to create a video on how the government works in Canada, as well as who fills the positions. To direct this video at our target audiance (young people like ourselves), we made our video in a sort of video-merchal with animations, voice over, and live action sketches. This was key, as taking your target audiance into concideration is one of the most important part to making any form of media. Regardless of how good/egucating our video was (I assure you, it was mighty educating), the feedback from our teachers and peers told us that we where sucessfuly aimed at our target audiance.

This perspective taking skill was crutial to our final product, a 10 minute presentation on why young people should vote. After being told about this product we were to make, the target audiance choice made more sense. We quickly stepped to it, our group bouncing with ideas before instruction had left our instructors voice. We dreamed up concepts like splitting up our video within our presentation (ooh), and utilizing a comedic character to bring some depth and keep our presentation entertaining (ahh). I noticed how all of the groups where firing off ideas right away. I initially thought this might be due to how fresh the previous asignment was in our brains, but in hindsight I think it was because people could think of more things they could pull off to be entertaining to young people in a presentation over a video. This kind of makes sense if you think of young peoples atention spans. We are watching crazy coulorful videos all day, so a fancy animation will not wow anyone. The ability to show that in the backgorund, while having a dapper young man in a shirt and tie presenting you voter statistics might just be enough to grab someone’s attention.

….Continued…