Jun
23
2019

There was a Blue Sky Yesterday

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Hello there and welcome to my last blog post this year. This post is about blue sky. If you don’t know what we do for blue sky click here to read my last blue sky post.

Just like last spring exhibition we followed the launch cycle to create our projects. The launch cycle is a very useful acronym that stands for; L. (Look, listen, learn) A. (Ask tons of questions) U. (Understand the problem) N. (Navigate ideas) C. (Create a prototype) H. (Highlight and fix). If some of the letters meanings are unclear watch this video to get a better understanding of the cycle.

L – Look, Listen, Learn

This is the brainstorming phase. We were given prompt questions and tasks that would help us decide what to make. In this phase I decided to create a mind map to plot out my ideas. You’ll notice that my idea isn’t on this mind map.

A – Ask Tons Of Questions

In this phase we had to ask questions about our idea. By this time I still hadn’t come up with an idea yet. But I made a timeline so that once I had an idea I already layed out a plan to comeplete it.

U – Understand the Problem

It was right around here that our project pitch forms were due.  Fortunately I had finally come up with an idea. My idea was to make a napkin box for tissue to reduce the amount of tissues that parents had to pick up from their little child. I completed the pitch form and soon after interviewed my grandma for her input on my idea.

N – Navigate Ideas

This phase was about organizing my ideas. The idea of this phase was to help you sort your ideas out if you had a lot. Unfortunately for me I already had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do so this phase is hard to show. I used post it notes to help organize the few different ideas I had.

C – Create a Prototype

We were supposed to do 5 different types of prototypes but my time management was quite off and I had some major things back up. So I didn’t get around to doing this stage until 2 days before the exhibition. So I only had time to create 1 prototype and fix it the next day.

H – Highlight and Fix

This phase was the final one before presenting my product to a live audience. The only major change was that I added ribbon to the box to make sure it stayed closed when you would withdraw napkins from it.

 

Night of

As with all exhibitions we were put into groups based on our products. We had to have a running theme throughout our area that tied in with all of our projects. I was put into the home products section. We attempted to turn the hallway into a house and our project were all supposed to be the different rooms of the house. I say attempt because it did not go good at all. But it wasn’t that bad as we had the best food out of everyone there and our projects mattered more then our room theme.

If you would like to see my launch portfolio, the thing I presented on the night of the exhibition it is right below.

Reflection

It definitely helped this year having 3 exhibitions of experience under my belt as we also had to take charge and lead the gr. 8’s in the setting up of our rooms. I once again need to manage my time better as I should of made more prototypes. All in all I thought this blue sky was the best one yet.

Thats all for now. See you next year!

-Emerson

Jun
21
2019

WW1: The Aquatic Front

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Hello there and welcome to my final humanities post for this year. This will also be my last humanities post for a long while as I am leaving the program. But I will probably come back for gr. 11 if it runs. Regardless I hope you enjoy this post about WW1.

In this unit we made a video about a specific topic in the category of WW1. This project was a lot more open ended then our other video projects. As we could pick the style of video we use. Regardless we still had a lot to do before we even chose our form.

One of those things was the novel study we had to do. To help us get a better understanding of the scale of WW1 we had to read a book.

There were 3 books that we could choose from. Warhorse, Generals die in bed, and Private Peaceful. I chose to read Warhorse as it sound the most appealing to me.

Warhorse is about the main character Joey who is a horse. He gets sold to the army where he goes on a epic journey to find his owner Albert. I can’t say much more without spoiling the book.

To show that we read the book we had to complete a role sheet each week and participate in book chats with other people who read the same novel.

I did not really like that we had to fill out role sheets about the book. I understand why we have to do it but I don’t like it. I would much prefer if we could talk about the book for a while. That would be much more interesting.

After we finished our books we had to do a final book reflection. There were 5 different options. I chose to do a photo essay. Before you go any further my reflection contains spoilers for the book. So you have now been warned.

While we were reading the book the more important part of this unit was taking place. That was the creation of our videos.

Our videos were required to have many things. Some of them were; an intro, music, and works cited. My topic was the War at Sea. I followed 5 main steps to make my video.

First I had to research my topic, the War at Sea. The research would become my base of the video. It also helped me understand what happened at sea during WW1.

 

Then came the video pitch form. Now that we had an idea about our topic and what story we were going to tell we could now pitch our video styles to Ms. Maxwell. I decided to go with the Indy Nidel style video. I picked this video style because I didn’t really like the other options. I hate drawing so an animation was off the table, and I have no idea how to make a stop motion.

 

Next I moved on to writing my screenplay. This stage is very important as this is where I decided what I’m going to say. It was important that I do this stage and not procrastinate it because it made filming the video a lot easier.

 

The last planning stage we did was the storyboard. This was helpful as it helped me plan out what I was going to film and what it would look like.

 

After all that I moved on the most important stages, filming and editing. I made many drafts for this video. I even had to change sets and re-film most of it. Here is my final video that I presented to the students at Cove Cliff.

Now let’s look into how I got there. To film I had to get my mom to help. My first draft was on a different set. Take a look.

As you can see the set was drastically worse and I didn’t have an intro or music. I also didn’t have a lot of images  to break up the face. This resulted in a pretty boring video. Using the feedback I quickly made a 2nd draft.

In this draft I re-filmed the video and added in more images. I did not have time to make an intro or add music for this draft but I put it in for the final one.

I only made 3 versions of this video mainly because of the time crunch I was on. Normally for a video we make at least 3-4 drafts before our final product. However as I said before we also went to Cove Cliff (an elementary school close by) to present our videos to a live audience.

Me at Cove Cliff showing kids my video.

 

Reflection 

This unit was a great way to end our humanities year. I learned lots about Indy nidel style videos and how to film/edit them. If I were to re-do this project I would definitely give myself more time to edit the video and add things like music and an intro earlier so that I can make less drafts. I loved the fact we got to go and present our videos to a live audience as it helped make sure the video was something I was proud of because I had to show it to people I don’t know.

Anyways humanities this year was great. I have one more post to do so stay tuned.

-Emerson

Jun
19
2019

TPOL’S!!

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Hello there welcome to my second ever tPOL. For those of you that don’t know a tPOL is a lot like an mPOL except we reflect on the second half of the year and talk about why we should be allowed to continue PLP. With that said lets get into it.

Humanities

First I am going to talk about humanities. We have done many great units this year and the information that I learned this year will stay with me for the rest of my life.

This year I learned a ton about filming and editing. The most important skill I think I learned was definitely the rule of thirds. I also now have a lot of respect for the film crew behind every movie, tv show, and animated cartoon because now I truly understand how much work it takes to make them.

My favourite humanities project this year was definitely the heritage minute unit that we did about confederation. I really enjoyed this unit for many reasons. The first was the video form. I really enjoy group skits, because my acting is not very strong so I don’t have to be the centre of the film. I much prefer to film and edit videos so I can do that instead. It’s not just that I also really enjoyed the topic we were learning about.

The unit I disliked the most this year was probably the unit about animation. This unit was especially hard for me because I am a very bad artist and hate drawing. So the fact that we had to make a 2-3 minute animation frame by frame was terrible. This is probably my least favourite unit that I’ve done since the start of gr.8. If the video hadn’t been animation based I would of enjoy this unit very much as I like to learn about history and famous people.

Overall I learned a lot about video skills and editing. I enjoyed this year of humanities a lot better then last year. Next year I am looking forward to learning about WW2.

Scimatics

We did many very intriguing things this year in scimatics. But I would like to focus on one part that I really enjoyed.

This year in scimatics I really had fun and learned a lot about biology. My favourite unit in science this year was definitely the clone army. This was the unit where we grew clones of plants and then chopped them up to find mitosis. This unit really stood out to me as I found the cells very interesting to look and learn about.

Maker

Next we have Maker, I would say that I took the most risks in the class compare to any other. Mostly because of DI. In DI this year I took a big step/ was force into it by my group. That step was playing the main character in our performance at provincials. As I already said I dislike acting very much as I feel uncomfortable talking/performing in front of others. So being forced into a major acting role I would say helped me become more comfortable with acting as practice makes perfect.

PGP

This is the course that I struggled the most in this year. Everything I handed in was late and it wasn’t my best work. This course was definitely my weakest subject. I think this is because of my lack of use of some helpful apps such as things. I am going to re-do my time blocking so that it is easier for me to see how much time I have each day. This year of PGP really helped me plan out what I want to do and where I want to be. Next year will be the year where I now start getting to my destination.

Conclusion 

This year I did very well in most subjects. In some however I definitely struggled. I plan to do a lot better in some courses mainly PGP by using the tools that help me better manage my time. From my mpol to now I haven’t really improved but I plan for major changes for next year. This summer will help me a lot as I have much planned. I’m going to start working at a job which will help with my overall awareness of time. I think I am ready for PLP 10 because I have grown a lot. My video skills at the beginning of the year were sub par but they have improved greatly from then. Even though my time management still isn’t great I have a plan to improve it for next year.

Jun
04
2019

PGP? Plus a Time Machine?

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Hello and welcome to one of my last gr.9 blog posts. In this post we will be talking about PGP the new outside of timetable course!

PGP this year was divided up into 3 sections. Goals, productivity and the 7 habits. We met once a month after school to discuss how we were doing with the assignments. Personally I didn’t like this course as it was quite a bit more work, but mainly because it was outside the timetable because who likes staying after school?

We started off the year talking about goal setting. We read this book called What Do You Really Want by Beverly k. Bachel. We had to fill out the forms (worksheets) in the book into a journal and submit them. This was my least favourite part about PGP because I don’t really like to get personal about what I want to do and all that.

We then moved on to the productively section of PGP. In this part we learned a lot about how to be productive and ways to stay on task, as well as given tools to stay on top of work. We learned about time vampires. Those are the people/ apps/ sports/ pretty much anything that distracts you. We also learned about time blocking. Time blocking is a very useful tool that will help a lot if your like me and struggle to get work done on time. To time block just open calendar on your mobile device and put in blocks of time. I block mine by the hour. Then you know when to work, play and when you have time to go out and hang with friends.

What my time blocking looks like

The other part of productivity was a tool that we got, Things. Things is a very useful app. You just add stuff into things and set a due date, then Things will send you reminders and even put it into your calendar. It’s a really great app that I would recommend to anyone. It also has a ton of tutorial videos, so if you get stuck you can just go watch one of them. It’s also compatible with just about anything. iPad, phone, or computer Things will run.

The final unit we did this year in PGP was the 7 habits. The 7 habits are 7 great habits that are almost a necessity. If you develop these habits then you’ll be golden for the rest of your life.

1. Be proactive

2. Begin with the end in mind

3. Put first things first

4. Think win-win

5. Seek first to understand then to be understood

6. Synergize

7. Sharpen the saw

If you want to know more about the 7 habits, feel free to look it up or I suggest reading Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey.

For the end of year project In this course we had to make… a time machine! The idea behind this project was, what was something that you know now that you wish you knew at the start of the year. For me I didn’t really know where I wanted to be at the beginning of the year so I decided to focus on Habit 2.

I ended up making an infographic for my artifact.

That was PGP this year. I hope you enjoyed.

-Emerson

May
27
2019

We Made an Army!?

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Hello everyone and welcome back to another post. Today our focus is on science and the army we created. Now we didn’t create an actual army, we made a clone army! Except the clones weren’t human because that’s illegal and we would of been arrested. We cloned plants!

This project was a little different then most. Our goal was to create clones from another plant, then turn them into slides and try and find mitosis.

For those of you that don’t know mitosis is the process of cells splitting apart. It is how plants and bacteria grow. They duplicate themselves.

Here is a diagram on the stages of mitosis

As for all scimatics posts here’s my mind map

We did three main things in this unit. The first was making clone set one. To do this we went outside and dug up dandelion roots. We then planted them in cups and let them grow. While they were growing we planted our second clones.

The second clones could be any plant we wanted. The only restriction was that it had to grow within 1-2 weeks. Caleb my partner and I decided to clone garlic. The third major thing we did was lean how to make slides.

The slides are the things you put under the microscope to look at. It’s actually a pretty long process to make slides.

Our goal was to find mitosis in the slides of our clones. Unfortunately Caleb and I were unable to find mitosis in our dandelion clones. Our garlic on the other hand was a whole different story.

It had been about 2 weeks since we planted the garlic and they had grown a lot. The shortest was about 10 Cm tall and the largest, over 13!

We thought it was going to be easy to find mitosis. Boy were we ever wrong. We made over 5 slides trying to find mitosis in the garlic. After about a week of trying to find mitosis I was getting fed up. On the 6th and final try we finally found mitosis and boy was it a lot.

As you can see we found all the stages of mitosis almost instantly and it felt so good to finally find something.

That’s a look into what we do in scimatics hope you enjoyed.

-Emerson

This is for Mr. Gross our teacher, we have to put in 4 curricular competencies.

1. Collaboratively and individually plan, select, and use appropriate investigation methods, including field work and lab experiments, to collect reliable data. This was shown because if we didn’t do this our clones most likely wouldn’t have sprouted.

2. Formulate physical or mental theoretical models to describe a phenomenon. We showed this by creating a clear chart on the different stages of mitosis.

3. Select and use appropriate equipment, including digital technologies, to systematically and accurately collect and record data. This was shown because we were successfully able to create microscope slides by ourselves.

4. Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches. We showed this because Caleb and I worked really well together and collaborated well.

May
08
2019

A Minute of Canadian History

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Canada! A country that was only founded 152 years ago but already has such a rich history. In this project we had to create our own history minutes in groups of four. The time period for our videos was anything between 1800s and WW1. We were divided into 5 groups of four. Each group had a different topic that they had to focus on. My group consisted of Kiera, Taylor, and Luciano. Our topic was the Fur trade. We decided to focus on the voyageurs of Canada. Here was our end product.

Now we go though the process of getting an idea made into a video.

The Process 

Obviously the Fur Trade is a huge topic and narrowing it down can be a difficult challenge. One of the big rules for this project was that you could make your minute on a topic that had already been done. Fortunately Historica Canada (the company that makes history minutes) had not done anything about the fur trade so for us the door was open.

After a lot of research around what significant events happened during our time period after much debating we decided on the voyageurs of the fur trade. For those of you that don’t know the voyageurs were a group of elite First Nations men payed to move furs across Ontario and Quebec’s rivers.

We then plan out our video using a storyboard. After that we turned to the calendar to figure out a day that we could all film.

Then we went on the the filming stage. We ran into quite a few challenges while filming as it was very hard to make sure there were no houses or anything human built in the background. We also only had just over 2 hours to film everything as some people in our group had to go.

We then moved on to my favourite part of video making, the editing! I really enjoy editing because it’s all about precision. If one clip is a tenth of a second to long it could have drastic impact on the film and make it look very unprofessional.

Once I had put our clips together our first draft of our video was due.

As you can see the first draft was pretty solid but there was still quite a bit to change and fix for our second draft.

Here is our second draft. Some of the things we change were: we re-filmed all of Kiera and Taylor’s talking scenes as they were out of focus. We also changed transitions and extended/ cut a bunch of clips. We also add another scene.

This is our third and pretty much final video. For this draft we add music and I changed the font of the subtitles.

Here is our final video. It is the one featured at the beginning of this post. From the third draft we change the volume of the audio in different places. We also added a black screen at the beginning to add more effect. Also an outro at the end to tie it all together with the other videos.

After we made the video we then sent it to Historica Canada the company that create history minutes. We recently got feedback from Ryan Barnett and Joannne Archibald, who are important people at Historica. Here was their feedback.

 

Apr
25
2019

Matter Cycles Matter

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Matter cycles are important to our survival. Without them life as we know it would cease to exist. Welcome back to another one of my post. Today we talk about the importance of the matter cycles and peril that they face.

There are four main matter cycles. Nitrogen, phosphorus, water and carbon. Each one is very important in there own way. If one was to cease to exist the other cycles would not be able the function properly and would cease to exist as well.

In this project we had to pick a matter cycle then identify a human caused impact that negatively effect said cycle and then find a way to fix it. It didn’t have to be 100% realistic as it’s gr.9 science class. We aren’t expected to solve the worlds problems so young.

My partner Jordyn and I picked the water cycle. We descided to base our project around the negative human effects on groundwater.

Ground water is the water in the ground. In dry places like California and Nevada they use a lot of ground water which isn’t good for the water cycle as it upsets the water table.

Here is a video of our presentation.

Curricular Competencies 

1. Make observations aimed at identifying their own questions including increasingly complex ones, about the natural world. We showed this by identifying multiple negative influences on the water cycle.

2. Contribute to finding solutions to problems at a local and/or global level though inquiry. This was shown in our presentation because our idea was original and was a serious attempt to address the problem.

3. Communicate scientific ideas, claims, information, and perhaps a suggested course of action, for a specific purpose and audience, constructing evidence-based arguments and using appropriate scientific language, conventions, and representations. We showed this by making a physical model that was crafted with precision and detail.

4. Evaluate the validity and limitations of a model or analogy in relation to the phenomenon modelled. This was shown when we addressed the limitations and unknown/know consequences and impacts from this idea.

Apr
20
2019

Time to DI again

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Hi again how you doing? Welcome back to the sequel of DI. This post is mainly a reflection of what we did and what we could of done better. If you want to read more about what our challenge was and how we decided to solve it then go check out my regionals post here.

Now that your caught up on what was going on let’s get into it. We shall start with how we improved our performance.

For provincials Nik could not attend as he was away at a golfing tournament. We had to change roles, my character (Ryan) was removed from the play and I had to play Nik’s role as Connor. We also decided that Taylor was to be the person that placed the weights on the structure.

Here is the video from our provincial performance. Below that is our performance at regionals.

As you can see there were some drastic changes (for better or worse). Somehow we still managed to get second out of 4 teams and beat one of the teams that beat us at regionals.

Now we move on to the fun part where I explain what we changed, how well I thought my team and I did in general, and what I was feeling on the day of.

Between regionals and provincial there is about 4 week for you to change and improve your solution but most years spring break falls in between regionals and provincials. Due to scheduling difficulties my group and I were unable to meet up during spring break leaving us with one week before the break and one week after.  So instead of 4 weeks to fix our solution we had 2.

In the week before the break we spent most of our classes making these things called burn charts. The idea of the chart was for it to show the progress you made on each part of your challenge that you want to fix. After each team meeting you would lower the scale effectively “burning” the chart down. You would know when you were done when the chart was burned all the way down.

Personally I did not like the burn charts. I thought they were a great idea and they worked. My problem with them was when the teachers introduced them to us. I think they would have been just as effective if not more if the teachers had shown us these when we were building our original solution (before regionals). I thought that for where we were and the tight deadline we were on they did more harm then good as we had to use 1-1.5 classes making these charts, when we could of been working on our challenge solution.

Now we move on to the day of and more technical aspects.

As I said before I had to play Nik’s part in the performance as he was unable to attend due to a golf tournament. So I had to fill in for him. I was very uncomfortable about playing Nik’s role as I am not a good/confident actor. It also didn’t work in out in other areas like the weight placement on the structure. Our structure was designed differently from the last, one of the columns holding the structure up was a lot because of this if not placed correctly the pressure board would tip causing our structure to be DQ and us not being able to continue placing weights on the structure. Guess what the pressure board tipped so we lost out on a lot of points.

As you can see in this helpful table the difference in our scores from regionals to provincials. We improved in most categories which was great!

Reflection 

This year in DI I enjoyed it a lot more then last. There are many reasons for this first is because we got to pick our challenge. I liked this a lot better as you have more of a say in what challenge interested you. Another reason is because we had some say in who was in our group as there are some people in the class that I don’t work very well with. Also this is our second year doing it so we just have more experience about what works and what doesn’t.

Some things I should change for next year are:

We should go watch other groups that are competing in our challenge. If I had watch other groups I would probably have found a better solution to triggering our special effect as that was one of the weak points in our performance.

Communicate more with the group because there were a couple times where we realized that the person that need to know the information the most wasn’t present due to us not communicating well.

Well that is the end of this post I hope you enjoyed year 2 of DI. I only have 1 year left. Till next time

-Emerson

Mar
29
2019

Time to DI

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It’s that time of the year again. The time when all PLP student stretch their creativity to the limit. Yes ladies and gentlemen it’s time for DI! If you haven’t been reading my post for a long time you can go check out my past DI posts here and here.

This year the challenge masters of DI had brewed up some cool challenges. From building a drone to acting as ancient coin heads, DI this year truly had it all.

However this year had a twist. Instead of getting group by the challenge we wanted to do. We were put into groups first and decided our challenge after. My group this year is Taylor, Anika, Nik, and Kiera. The challenge we chose was Engineering: Monster Effects.

To get an idea of what our challenge had to include watch the video below.

So we got right to work. Kiera was in charge of the story, Nik did the backdrop, Anika built the structure, Taylor made props, and I was in charge of the special effect. As the weeks ticked by things came together nicely.

Actually that’s a lie, we were scrambling to get everything done on time. But eventually we got it done.

Our performance at regionals was well, a train wreck. So many things went wrong that I can’t name them all but in short we know what to fix for provincials.

Anyways here’s our performance from regionals.

We have provincials is about a week so you’ll be able to read another post about DI real soon so stay tune.

-Em

Mar
22
2019

Hockeynomials

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Welcome back to my amazing blog. Today for you, I have a math post about polynomials.

Your probably asking yourself, what is a polynomial? Well all that and more will be answered in this post.

This unit the project was to create something that can be expressed using an equation which features a polynomial. A polynomial is an equation made up of terms. A term is a number, variable or number and a variable. Here is an example of a polynomial.

But as you know for math and science unit we have a mind map that we have to do here is what I knew before and what I knew after.

My partner was Aedan and we decided to do our project based around hockey as we both enjoy the sport. For our project we decided to make an equation/ equations about how much a hockey player makes after tax. We used Elias Pettersson as an example.

As you can see hackney players still make money just not as much as everyone thinks.

Curricular competencies 

As for all science and math post we also have to list competencies that we thought were shown in our project.

1. Connect mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas and personal interests. We showed this in our project by making the main idea about hockey, as me and Aedan both enjoy the sport.

2. Visualize to explore mathematical concepts. This was shown in our project with the equation and just the unit in general as there were some questions that involved blocks.

3. Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms. This was in our project because we had the letters(variables) be symbols for what they represented.

4. Communicate mathematical thinking in many ways. We showed this in our project as we correctly used the right vocabulary during our presentation.

So that’s all for this post I hope you enjoyed 👋