reflection

Laser laws project

faiths Science , , , ,

 

How can you test the Pythagorean theorem and the laws of reflection? This is the question that drives this whole project. This project is called laser laws, and in this project we have been learning about the Pythagorean theorem A2 + B2 = C2 and about the laws of reflection. All of this information was then used when we went into groups to design and build a laser display to prove the Pythagorean theorem and the laws of reflection.

Display photos⬇️  

Mind map 

 

Curricular competency’s

Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest. 

I demonstrated this curricular competency by I using all class time efficiently. When I worked with a group and even when I worked alone. I used all class time efficiently in both scimatics and in LAC. I especially used our class time well when my group and I were creating  the star shaped laser model. This demonstrated my curiosity about the scientific topic, the laws of reflection and the mathematical topic, the Pythagorean theorem. 

Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms

This was the curricular competency that I did the best at. To complete this competency my group and I had to measure all the angles of our laser display to make sure that we had at least one right triangle. To know that the triangles in the star were a right triangle we used the Pythagorean theorem(A2 + B2 =C2). We also labeled all of the other triangles in the star as well. Next we put all of these  measurements on paper so we could accurately know were to put the mirrors in order to create the best star with the most right angles. Over all we found 6 right angles in our laser star. 

photos of the star⬇️  

Applying and innovating: Co-operatively design projects

I showed this competency when my group and I accurately planned, labeled, measured, and  built a star shaped laser. I also showed this competency when all group members contributed equally towards planing and building our project. We especially work hard when we built the final laser model. All of these things together demonstrates this curricular competency on applying and innovating.

So to answer the driving question, how can you test the Pythagorean theorem and the laws of reflection? You can test it by making a laser display. Not only do you need to know the laws of reflection to properly calculate where the laser is going to go but you also use the Pythagorean theorem to help calculate the triangles in the shape. Over all this was a very interesting project. 

Final reflection on medium is the message project

faiths Humanities ,

 

This project was all about advertisements and what they mean.  What you see above this is our final project our DCM ad. Myself and the other learners have been working really hard on creating this ad but we can talk about that later right now i am going to tell you about our driving question.

 Our driving question is “How does what we hear read and see effect us”, this is the question all of the PLP 8 learners have been trying to answer for the whole project, and I think I have an idea of the answer.  I think it can influence us in many many different ways. One example is that it can change our opinion on things, like if you see a celebrity saying that a brand is bad and before you watched that ad you might’ve thought it was great but hearing somebody big and powerful who you trust saying it’s bad might make you think they’re right. What we hear see and read can influence us also by changing the amount of stuff that we buy they can make a spend much more money by making products seem more appealing. They can also change how we are as a person by changing will be surround ourselves with. 

now how did i get to that conclusion, well i got to it by the many steps that we did in this project and I am going to tell you about a few of them now. 

Milestone 1 this is the milestone that got it all started without it i wouldn’t be able to tell the message of an ad or find the target audience very well. In this milestone we had to write a paragraph saying what the message and target audience was of an advertisement called welcome home. 

The next important part of the project was a worksheet to have us practised finding the message of an ad. This was the advertising survey. This helped me understand how to find the message in an advertisement. 

The next very important part of this project is milestone 4 the team launch journal. 

This journal we’ve been working on for the whole project.  It was the one we worked with in our advertisement group when we were thinking and creating our advertisement drafts. This was part of the project where my group had difficulties working as a team because we all have different opinions and it was hard to listen to other peoples’. I think this was a very important part  because it was one of the first times i work in a group in grade 8. I have not gotten a mark on this yet.

Next was milestone 6 the most important part of the project it was our final team advertisement. My group had to make an advertisement for Deep Cove Music and we finish just a few days ago. This was probably my favourite part of the project I loved creating the different advertisement drafts, you can see a couple of my individual and group draft below.  Without this advertisement I wouldn’t fully understand how much work goes into creating one and how we must think about the target audience. 

Here are some of my individual and group drafts. 

Individual drafts

Group drafts

Those are all the steps that most helped me to answer the driving question. I enjoyed this project and I love learning about media, message and how to answer the driving question.

I hope to do another project soon.

The medium is the message project reflection

faiths Humanities , , ,

This project was all about advertisements and media. The big question we are trying to answer is how does the things we see, hear, and read influence us. And even though we haven’t really got to fully answer that question we have done many other things. To start we did the launch activities but sadly i was away the first three days of this  project so i can’t really tell you what happened though i know for a fact that they did some similar thing that we did on the last project for example they put what they needed to know on  sticky notes and what they already knew on different sticky notes just like what we did on the last project. 

The 1 milestone I also away for though i still did it, only a few days later.  For this milestone we had to write a paragraph about an apple advertisement called Welcome Home.  For this paragraph i had to describe what the message was and how they got that across along with who it was for. I believe I did well on this one.  I earned a sun emoji. I enjoyed watching the advertisement.

The next main activity was Milestone 2. For this milestone, we wrote another paragraph, but this time it was on a historical piece of media. In this paragraph we had to answer the five key questions along with explaining what I thought the message was, who the target audience was, and who made the advertisement. I also earned a sun emoji on it.  I wish I had written down the five answers because I voice recorded my answers. Because of this the teachers could not see it and thought I did not do it! At the same time, voice recording saves me a lot of time.  Now I know how to make it so the teachers can see it.

The last milestone that we have done so far is Milestone 3. In this milestone we also had to choose a piece of historical media.  This time the piece of media had to be an advertisement. In order to write a paragraph on this advertisement we had to learn about the techniques and appeals that people use when they make advertisements. We did that in class. In our paragraph we needed to write about two to three techniques and appeals that the ad uses to catch people’s attention.

All of these milestones were leading towards the end product which was creating an advertisement for a Deep Cove Business. My group chose DCM as our business to do the ad on. In order to be able to create an ad fro them we had to do an interview with them. This is where we ran into our first problem!!

DCM did not answer our calls.  The person we needed to talk to did not contact us and seemed to be away.

One week later, we finally visited their business in person.  We did the interview. In this interview we asked Brandon an employee there, 5 questions about DCM and what we think the ad should look like.

The next day we reflected on the information and started our own individual drafts.  For my first draft, I looked at their past advertisements and tried to make mine based on what they liked before. I will say that I didn’t love my first draft. It didn’t;t seem to fit the DCM theme but as I did different drafts I got better and understood more about what I had to do. 

 

After every draft we created our group would have time to critique each other’s. They always said that it was too colourful and didn’t fit their past advertisements. I changed mine from portrait to landscape and adjusted the colour. I liked mine but it was different from the rest of my group.

One of the main problems that my group faced was when my group had to do our first group draft. Most of the boys in my group wanted to do their own thing and didn’t’t want to listen to other people’s ideas.  A few of them didn’t listen to the teacher’s instructions. Because of this, it took a long time to finish our first group draft. I did not think we would get them done in time. My group said I was too bossy and I sorta agree…I can be bossy. HOWEVER, I do believe that they needed to pay attention a little more so they wouldn’t keep asking me what we were doing when the teacher had just explain it i minute ago. Our first group drafts looked like this.

          

Right now, we are working on our latest group draft.  It is due tomorrow morning. We plan to meet before school to make sure can finish it on time.

User Manuel Project review

faiths Humanities ,

The first PLP 8 project of the year was driven by this question: how do I creatively communicate who I am? The main way was by creating a user manual. No…it was NOT a user manual for our iPads but actually was a user manual about us! To do this we would complete six milestones.

For the user manual project we first had to start by building knowledge about ourselves.  This meant figuring out what we knew, what we needed to know, and how to find out how to get that information. First we wrote what we already knew about ourselves and then we wrote what we thought we would need to know about ourselves and the apps on the iPad.  Finally we wrote down ways we could get this information. 

Through my group discussions I realized that I knew what I liked and what I disliked.  I knew what some of my troubles were and a lot of the things that make me unique.  For  example I am picky with food and sometimes talk in random accents for no reason. I knew how to use the camera, iMessages, and how to make an memoji, which was very helpful information to know.

I needed to know how to use the iPad apps more so I could creatively communicate who I am in different ways. 

To find the missing information I needed to be willing to ask people around me like classmates, teachers, and family…not my Mom for computer stuff. This is difficult for me because I do not know these people well(teachers,and students, I know my Family).  I am shy when talking to other people and I do not like talking in front of people who do not know me.  Mr. Hughes and Ms. Maxwell helped us explore the apps and I also did some exploration on my own.  The main apps that we explored were pages, keynote, notes, photo, and things. 

The next step was to see the user manuals that the teachers wrote about themselves. I loved learning about my teacher’s personalities and who they are after 3:00! Seeing the manuals gave me the idea of what we would create in the next few days. We then started to write down words to describe ourselves. For example if we were a daughter or friend or dog lover or cat hater we wrote that down. 

For our fourth milestone, we needed to use the Memoji laptop sticker we had made a few classes before. The Memoji laptop had stickers we customized to show a little bit about who we  are. The fourth milestones meant getting critique on that Memoji sticker and being able to reflect and create something better. First we got student critique and  I only had two sticky notes on my laptop Memoji the first round and 1 sticky note the second round. I was not sure how to move forward because of the critique wasn’t super helpful. 

The fifth milestone was all about the revising and getting critique on the user manual. We had the rough draft. I loved writing the rough draft of the user manual. I had a lot of ideas and found it fun.  The critique itself I found it hard to do. I got much better critique on this part. I don’t love giving critique and find it hard to tell people how they could improve. I also did not have enough time to read through their whole manual.

The sixth and final milestone was about presenting the project. For this we were supposed to stand in front of two classmates and read them some of our user manual and show them our laptop stickers. I believe that I did ok. I should have looked at the audience more and prepared what I was going to say a bit more.  I loved hearing more  about people and their likes, dislikes, and warnings about them. 

Overall I think I loved the project and think I did well on the project although there are a few things I could improve. I believe I answered the question I creatively communicated who I was in not one but in TWO ways…the user manual and the lap top sticker. I would have improved my layout for my Memoji laptop stickers. There were some things I wanted to make better but could not quite put my finger on them. For my user manual I had trouble with the trouble shooting. It was hard to get the main idea for that section.  Overall I hope that through PLP I will get more comfortable and better at presenting my ideas in front of others. It is a good life skill. Finally, I believe that through this project i improved in several ways making it so I can create the project you see below.

My user Guide