How do I make effective personal design choices? This was the essential question to my first Grade 10 maker project. Making personal design choices involves collaboration, evaluation, self-exploration and the refinement of skills. We started with investigation 1 learning about and creating a personal productivity system. 

Investigation 1

Using management tools we already learned in past projects and combining them with new skills we were going to learn, our goal was to create a new system to help us manage our own projects inside and outside of school. In order to do this we needed to follow these 7 steps: 

1.Introduction: 

– What Is the Purpose of a Productivity System?

2.Using the Right Tool to Get in the Flow: 

-How can I use a Task Manager and Calendar effectively in my Productivity System?

3.Capture: Building Buckets, Capturing Stuff, and Clearing a Backlog

• closing open loops (the stuff circling around in my brain before bedtime)
• 3 buckets: Home bucket, school bucket, and out and about bucket. 

4. Clarify 

• determining the exact meaning of something that came from the capture phase
• Mental not physical stage
• Identify your stuff and determine: Is It Actionable? These are evaluated in terms of does it need  a next action or turned into a project. Is it a Non-Actionable Item? These non actionable items can be classified as Trash, or a checklist, or as “someday” or “maybe”, or reference. 

5.Organize: Process Actionable and Non-Actionable Items

• to physically, visually, or digitally sort and place items of similar meaning into distinct categories and locations. 
• Actionable 
  • Calendar 
  • Things to do 
  • Things project 
• Non-actionable
  • Someday folder in things 
  • To Do Bullet List in Anytime Folder in Things
  • Files in the Right Places

6.Reflect: to review and update the contents of your system to bring it up-to-date with your current reality so that you can make informed and effective choices.

• A Daily Review
• A Weekly Review
• A Weekly Plan

7. Engage: Clear your space to do the Things

• to clearly, fully, and confidently do what you know you should be doing in the moment.
• chill
• relax
• listen to music
• be fully present for a friend, have a conversation with someone new, daydream about someday or maybe lists 
• check your Things. What is in your To Do’s at the moment?
• review your choices:
• Location: where are you? what can you do here?
• Time: what can you do in the time you have?
• Energy: what can you focus on and do with the energy you have?
• make a priority decision:
• what is most important for now?today?

Investigation 2 Research

Investigation two was making the foundation for our final product. Our assignment was to watch TIKTOK! Our end product was to create five Disney TikTok trend videos so for this investigation we had to research Tiktok trends by watching TikTok. I don’t have TikTok and never watch any videos from there so I found this step challenging. Most of the videos I found on TikTok seemed weird and not something I would enjoy creating. I watched all the examples in basecamp and searched up my own ideas and came up with three different examples of what I wanted to do. Then with my friends we came up with two more that I really liked that we would film and hand in together. 

Investigation 3 Planning

This step started a week before Disney world and was about planning the trend videos by using storyboarding skills and making prototypes. Starting with storyboarding, I quickly realized that I needed to do more research, because I was planning on doing a Disney food video but I didn’t know where or what food I wanted to use. I am glad I did more research because if you have ever been to Disney World the food and beverages are very imaginative like blue milk!

After a few days I created the storyboards and some prototype videos. I unfortunately was sick and wasn’t able to create all of the prototype videos but I made enough to get a strong idea of my plan.

Disney was awesome!!! This project was a fun way to express things we experienced at Disney that we want to mention. The video is silly but you still needed to plan it out and think it through in order to make it effective.

Here are the videos I made:

1. Craziest food I had at Disney 
2. After a day at Disney 
3. A day at Disney 
4. Can we skip to the good part?
5. Meet the friend group

We ended up being very inspired by Disney and made a fun bonus video. It imitates “It’s Corn!!” Trend video but is called “It’s PORG!!”.