Next week, our Metaphor Machines are due, so we are hustling to get them all ready and finished. This past week, Zak and Michael have been starting to put all of the finishing touches of our machines together, Anatolia and Chris have making our movie rough cuts, and Nash and I have been finishing off our machine blueprints.
We have been conducting many changes in our plans, and we are very good at figuring out different ways to make our machine better. We have thought out many senarios about how this machine could go wrong, and we have sorted them out and fixed them. Having all the right people in this group has made this project thrive, and I am confident (I think) that the machine will work well, just as we hope it will.
This past week, We have started to construct and build our machines and ours is coming along quite well. Everyone in our groups were assigned a certain job or focus area to work on. There are the engineers, the architects, and the storytellers.
I am an architect, and that means that I am responsible for making the final draft and real copy of our machine’s blueprint. But it is expected that we don’t finish it all at once because the engineers are testing every part of our machines and the plans and designs are always changing.
We have been gathering all the materials we need for our machine, and are now cutting wood, assembling popsicle sticks, testing marbles, trialling simple circuits, and much more. I find that our group is really doing well at making sure that all our simple machines and the whole design can function properly by trail and error testing everything.
I think our group could have better communication skills, like, we take a really long time replying to questions or thoughts that we have in our iMessage group chat. We also have to try and work on staying focussed because a lot of our group is distracted by other groups, other group’s machines, and online bidding (?).
Anyways, other than those few things, I’m confident that my Metaphor Machine group is on the right track to finish with a great product!
We’ve carried on with our Metaphor Machine, and we put together some ideas about how it can come together and represent the French Revolution.
These past few days, we split up as individuals and began to draw and sketch out some potential designs. Before this activity we had already done a rough sketch of what we wanted the machine to resemble, as a group. We had also previously written down some metaphors that we can fit in with the French Revolution, which we then added into our drawings.
After we had finished our own drawings, we came together into our groups and merged the designs into a rough blueprint that we all agreed on. I think ours looks very logical and interesting. We have mapped out all the knicks and knacks and we know exactly how it’s going to function.
I’m happy with how far we’ve come with our planning and organization of our machine, and I’m excited for the next steps we need to take in order to make it even better.
So, recently we have been beginning to form plans and ideas for a new project we are starting in class. We are creating Metaphor Machines based on a revolution that we studied: The French Revolution, The English Revolution, The American Revolution, or The Industrial Revolution.
My group originally planned to base our machine on The French Revolution, because we were all very interested with all the famous events going on during that time. But sadly, we were downgraded to The English Revolution, which none of us really wanted to do, well, except for Zak.
First, we had to make a timeline of all the important things that happened during The English Civil War. Then we had to figure out if it linked to Crane Brinton, Jack Goldstone, or George Lakey’s opinions and theories of “What a Revolution is”.
I think our group has really great thinkers and we can all work together as a group. I have work hard, along with everyone, to contribute to our timeline and the sketches of our ideas for the machine. When we started to draw and make the timeline, we did a really good job of connecting our ideas to others on the timeline. I think we should try to use our class time a bit more efficiently – we don’t always focus and sometimes only two or three of us end up doing most of the work.
So I feel as though we should try and all put a bit more effort into our group and our project, then we will be the “Dream Team”!
We have just finished our French Revolution topic in class, and (once again) were asked to come up with a question to research the topic deeper than we had in class.
Anatolia, Marley, and I were having a water fight on Saturday afternoon, and we suddenly came up with an idea that we could turn our fight into one of, the French Emperor, Napoleon’s battles or invasions. We came up with a main question: “Why and how did Napoleon’s invasion of Russia end badly for France?” So then we turned on the camera, put on some French and Russian accents, and reenacted “Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempted invasion of Russia.”
So after watching our short movie, you are probably thinking “well that’s not really what happened” or “those aren’t the same facts that I’ve read in a much more informative primary source”. After watching our video, Anatolia and I were thinking the same things. We made the mistake of not doing a thorough researching job before we started filming, and then after we filmed we found some information about the invasion and realized we got a few of the facts quite wrong.
So the main reason Napoleon wanted to invade Russia is because he had almost all of Europe under his control and wanted to make Alexander I hand over Russia into his open arms. We kind of messed up on our dates and the period of which Napoleon was attempting to invade. We said that it took a couple of weeks, but the whole expedition actually lasted about 5 months, 2 weeks, and 6 days. Russia realised that France had a very strong army, and they could only hope to defeat them, so they decided to, pretty much, go into defensive mode and retreat each time France would try to strike. Every time Napoleon would advance towards them, Russia would retreat, but leave little traps and “surprises” to slow the French.
As time went on, and France still had had no direct combat with Russia, they began to disintegrate due to extreme fatigue, hunger, and small attacks made by the Russians. Finally, the Russians realized that if they didn’t stay and fight with the French, then the whole of Russia could potentially fall into their opponent’s arms. So they battled in Moscow, on September 7, then found that it was useless because no side had really “won”. Russia abandoned Moscow days later, leaving the French with hardly any resources.
At last, the realization sunk in that Russia wasn’t about to offer to negotiate any deals, and the Franch began the journey home, but were caught in the midst of the cruel Russian winter. Food was basically non-existent, cossacks were attacking the stragglers, and in the end, 10,000 men survived out of the 600,000 men to start.
And that pretty much sums up Napoleon’s invasion and how things went downhill!
So, I’ve recently been focussing on the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War in class. It was primarily between Great Britain and The United States of America, but America made an interesting ally along the way; France!
In this short video, I will be explaining the alliance between France and America, and “How this alliance aided America in the defeat of Britain during the Revolutionary War”.
I chose to make an Explain Everything to portray my ideas and research in a clear and simple way (even though it took me , like, 4 hours to finish. But hey… what can I say? I’m slow with this kind of stuff). I also used some interesting animations to grip the watcher into my presentation.
This week in class, we researched the English Civil War, and focussed in on one key figure to do with it. We dug deeper into our chosen topic, and mine was primarily based on the Battle of Naseby and how it lead to King Charles I being captured.
The Battle Of Naseby was a key turning point in the English Civil War. Where King Charles I, and the influential leader of the Parliaments, Oliver Cromwell, face each other in a battle that leaves the King’s Royalists side without a true leader. The battle took place on June 14th, 1645, and eventually lead to the final pursuit and capture of King Charles I.
In May of 1645, Charles I was marching northwards to retake Marston Moor, after their defeat. And the New Model Army was on it’s way to Oxford for an attack. Charles planned to divert the Roundheads from the Oxford attack, and so the Royalists marched southbound from 60 miles north of Oxford, in Leicester. But, on June 12th, Charles soon found out that the New Model Army and commander Thomas Fairfax were marching northbound towards the Royalists, and that the Roundheads had quite a numerical advantage over Charles and his Royalists.
Finally, on June 14th, both sides stood poised at Broad Moor near the town of Naseby, and at ten o’clock in the morning, Prince Rupert (Commander in Chief of The Royalists side) was the first to lead a charge into battle. A little while into the fight, the Royalists suddenly had both of their flanks open for the Parliaments to attack. Prince Rupert’s infantry was upholding against Parliamentary attacks, but most of the Royalists, including King Charles, ran from the battle. They were pursued by Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax, and the New Model Army, almost until they got to the city of Leicester once again.
Oliver Cromwell Leading The New Model Army
There were battles following the battle of Naseby, but none under the command of King Charles, as this battle seemed to put the Royalists in a position where they were unable to recover from the defeat. A few years later, in 1648, King Charles surrendered himself to the Scottish Army where they then handed him over to the English Parliament after nine months. Charles told the Parliament commanders, “you cannot be without me: you will fall to ruin if I do not sustain you.” He saw the monarchy as a sense of stability and believed that England could not survive without it.
So I know that, for me, the Battle of Naseby lead to the capture, and eventually the execution of King Charles I. It was the turning point where King Charles was overthrown and the Royalists fell apart and couldn’t put the pieces back together.
At the beginning of our Elizabethan and Romeo and Juliet unit, we did research on what the Elizabethan era was all about: What food they had, what the housing was like,the types of servants. Everything.
For this research we got into groups of two and got assigned a topic from the era. We had to create a Keynote presentation and present it to our class. I worked with my friend Anatolia for this project and I thought that it turned out really well.
If you want to check out our slides from our presentation, here they are:
As I said above, I think this was a great project, but it could have been improved. Anatolia and I could have practiced a lot more, to get a bit more familiar with the topic and what we were saying. And know for a fact that we both procrastinated on this project, which made it a lot harder to know our scripts and get the project done on time. But I also know that we had fun on this project and it gave me a lot of knowledge about the Elizabethan era and our world history.
In science class, we have been studying the Periodic Table and it’s different trends, patterns and sometimes even codes. Then we were told that we had to make our very own Periodic Table of something… well… ANYTHING! So I chose to focus mine on different breeds of dogs! I chose dogs because I love animals and I was interested to learn all this cool information on the animal that I love the most.
The Periodic Table of Dogs is my interpretation of The Periodic Table of Elements. For this project I created a series of trends and patterns and put them together in a table, of sorts. This blog post is about how to decode the trends and patterns within my Periodic Table of Dogs.
First off this is the example for each separate tile that I have on my project, it probably explains itself better than I could:
The first trend I have in my table is that I colour coded the breeds of dogs to show what continent they come from. The majority where from Europe, two from North America, one from Africa, and one from Asia.
Then I sorted the age spans from youngest to oldest. Being youngest at the top left of the table and oldest at the bottom right. Inside of this trend, I also put them from lightest weight to heaviest weight for each age group.
And that’s pretty much it, not to hard to understand, right?
a formal discussion on a particular topic in a public meeting or legislative assembly, in which opposing arguments are put forward.
Recently we put on our very own class debates, on quite controversial topics surrounding our lives. My debate topic was “Be it resolved that zoos are essential for the preservation of endangered species”. I really enjoyed researching this subject because I’m really interested in animal abuse and captivity. We worked in groups of three to each write and rehearse a five minute argument and put it together to construct a structured debate to appose an affirmative or negative side.
Unfortunately I don’t have a video or clip from my debate, but I can tell you that it went pretty well. I spoke clearly and I paced myself well. I think that I had three well structured points and I made a strong argument. I could definitely work on my rebuttal, though. I feel like I was not comfortable with thinking of an argument off the top of my head because I was scared of messing up while I was speaking. For next time, I want to try harder at constructing a quick and effective rebuttal, and not being afraid to make a small mistake. I also want to try and not get myself so worked up about an in class debate, I mean come on, it’s an in class debate.
I did find this cool sketch that someone drew while watching a debate, and what they saw while they were there.
In the end, I learned a lot of useful skills during this project, that I will take with me in the future.
