Monthly Archives: January 2018

mPOLs

Hello loyal readers. Today I will be talking about mPOLs. Presentations of Learning. These are basically student led conferences where we discuss our work for the term, our blog posts, and how we can improve our work. The main question for the mPOLs is: How am I going to progress as a learner? To help answer this question, I will be reflecting about my main PLP classes, Maker, Humanities, Math And Science.

So, my first discussion topic is humanities. Our first ever unit for Humanities 8 was, as you can probably remember, the wonderful world of advertising. I feel that my ads for both Deep Cove And Oregon could have been better. I feel that my knowledge of advertising has grown a lot with this unit. My evidence for this is my advertising blog post.

The Advertising Project Of DOOM

Then, for worldview and religion, I also feel that I could have done better work. My Explain Everything was OK, but I think our infographic was pretty good. I think the thing that I want to work on the most for Humanities is to improve my study habits and time management. My evidence for this unit is my Religion and Worldview blog post.

Religions and Such

Okay. Now let’s move on to Maker. In Maker, I feel that my work has been pretty good. My growth mindset studies and my selfie project were both pretty good. I have learned a lot of information about growth mindset and I feel it has helped me develop a better growth mindset. The main problem for this unit was, as you can probably tell, time management. Some of my assignments were late, and my goal this term is for my assignments to be on time.

My Mindset And Me

Then, we did the big Star Wars Exhibition. I think that my exhibition project went pretty well. The big issue for me was definately time management. I feel that I could have used my time for the Exhibition much better. Overall, I think that I had a pretty nice, open-ended question and a newly discovered knowledge of prosthetics.

It’s a trap!

Now, onto math. I feel that I did pretty well in Math this year. My test and schoolwork have been pretty good and I have handed in my work on time. I think that our group did pretty well for our door surface area project and we both worked well together and we did a pretty good job handling anything that came our way. I think my main issue for math was that I rushed through some of the work. My goal for math is to spend more time thinking about my work and to go through it slowly instead of rushing.

My door is a bore no more

I think that my study habits were a little slow. My homework took pretty long and some assignments were late. The assignments were pretty good quality, but I think my main problem is speed and time management. To achieve this goal, I will give myself more time to do schoolwork and document all of my assignments for the day.

I think my revision has been pretty good. I have taken all of my critique constructively, and I have used it to make my work a lot better. My teamwork has also been pretty good for the past term. I have been pretty responsible in my groups and I have been working well with others.

Overall, my main issue in the past term is definately time management and getting my assignments in on time. I feel that I can improve my study habits by giving myself more time for homework and using my school time wiser. My main question for how I can improve myself is: What can I do to make sure all of my assignments get handed in on time?

My door is a bore no more

Hello fellow humans. This post is going to be about something I feel I don’t really write about in this blog. That’s right, it’s everyone’s favourite subject, Math.

Ok, so our first big project for math was a project that has to do with surface area. We were tasked with increasing the surface area of this door by 5.

I was put into a group with Izzy, Ben, and Kiera. What we did was we made a ton of rectangular prisms to increase the surface area by five. Here are our calculations.

We first decided to shrink them by half to save paper. Bad idea. That ended up messing up all of our calculations. After that colossal mess up, we had to start all over again and make all new, full size rectangular prisms. The end result ended up looking like this.

As you can tell, our groups’ stuff was the direct middle of the door. I personally think it looks pretty good. Welp. That’s it. See ya soon.

Religions and Such

Alright. Before I start, I want you all to know that this is going to be a looooong post. So, be prepared to spend at least a whopping 5 whole minutes reading about a socially awkward 8th grader’s journey through the wonderful world of religions.

Hi there again. It’s Jason. In this post, I will do my best to try to explain our latest unit, religion and worldview. So, when we started this unit, we learned about what a worldview is. It’s basically what the name suggests. Your view of the world. Of course, everyone’s worldview is different. This is what led to the first project of the unit, where we used a new app. The legendary Explain Everything. Long story short, the app was confusing. Our project was to pick three of these topics:

My three topics were Society, Values, and Knowledge. Then, you think of some stories about your 3 topics and talk about them in your EE (Explain Everything) with some pictures and animations.

After we finished the whole worldview stuff, we dove head-first into the wonderful and confusing world of religion. First we started with making new groups for a whole new project. I was put into a group with Nik, Grace, and Izzy. Our first religion that we studied was Aboriginal Spirituality, And we were tasked with making a chart of all of the religions that we studied. After Aboriginal Spirituality, we studied Judaism, then Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

After we finished our religion studies, we started on our main project. We were tasked with creating an infographic about a religion. More importantly, it was supposed to be about the worldview of the followers of that religion. First, we picked our religions. We picked Judaism as our religion to study. After we picked our religions, we wrote down what we knew about that religion and any important things that relate to the worldview. Then, we went on field studies to each of the holy places. We had to present our data to each of our respective religions. For us, it was the Synagogue. Also, we went to CHIPOTLE!

Here are some photos from our expeditions:

The Islamic Mosque

The Jewish Synagogue

The Hindu Temple

The Buddhist Temple

The Sikh Gurdwara

And Last but not least, The Christian Church

Then, we got to work on our infographics. Our original idea was for the background to be a desert, but it ended up looking like an old paper, so we changed the image. Then, we had to fix a text problem. The problem being that we had too much text, so we changed that. The app that we used to make our infographic was pages. We had many drafts and were critiqued multiple times on how we could improve it, and then we finally finished it.

We were pretty proud of our final draft and we were one of the first groups to finish our worldview/religion infographic. Here are some of the other groups’.

Ok. I guess that’s it. I hope you learned a lot about religion and worldview from the infographics that we made. I hope you enjoyed this post, and make sure to check out some of my other posts.

Yours Truly, Jason

Socially Awkward And Proud Of It

It’s a trap!

In a galaxy far, far away, Admiral Ackbar created one of the greatest Star Wars memes of all time with his groundbreaking phrase, It’s a Trap! I’m pretty sure you can figure out what this post is about.

So, if you keep up with the latest PLP activities, you probably know about the PLP Exhibition that happened a few days ago on the 14th Of December. Hopefully you came and saw our wonderful decorations and projects. If you didn’t, I’ll catch you up.

The Exhibition is kind of like a cooler science fair. There are 2 every year. A small one in December and a big one in June. For every Exhibition, the PLP teachers pick out a theme. For December’s, as you can probably tell, our theme was Star Wars. The students pick out a question each that relates to a topic. After they pick out a question, the students to hours of pain staking research to answer the question. Every student’s research must consist of 3 resources. A website, like Wikipedia, a video, and an interview with an expert in the field. This process all leads up to the Exhibition.

Now, let me tell you about my Exhibition experience. This Exhibition was really special to me and the other grade 8s because it was our first Exhibition. When we started working on the Exhibition, first of all, we had to pick an inquiry question. They told us to think of as many questions as possible about one single topic. After we brainstormed some questions, we picked out our top 3 to consult with the teacher about. Here is a list of my questions:

I then proceeded to have a conference about my questions, and I decided on the question “Would Star Wars cybernetics similar to Vaders’ Work in real life. After a bit of tweaking, I finally decided on a final question. My final inquiry question was, drumroll please,

HOW WOULD STAR WARS PROSTHETICS OR CYBERNETICS WORK IN REAL LIFE?

So, after I figured out my inquiry question, I got started on my research. I started on my website research first, and found this great website called wookieepedia, which is basically like a Star Wars database. Link to wookieepedia right here. On said website, I found a page about prosthetics or, as they’re called in the Star Wars universe, Cybernetics. That was the main website that I used for research. Finding a video was even easier. All it took was a quick search on YouTube to find the perfect video. The video that I used was called Star Wars Science – Prosthetic Limbs by HelloGreedo. Link down here. ⬇️

I really liked this one because it compared both Star Wars and real life, and goes into in depth detail of each aspect. And lastly, I interviewed someone from Pentlands Prosthetics and Orthotics. Pentlands is a company that specializes in Prosthetics and fits people with custom Prosthetics that best fit the recipient. Unfortunately, I had really lousy timing and emailed them during a very busy period and wasn’t able to schedule an actual face to face meeting. Even though they were busy, they agreed to answer some questions that I had about prosthetics.

After we all finished our research, the PLP teachers revealed our groupings. The Light and Dark sides. We then got grouped into smaller groups. I was on the Dark Side and in the Impact on Today’s World group.

Armed with my knowledge of prosthetics, I got started on creating my project. I went and made a big ol’ prosthetic hand model. Long story short, it ended up looking like a statue.

I built it out of plasticine, which is probably why it looks like a statue. I was going for a robotic look, but I ended up getting a modern art feel to it. I also made a posterboard. Yes, a posterboard. A staple of all middle school science fairs worldwide. My posterboard was pretty horrible to begin with. It looked like this.

Yeah. Pretty bad. After getting pelted with criticism, I went home and used that criticism to improve my posterboard. The next day, I came back with my posterboard looking like this:

Much, much better. Don’t you agree? Alright, let’s cut to what you’ve all been waiting for. The night of the Exhibition. Exhibition day was pretty stressful. Not gonna lie. We spent nearly the whole day decorating our respective spaces, with the Light Side occupying the PLP room and the Dark Side occupying the Library. First of all, our main problem was light. We had to turn all of the lights in the library off, so we all had to bring as many lights as we could. Our second issue was the walls. I’d say about half of the time we spent decorating the room was on putting paper all over the walls to cover up the fact that it was a library. The rest all fell into place after we finished those things. Then, in a flash, it was Exhibition night. Not gonna lie, I was pretty nervous. That and the fact that I had way too much pizza before the Exhibition was a deadly combo. I had worn a sick Darth Vader mask to the Exhibition.

That did not work out very well though because A: I didn’t have the full costume so I looked like Darth Vader at an employee picnic, and B: The mask gave me absolutely no peripheral vision at all.When the people started rolling in, I got myself together and gave some presentations to the people that came over to look at my project. Halfway through, I went and ran the bar. We served “Vaderade”, which was pretty much a mix of Red Powerade and Gatorade. We also had some assorted snacks. Overall, I’d say the Exhibition went pretty well. One thing I would do differently would be to manage my time better. I didn’t make full use of my time. Next time I’m definitely going to get started constructing much faster.

OK. That’s it. Whew. I hope you didn’t get too bored reading that. It was a pretty fun experience and I have high hopes for the big one in June. Make sure to be on the lookout for my next post on religion.

Yours Truly, Jason

Living, Breathing, Pinterest Fail