Monthly Archives: May 2018

L to the A to the U-N-C-H

Hello there, person currently reading this post. In case you didn’t know, my name is Jason, and this is my magnificent blog. In this blog, I write posts, some of which I may or may not be forced to write. Anyways, in this post I’m going to be rambling about what the LAUNCH cycle is and what it has to do with school and how it’s going to help me in other projects.

So, unfortunately, LAUNCH does not refer to actually launching anything. No rockets or space shuttles or anything physical. Just our minds. So before you get disappointed, don’t say I didn’t warn you. LAUNCH is actually an acronym. It’s an acronym for a simple method to help you with completing a task and/or finding a solution, more specifically, designing something. It stands for:

L – Look, Listen And Learn

A – Ask Questions

U – Understand Ideas

N – Navigate Ideas

C – Create a Prototype

H – Highlight And Fix

Here’s a helpful video to help you better understand the LAUNCH cycle.

So, the main project and goal for this unit was to create a sport. But, as is in every M. Night Shyamalan movie ever, there was a twist. We were only allowed to use 2 squash racquets, some plastic cups, string, balloons, and a wiffleball in terms of equipment. All this really meant was that most of our games revolved around hitting wiffleballs with racquets. So, not very much variety. It was still fun however. Here’s a more in depth analysis:

First, we started with getting into groups. Mine consisted of myself, Emerson, Grace, and Taylor. We then proceeded to research some factors of what makes a sport interesting and also what the public is into. We first did a survey to find out public opinions. We were able to figure out that the public enjoys games in which there are teams of 6 people or more, using multiple body parts, having the winners decided based on a scoring system, and games that are 1 hour or more.

We then figured out what made sports interesting and also what made them boring. Exciting sports usually weren’t very repetitive, were fast paced, and kept the action going, while boring sports were repetitive, slow, and usually have long pauses in between. We used this information and the survey data to create a draft of our game.

Unfortunately, I was sick the day we created our sport, so I’m not very familiar with the rules. If I’m doing a bad job, you can go check out one of my group members’ posts or check out the video I’m about to link below.

So pretty much, our sport is usually played on a rectangular field with goals on either side that were made of 1 piece of string attracted to two balloons. There are at least 3 players in each team and there are two teams. Each team has 1 racquet and 2 cups. The other players have nothing. Only the players on each side with equipment can touch the ball, which is being passed around. The goal is eventually for a player with a cup to pass to the player with that racquet and for that person to hit it into the opponents’ goal. There are no designated positions other than person with racquet, person with cup, or some poor sap with nothing.

Also, our sport was called LLAMABALL. Unfortunately, there are no llamas involved in the sport. Our budget was too tight and I don’t think llamas are technically allowed in schools. Or even in Canada as a pet. Here’s a short video that my teammates and I created to help explain the rules better.

https://youtu.be/j1D_mNEojng

Wow. Wasn’t that delightful. After some fun and goofing around, we played our game against some formidable enemies. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure we ended up losing. Here are some action shots of our team in action.

Well, I guess that’s the end of this post… wait… I forgot to say why this will help us. This whole launch unit thingy is a skill that we’ll need very soon as we tackle the terrifying sss…sss….SUMMER EXHIBITION. Make sure to be on the lookout for that post, coming soon. Ok, that’s the real end of the post. If you have any compliments, complaints, suggestions, or just to tell me I suck, go ahead and post it. Although I do have the authority to delete your comments and report you, so keep the hate PG-13. Anyways, I’m Jason, and thanks for sitting through yet another of my posts.

The Good Ol’ Explorin’ Days

Yo yo yo, it’s Jason back again with another wonderful humanities post. That’s right, they just keep comin’. This one’s gonna be about the days of waves crashing against ships, invading lands, and takin’ stuff. No, unfortunately, it’s not the pirates. No no no, it’s not the Vikings either. What’s that, the Age of Exploration? You bet it is!

Also, unfortunately, or fortunately if you don’t like bad memes, I won’t be putting any memes into this post because all of the Age Of Exploration memes I found were nasty Columbus Day memes and I just don’t really want to get into that drama, so let’s carry on.

Alrighty then. Let’s start with talkin a bit about the final goal. Our final project this unit was a big ol’ comic book about an explorer from a certain country that we picked… wait, First, we were put into new groups yet again. Our NEW group consisted of Paisley, Izzy, Celeb, Luciano, and yours truly. Ok, now that that’s out of the way, I can move on. So, we picked countries by using a big ol’ digital wheel, and we picked Spain, mostly based on the fact that their names were the most interesting. We then picked our explorers and I picked a certain Mr. Juan Ponce de León. Fun Fact: Juan Picne de León was one of the first people to start searching for the legendary Fountain of Youth. Bet you didn’t know that.

As I mentioned before, we had to create comics from the point of view of a crew member on a certain explorer’s voyage. We had to also make a presentation while acting as that crew member and attempt to persuade the King and Queen to allow us to embark on our own voyages. Pretty “radical” if I do say so myself.

Comic Research

As we learned about explorers and trading and all that stuff, we also had a side project on comics, which to me, was an absolute godsend. Unfortunately, we had to make a very extensive chart on said comics. Meh. You win some, you lose some I guess. We had 4 main groups of comics we had to cover. Tintin, Superhero, Anti-Hero, And New Age. Upside: I got full bragging rights to my non PLP friends as I got to read comics in class while they were stuck doing textbook work. Downside: As I was reading comics and listening to music, my parents did not believe that that was considered as homework. They thought that I was just reading comics because I felt like it and that I was using Humanities as an excuse.

Motivation

The first thing we looked at after the unit overview was why the explorers even bothered to explore. We looked at what a Beringia was (land bridge) and some of the main reasons nations, such as Europe, explored. The 3 main reasons we looked at were because they wanted to insert themselves into the trade routes, because they wanted new metals to use as currency, or to spread the teachings of their religions. (Mostly Christianity.)

Challenges and Technology

The next things we looked at were what challenges they faced and the technology they used. We looked at the types of ships and equipment used on the voyages, and we also looked at how life in the Renaissance impacted their explorations. For more on the Renaissance, check out my post on that:

Changes This Everything!

Other stuff

After that, we looked at a variety of things, as the creative title suggests. We checked out who Jacques Cartier was and his expeditions to “discover” Canada. We also looked at the Middle passages and slavery. For that, we looked at 5 different documents about slavery and the middle passages from 5 different points of view. We then made a chart of the differences between the documents. After these studies, came the final project. Yep. The presentation.

The Climax

Oh, yes. The presentation. Now, as always, I procrastinated as much as I possibly could before the presentation. So, in the last few nights leading up to the presentation, I really had to rush to get it all together. In those nights, I had enough energy drinks to make myself vomit, and I listened to enough Iron Maiden to make my ears bleed. Finally, I finished the last slide of my keynote, I created the last block of my comic, and I wrote the last line of my script. Then came the presentation.

I think the quote that best describes the presentation comes from the immortal Homer Simpson.

I panicked. Yep. I absolutely choked. It was not good. I sped up my talking a lot and I made little to no eye contact to the crowd. Definitely not my best. Anyways, I managed to get it done with a decent mark and it was finally over. If I were to somehow redo it, I would not have procrastinated as much. I think that, as always, laziness was my downfall. Also, here’s a copy of my comic. You can check that out right here.

THE AMAZING, ASTOUNDING, ANTHONY DE CAPO-1felpwh

Well, I guess that’s it. If you’ve made it this far, give yourself a big pat on the back. I probably couldn’t have made it through my own post. I apologize if it’s kinda boring. I won’t take any offence if you think it is. Anyways…. bye.

Refrections and Reflactions

Bonjour mes amis. Je m’appelle Jason et c’est mon blog. Congratulations to you if you can figure that out without using google translate. Today, I’m going to talk about optics. Lights, lenses, mirror, and other stuff. Also, this is a science post! I think this might be my first science-related post and it’s about one of the most confusing topics I’ve learned this year. So, without further ado, here’s the first Science post ever on my blog.

First off, we started right at the end of our previous unit and attempted to prove why and how light and sound are waves. For this, my partner and I successfully proved how sound is a wave by talking about speakers and the sound waves emitted and picked up by the ears. Light, however, was a different story. We got pretty stuck on light, and all we were able to come up with was when you shine white light into a prism, it separates into colour beams. Yep. We were in for a looong ride.

Now, let’s talk ‘bout light. We then proceeded to watch a documentary about light and nature and cool stuff like that. Here’s the full video:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6co8oc

This documentary was kind of like an detailed introduction to the unit in a whole and helped us understand the unit.

Alright, now let’s have a little talk about mirrors. You know, The reflects thingys that are shiny. You know, you know… yeah. You’ve got your plane mirrors, your concave mirrors, and convex mirrors. And what better way to show off mirrors than with burning things.

Yep. We went outside, grabbed a cardboard chunk and a large concave mirror, and we burned the absolute heck out of it. Also, we also learnt about a solar furnace in France with enough heat and power to melt birds. Sad, but interesting.

This video, along with the mirror experiment really helped my understanding with mirrors and how powerful they can be if used properly. It also gave me a deathly fear of large, concave mirrors. Also, I showed this to my brother the other day, and now he’s scared of France. I’m not sure if he’s kidding or not, but I’m pretty sure he thinks if it can melt a bird, it can melt him.

After that, we watched a documentary about some guy going around the world looking at how the Islamic Golden Age impacted optics in the modern age. This was more about the origins of light, but was still pretty beneficial to watch. You can watch it for yourself right here.

This documentary shed some light on the origins of optics and also really helped us understand optics more. There’s a whole series of these documentaries by the same guy, so if you, my valuable viewer, are still interested about Science in the Islam golden age, you can go have a Golden Age Science marathon.

Some things that I found interesting were that although the Greeks are believed to have founded Optics, most of what we learn today came from a guy named Ibn al-Haytham in a period called the Golden Age Of Science (9th – 14th Century BCE). He pretty much challenged what the Greeks believed about light being emitted from the eyes and proved that light actually enters the eyes. So, when you think about it, he’s one of the real fathers of optics. Also, he wrote a book called the Kitab al-Manazir (The Book Of Optics) in an asylum after an angry Caliph (King) threw him in there after he faked being crazy to escape a promise he couldn’t keep. He was a pretty interesting guy, to say the least.

One of his most famous experiments was called the Camera Obscura, which was basically a pinhole camera. How it works is if you take a window with a view, black it and the entire room out, poke a hole in the window covering, and put some sort of screen behind it, the image will be perfectly reflected onto the screen, although it will be inverted. This experiment is also where the modern word camera comes from, as the Camera Obscura process is pretty much in everything that uses light, form modern photography to even sight. Here’s a diagram:

Of course, this is all in the video, so if you felt that I’m bad at explaining, or want to know how the Camera Obscura works, go check out the video above.

We didn’t really do much homework after that. We just listened to some lectures and did a couple of labs. My first lab was pretty basic. It was about mirrors and I worked on it with a certain Mr. Kyle Dandar. In this lab, we worked on some basic mirror stuff. We used a ray box and an optics kit and shined (shone?) light rays at different mirrors and marked down the incident rays and the reflected rays, which are the light rays shone at the mirror, and the ones reflecting off of the mirror. Pretty basic stuff, though still important. This pretty much acted as some of the foundation for the rest of our unit.

Ok. Now, onto the work that we did in school. We started by learning about Ray Diagrams.

A ray diagram is a diagram that shows rays. More specifically, the paths of rays that are shown at different mirrors and lenses. Also, the things you need to write down about a ray diagram follow one of the catchiest acronyms I’ve known in my life. Size, Attitude, Location, Type. SALT. Here are a few examples:

This was one of the biggest challenges I faced in this unit. And, even though I did not understand this at all,  and in all my panic, I forgot that there was a teacher in the room that knows more that I ever will, so, I was forced to go solo for most of this stuff.

Anyways, then we did our second lab, The BFLL (Big Fat Lenses Lab) which I did with Izzy. This one was about lenses and rays and cool stuff like that, as you can tell from the title. We looked at bi-concave and bi-convex lenses, and also how light behaves after being shown (shined? shone?) through different liquids (Water, Vegetable Oil, and Ethanol) and why we thought different liquids had different brightnesses of light rays. Here. Look at a few images.

For comparison, this lab was wayyyyyyy more extensive than the mirror one, but this one was also kore challenging, and therefore, I learned more knowledge. And, as we all know, knowledge is power.

Now onto our test. That’s right, no final project like in humanities, just a test to cap off our unit. And, I’m not going to lie, I did have to study quite a bit to do good on this test. Also, I had a ton of opportunities to get more practice in class with all the extra worksheets, and, like the overconfident naive child’s I am, I passed them up thinking I had my optics down mat. Unfortunately, I then proceeded to realize that it’s still optics and I knew nothing about optics. So, I studied. It was pretty hard having passed up all my opportunities, but I managed to get it done and wound up with a pretty good 21/23.

And that caps off my 1st ever science post. Wow. I’m just realizing that it’s over 1200 words. Good job to you for reading all of this. There might be more before the end of the school year, there might not. Be on the lookout for my next post about the wonders of exploration. And with that, I will leave you.

Wait, Wait, Wait, before I finish this post, I want you all to know, before you bombard me in the comment section, I know there’s a typo in my title. It’s intensional. I wanted to see how many people would actually notice it, well, now it’s not much of a secret anymore. Anyways, now, with that, I’ll really (finally) leave you.

Changes This Everything!

Hello there. Welcome back to another entertaining educational PLP post. Today I’ll be talking about the Renaissance. Yep that one. The era after the Feudal Ages that pretty much challenged everything we ever knew up to that point.

So the Renaissance was pretty much a hotbed of great things like the printing press, public education, new religions, new art forms, scientific discoveries, and challenging everything we ever knew up to that point. I kid you not. So we stayed in the same groups as our Feudalism groups. Ours consisted of Ben, Gabby, and Lucy. We did not yet know about our final project (or I’m just bad at noticing things) and we started by just learning some basic information.

What the heck is a Renaissance?

we started off by recapping what had happened leading up to the Renaissance. Not very interesting stuff. Then we started with receiving a side project of sorts. A page of answers to questions that we were asked throughout the unit. We then learned about why Italy flourished during the Renaissance and also what patronage is. Patronage is basically when rich people see potential in artists and other workers and sponsor them.

Changing Ideas

We then learned about some important figures during the Renaissance in three different fields. The Artists, Scientists And Mathematicians, And the Thinkers. We learned about some important figures like Michelangelo, Copernicus and Da Vinci who revolutionized their fields of interest. We also picked someone from each field to study as part of our unknown final project. I selected Marsilio Ficino, Johannes Kepler, And Michelangelo. I researched them and then made a radical Venn Diagram Of The three.

Spreading Ideas

There wasn’t really much of a main topic for this section. Just things or people that spread ideas, like the printing press, which made education more widespread and allowed for more people to enrich themselves in knowledge, and Martin Luther. No, not Martin Luther King, just Martin Luther. He was the guy who began challenging religion and the whole indulgence idea. Pretty much, the church wanted money, so they sold indulgences, which let people sin or do something naughty without punishment. He thought that whole thing was pretty gosh darn sketchy, so he did what any normal person would do. He started his own religion. It was pretty much just a branch of Christianity, but with some differences. And that’s how Protestantism was born.

The Impact Of Ideas

The final section before the main project was the impact that those ideas had on the Renaissance. This section included Politics and this guy called Machiavelli. This guy pretty much just said that all men are greedy, conniving liars and that leaders should only be concerned with maintaining land. Again, I kid you not. Also, we learned about the English Civil war, which included Charles I, a king who dismissed Parliament for money to fight Spain. He also believed in something called the divine right of kings, which said that all kings have the power of god behind them. Oliver Cromwell was another important fellow who opposed Charles I And took over the throne after Charles died. Unfortunately, the public didn’t like him very much either. After he died, they then chose Charles I’s son as the new king. Fun fact, after Cromwell died, they dug up his corpse and dragged it through the street, because that’s what all normal people do in their spare time.

The Final Project

The final project was later revealed to be a triptych. That’s pretty much a three paneled interconnecting work of art that has one common theme. Here’s an example:

So, we had to combine all of what we had learned into this triptych. The left side was Changing Ideas, the right was the Spread Of Ideas, And the Middle was the impact of ideas. And, once again, it was centred around the western worldview and how the Renaissance impacted it. Are you sensing a common theme with these projects? Because I sure am.

So, after many minute-I mean hours… of hard labor and a lot of procrastination, I created this abomination:

I know y’all are gonna roast me for this, but I know that my animation styles are whack. My reasoning behind this is that it’s hard to find really good images on Creative Commons of people that fit your theme.

Anyways, that marks the end of this post. In hindsight, I wish I had searched harder on Flickr to find better images for my triptych. I also really regret procrastinating so much and having to stay up until 2:00 finishing my homework. Those energy drinks sure ain’t gonna help me anytime soon. Well, I’m done. That’s it. Goodbye.