Monthly Archives: June 2019

Home Security 101

It’s June, which means that BlueSky has made its “triumphant” return. You know what that means.

EXHIBITION POST.

So, the exhibition went by pretty fast, and before we knew it, we were ripping paper off of the walls and tearing down hours of hard work. Here’s a quick edit I made of the chaos at the exhibition.

So with that out of the way, let’s start at the beginning. I’ll be telling this story through the LAUNCH cycle, because that’s the order we did everything in. We also did everything using the LAUNCH journal, which gave us prompts to try to help us achieve our goals.

L – Look, Listen, And Learn

This section featured a few writing prompts, including how might we’s, and also some world issue analysis. One specific prompt… prompted us to write about some pressing world issues, and from this, my project was born.

As you can see, I started researching and looking at home security. Safety and well-being was a topic that I still feel is under-recognized as a world issue, and my project was meant to change that. My first plan? A Home Security System.

A – Ask Tons of Questions

As you can tell from the title, in this section, we asked questions. Tons of questions. We looked at a helpful question formulation infographic-thing to help get the creative, questioning juices flowing. Ew.

The first step for this section of the journal was to make a chart of NTK’s, or Need To Knows. This was a chart featuring 3 columns:

Know – Something we already knew

Need to Know – Something we don’t know relating to something we know

Next Steps – What we’ll do to find out the NTK.

Here’s my chart.

The next, and final step was to make a timeline. Not too much to explain there.

Pitch Form

This was a break from the LAUNCH cycle. Mainly because P doesn’t fit into the word “LAUNCH”. But also because our teachers didn’t trust us (not all of us at least) to create something brilliant on the first try.

Long story short, I got rejected. Not fully, though. The main reason was because I am incapable of making a functioning security system in 3 weeks. So….

However, like someone going through a breakup, I bounced back, and a few days after, I settled for the next best thing: a Guide for Home Security. This was pretty much the same, but it featured myself, writing down my thoughts and home security research down into a digital book.

U – Understand the Problem and N – Navigate Ideas

I’m clumping these together, because A: I’m lazy and B: These steps kinda belong together. With that out of the way, U was pretty much the research stage.

However, N actually featured taking all of your research and plotting it out onto a post-it board, grouping similar ideas.

C – Create a Prototype

This section featured not only the prototype of your project, but rapid and live prototypes. Here are some links explaining rapid and live prototypes.

I created some wild prototypes, such as storyboards and mind maps. Here’s my mind map, which I used to try to figure out my accessibility.

H – Highlight and Fix

This is blatantly obvious. Revision. For my revision, I decided to add some minimalistic icons to my bland, colourless guide. I went into keynote, made some icons, and added them into my book, reformatting it so that it looked simple, but not effortless.

Launch!

Before we presented, we created interactive KeyNotes. These were called our Launch Portfolios. These are what we put our LAUNCH process into, like our blogs. These had icons that linked to different slides, featuring the L A U N C H.

As always, before we knew it, the exhibition was here. We (our group) was named “Home Products”, so our minds immediately jumped to home decor. Our group of Grade 8’s and 9’s set up decently well with the time we had, and soon, we Launched.

Reflection

There’s not much to say about BlueSky that I haven’t said before. BlueSky is great for practicing critical thinking, and with my digital book design, it really helped me work on my project design and my writing. I was able to kind of “find” my writing style, as I mixed elements from my essay writing (informative) and blog writing (humour and “charisma”). It also helped me figure out minimalism, as I think I did a pretty good job with the minimalistic design and formatting.

Conclusion: BlueSky was a pretty nice experience, and helped me work on skills I hadn’t really thought about before.

This is Jason, signing off.

The Return of tPOL’s

Yep. You read the title right. The end is near. And by that, I mean school’s almost out. Not the apocalypse.

With that mystical insight out of the way, I’m Jason, and this is my tPOL post. No dilly-dallying today. Straight into it.

I’m kicking things off differently this time around. I generally start with my subjects, but today, I’m starting by recapping my goals from last year.

Last Year’s Goals

Last year, my main goal was to integrate what I’ve learned through PGP into my extracurriculars, and I’m proud to announce that I’ve made good on this promise. I’ve been (or am trying to be) keeping up with things. I’ve plotted out all of my extracurricular activities, from music to academics, and it’s been pretty helpful. It reminds me of what I have to do, and it’s been really overall helpful for staying on task.

My goal for humanities was to use existing feedback and apply it to future situations. With the arrival of many new video projects, the feedback from my older videos proved to be a valuable asset. For example, one of the most common inconsistencies with my videos was the shaky audio. I’m glad to say that that foe has been vanquished…. for now. I looked back at all of my old videos, and took into account all of the repeat mistakes I had made, and for the time being, I have been pretty good at keeping my mistakes fresh and new. I still make mistakes. Only now, I’m making different mistakes.

For Maker, my goal was persistance. I felt I was too “soft” per se, and I gave up a little too easily sometimes. With the twin powerhouses of BlueSky and DI, I’m glad to say that this promise was kept. Even throughout all of the struggles, from wood measurements gone wrong to not having a functioning backdrop on the day of provincials, I kept my head up, thought happy thoughts (which was one of the biggest struggles), and I got through it. I guess things worked out in the end. We made the best out of our wood surplus, and our plan for a pit-crew style de-assemble and re-assemble worked like a charm….ish. And hey, we ended up with a sweet second place trophy. With BlueSky just around the corner, I’m sure with my new mindset, I should be able to get through whatever the exhibition will throw at me.

In science, my biggest goal was to keep an open mindset. I felt my attitude needed a slight adjustment, and in the second half of the year, I stepped it up. Instead of only using 70-80% of my brainpower in class, which was what I was kind of doing before, I kicked it up to 110%, and repurposed what other % of my power to other aspects, such as project design and thinking outside of the box. For example, our latest math project, which was about linear equations, involved calculating costs and looking at equations. Old me would have made a simple equation, not take anything into account, and make a pretty good video. However, new me took everything into account. Pencil cost, advertising time, and even the time it took me to walk to the library. I made a great video, and it paid off, as I got great marks.

Now that that’s out of the way, time for subject reflections.

PGP

Ohhh boy. The big fish. PGP was quite the rocky road. At the start of PGP, I, just like everyone else, was skeptical about it. It took me quite a while to catch on to what the course was about and what it offered, and by term 2, it wasn’t very high on my priorities. However, upon closer inspection, I realized that PGP actually offered a lot, from the 7 Habits to Things to Productivity to Goal Setting. After my newfound respect for the course, the Time Machine project provided me with a great opportunity to show off my growth in that course.

According to my teachers, it worked. My Time Machine product was pretty great in quality, and I think I was one of the only people who actually took the words “Time Machine” literally with my 90’s themed self help video.

Looking back, PGP was like a slope, with the line representing my interest and development in PGP. I started at the bottom, suspicious and kind of lazy, and I slowly clawed my way up to the tippy top of the slope. Pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Humanities

At the mid-term point last year, Humanities was going pretty well. I was a fan of the video projects, and I was consistent with the quality of my videos. I’m pleased to say that (in my opinion) I’ve kept that up. The quality has stayed the same, if not better, and I think my video skills have skyrocketed, from music production to special effects to being a theme master (remember my era-appropriate 90’s themed Time Machine?).

A definite high point for me in humanities was the Wild West, AKA Victoria. The reason I’m saying Victoria is because for one of the first times this year (other than the animation), I was all alone, other than my filming partner, Niklas. The reason I liked this so much was because of the unique challenges it brought to the table. For one, it was an incredibly limited filming timespan, as we only really had 40 minutes in Chinatown. Another thing was the pace. I’m generally a pretty slow actor. I take a while to get ready, and with the fast paced walking tour, I didn’t really have any opportunities to film along the way. However, I think I overcame these obstacles pretty well, with pretty good footage and new solutions (the use of old photos for contrast to show history).

Oh, right. It also taught me filming skills. ESPECIALLY rule of thirds. After some sub-par filming on my behalf for my filming partner Nik (sorry pal), I learned the importance of the rule of thirds and lighting quality.

Maker

Maker was a wild ride. I think I did pretty well this year in terms of leadership, communication, and focus. However, it also brought me back down to Earth, reviving my old foe, Time Management.

DI was so big I’m using it for my positives and negatives. The mid-term was just when DI was starting to heat up, and my god, what a blast of heat it gave me. DI really strengthened my leadership skills and my communication skills. I think I did a pretty good job of helping to keep the group on task, and after regionals, our group chat usage went from 2 texts a week to 20 texts a day.

However, negatives are needed to balance out the goody gumdrops. It gives me great displeasure to say this, but DI made me forget all about my old foe, Time Management. That’s right, the saga between me and Time Management lives on. All the fun of designing costumes and writing outrageous scripts made me forget all about the timeline, and before we knew it, we had 1 week before regionals, and a 60% completed solution. Thankfully, my group and I stepped it up, and we got things done, but a brush with an old enemy reminded me that bad Time Management is a slippery slope.

Scimathics

Not gonna lie, I like Scimathics. The projects and assignments are straightforward. The teacher is straightforward. I’m a pretty straightforward guy. Also, I pretty much think in numbers, so I didn’t have many struggles in this class. However, there were still highs and lows.

High point: Matter Cycles. This is the project where I really learned to think outside the box to create our methane monstrosity. I think this was the project that challenged me the most, or should I say, I challenged myself the most. I was constantly pushing myself to be better, and always looking for areas to improve. This resulted in maximum class time usage, optimal time management, and best of all, lots and lots of calculations.

In the end, I was able to create a superb presentation, filled to the brim with environmental concern, statistics, and unnecessary but still helpful calculations.

Low point: Polynomials

Nothing against polynomials. Nothing against the project. However, this project doesn’t look great compared to my Matter Cycles. I stuck to the basic, keynote template, bottom-feeding, bread and butter, simple project outlines. No self-challenging, just laziness. Not great. Sure, I had things going on, like RCM and DI, but still. However, towards the end of our (Kyle and I’s) project, I kicked it up a notch, and made some much-needed improvements, turning our project from “meh” to “wow!”.

Final Reflection

1 and a half hours and 1500 words later, here I am. Tired, hungry, and ready to reflect on my year.

Grade 9 was great. The projects were usually fun, and the video focus really drew my attention. I made a new friend by the name of PGP, gained some confidence, and made good on my goals. What more could I ask for.

Humanities: Interesting. Maker: Useful. Scimathics: Fun. PGP: Growth.

Those 8 words could sum up my year in terms of PLP, but I also had my extracurriculars. My academics are booming, due to the help of things, and music couldn’t be going any better. Surprising to see that I came so far from a socially awkward Grade 8, to fan favourite, decently confident, time-blocking, things-using, musically accomplished, Grade 9 social butterfly Jason Guan.

Ok. I’m gonna stop writing before I tear up-wait! My goal! I forgot all about that!

My goal/question for the next stretch of months is:

“How can I keep learning even when school’s over?”

As you all know, the pursuit of knowledge never ends, especially with me. Unfortunately, I will be attending summer school this year to boost myself ahead in Math, but even without that or my extracurricular academics, I will keep trying to learn new things, through reading books, passion projects, and who knows, maybe even video games can teach me something. (Mortal Kombat 11’s anatomy is spot-on).

This is a surprisingly emotional Jason, signing off.

Mud…. The Greatest Threat of Them All

WWI, AKA the Great War is one of the most infamous wars throughout history, and for good reason. It was incredibly gruesome, and had an incredibly wide impact on the world. In our latest unit, we studied all about this big, gory mess of a war and in this post, I’ll be talking all about the war in all of its bloody glory.

So, WWI was not fun, to say the least, and to be honest, I probably shouldn’t describe all of the bloody, gory, gruesome death that occurred during the war. So I won’t.

With that out of the way, out unit began with the introduction of our main project: a video (we pick what type) based on a particular aspect of WWI. The twist? We had to present these to (drumroll)….

elementary school kids. Yep. Every high-schooler’s worst nightmare. And even better? This project was individual. You can probably guess the emotions that were running through my brain. Throughout this project, I learned to tolerate small children better, and I eventually grew to enjoy the project, but I’ll save the reflection for the reflection.

Content

Now, as you probably know, World War I was quite a broad topic. Probably too broad for me to sum up in a single post, but I’m sure as heck gonna try.

So, the most common theory of what really “started” WWI can be traced back to the assassination of Austria-Hungarian archduke, Franz Ferdinand.

Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne, but married Sophie, who was of lower birth than him, leading to strange circumstances. While in the city of Sarajevo, the archduke and his wife, who were riding around the city in their car, were targeted by the Serbian Black Hand, a group of Serbian Nationalists that really hated Franz. After several failed assassination attempts, a failed bombing, and a lot of disappointment, Gavrilo Princip, who was stationed around a corner near a shop, shot and killed both Franz Ferdinand and Sophie.

As you might have expected, the Austria-Hungarian government didn’t take too kindly to this. Austria-Hungarian General Conrad von Hötzendorf, who was infamous for always trying to start wars, didn’t take too kindly to their archduke being assassinated. He demanded the Serbians sign an ultimatum, which they nearly all agreed to. However, with Kaiser Wilhelm, the German General, in vacation, Conrad saw this as the perfect opportunity to declare war. To show our understanding of this topic, we (Emerson, Sam, Fraser And I) created a video.

Clarifications: I represent Austria-Hungary, Fraser represents Germany, Emerson represents Serbia, and Sam represents Russia.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=51yOky-Vq2E

We also read 3 different books. The books varied from horse stories, to brotherly alliances, to bayonet incidents. We wrote reflections on each part of the book, and the books actually taught me a lot. The book I picked was called Generals Die In Bed. I picked because A: It was written by an actual veteran, and B: gratuitous violence.

Not much else to say about WWI that you probably don’t already know. The triple alliance (Britain, France, Russia, and later the U.S., and Canada) battled the triple entente (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans). Germany occupied Belgium as a part of their Schlieffen Plan. Tanks. Planes. Chemical Warfare. Germany also used their U-Boats to try to starve Britain. However, at some point, the German U-Boats angered the wrong people, and ended up getting the U.S. involved in the war. Russia went through their own revolution, resulting in them dropping out of the war. As you all know, the Allies came out victorious, but losses were suffered on both sides.

My Project

Now, as I said in the beginning, we created individual videos based on a specific aspect of the war. How did we decide? you may ask. Luck of the draw. We spun a wheel, and lucky for me, I was picked first, which meant I ended up with my first choice, tanks.

As always, the first step with any project is research, and I had quite a hefty amount. Not much to say about that. Next, we picked our video forms. I decided on a John Green/Crash Course type of video. Next, I wrote a screenplay. Not much to say about that either. After that came the storyboard. This is when I really finalized my set design. Finally, I filmed. I was able to find a decently well-lit, neutral desk area to record. After a bit of editing and GarageBand, I cranked out my first draft.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ujwcpZoZFIU

After the first draft, I got some pretty nice critique. I smoothened out the audio, made some more music, and the second, and surprisingly, final draft, was ready to go.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bcl92w7gLE0

After what had felt like a pretty short amount of time, we presented. We headed down to our local elementary school, and paired up, 1 Grade 9 to 2-6 Grade 6-7’s. It went pretty smoothly. We had made quizzes the days before, and it seemed like the kids were actually pretty engaged.

Reflection

In hindsight, I think I really enjoyed this project. The content was really interesting, and once again, I learned new video skills, especially my GarageBand skills. This was another project where all music had to be custom, and I learned how to create music of all genres.

The politics, social situations, and especially warfare were all really interesting. It may sound disturbing, but I enjoyed reading about all of the different types of combat, from aerial aces, to battleships, to big ol’ tanks. Another thing I worked on is set design. In this project, with my video form, set design was vital to the operation and I’d like to believe I did a pretty good job. Overall, enjoyable content, new video forms, and an interesting challenge led to a great way to end off the year.

This is Jason, signing off.

Blast From The Past

Hello loyal readers, I’m Jason Guan and this is my official PGP post. Before I start, this may be my biggest post ever, so prepare for some reading.

So PGP (personal growth plan) is something new that the PLP team introduced this year. It’s an X-Block class that involves all of the goal-setting things from regular class and compresses them all into one, once-a-month class.

In this post, I’ll be showing off my “Time Machine” project (blast from the past), and also walking through everything we’re learned this year in PGP.

But first, backstory. In the beginning, I was a small child who didn’t know any better. I had the occasional late assignment in showbie, and got flooded with work. However, from the beginning of Grade 9 until now, I have learned so much information I wish I could have told my past self. That’s what Time Machine is for.

My Time Machine Project

The first section of this post will also be the best. Time Machine. For time machine, I chose to create a good ol’ self help video. You know what I’m talking about. These videos are notorious for being mystical and using fancy words like “revitalize” and “heal”. I found this to be the best way to show off this information, as many aspects of self help videos and PGP line up together.

I chose to focus on my three favourite habits, AKA the topics I wish past Jason had known. Putting first things first, Think Win-Win, and putting first things first. These all associate to some part of my life, whether it be education, music, or health. Here’s the final product.

https://youtu.be/Euj-7R3XxLM

Here’s the second part of my post, the explanation of everything we learned. This is the long, reading part that I warned you about. So buckle up, grab a drink, and prepare for a mild ride through the streets of productivity.

Goal Setting

I’m sure you all know what goal-setting is, and we thought we did too, until we read the book “What Do You Really Want?”. This book was focused on goal-setting and how to set effective goals.

One of my biggest take-aways from this was SMART goals. Smart is an acronym to consider when setting goals. It stands for:

Savvy

Measurable

Active

Reasonable

Timed

If you remember this acronym, then your goals will be bound for success. One of our main assignments for this unit was the use of forms. Forms (Think it and Ink it) were great ways to get thinking about our goals, and we wrote them down in a journal.

Productivity

Our Productivity (Time Management) unit was mainly centred around two main aspects. Time management tools and time blocking. Time management tools are like evolved to-do lists. The one we used was called “Things” and allowed us to set deadlines, set repeating to-do’s, and even organize them by area and project. It was incredibly useful for managing your time well, which was one of my goals from last year.

Time blocking was another focus of this unit. Time blocking is the use of a calendar app (we just used the Apple calendar) to plot out every 1-2 hour block of your life. This can be incredibly useful for people who play sports and practice often, or for people like me, who are terrible at sports but take a ton of extracurriculars.

The 7 Habits

Oh boy. This is the big fish. This is one of our biggest units this year. The 7 Habits. The 7 Habits are a set of… well…. 7 habits designed to help you achieve your goals and many other things. The 7 Habits (in order) were:

Be Proactive

Begin With The End In Mind

Put First Things First

Think Win-Win

Seek First To Understand, then to Be Understood

Synergize

Sharpen The Saw

I could sit here and type out a long, detailed explanation of the 7 Habits, but I highly doubt you want to read that, so I’m going to make good use of this unit’s main project, the 4 creative reflections. For each section of the book, we were asked to fill in a workbook to show our learning, as well as make a creative reflection for each section. I think you’ll enjoy looking at my doodles/sketch notes a lot more than reading big, fat blocks of text.

Reflection

Wow. That was actually a lot less than I expected. But, I still have a Reflection to write.

PGP was a big help for all of my classes. The time blocking and use of things was incredibly useful for planning out my valuable time and helping my stay on track and helping my assignments stay on time. The 7 Habits were an even bigger help. They stayed in the back of my mind, and helped me in every situation where they could be used. I think I’ve used every single habit at least once after I learned about them, and I feel I utilized them well.

The first ever unit, goal setting, was just as big of a help as anything. The forms allowed me to concentrate on all of my goals, and the SMART acronym is something that I don’t think I’ll ever forget, whether that be good or bad. The Time Machine was a great manifestation of everything we learned in PGP, and was a great refresher on everything I might have forgotten.

Overall, PGP may have been frustrating at times with the workload, but in the end, I think it paid off.

This is a very tired Jason, signing off.

Clone Army

Hello. I’m Jason Guan, and this post is gon’ be ‘bout cloning. Mitosis, you know what I’m sayin’?

I’ll stop now.

Ok, so this unit was all about reproduction. I’m talking mitosis. I’m talking meiosis. I’m talking asexual AND sexual reproduction. Our final project for this unit was to clone two plants. A dandelion, and a plant of our choosing. After a few lessons on cell division and microscope usage, we got right to it.

The first main part of our project was planting our plants. We (my partner Luciano and I) dug up some dandelion roots, cut ‘em up, and planted the chunks of root in some soil, praying for them to grow. Spoiler alert, they didn’t. After that disappointment, we hoped our personal choice plant, garlic, would end up growing somewhat better.

The garlic planting was MUCH better. We planted the cloves and within a few days, the garlic sprouted beautifully.

The second main part was microscope usage. To examine mitosis in action, we cut off some of the root tips, and do some standard procedure. The procedure involves taking a root-tip, soaking it in hydrochloric acid to kill it and stop the cell growth, and soaking it in blue stain to make it more visible under a microscope. Under the microscope, we found some great mitosis photos.

Finally, what would a science post be without curricular competencies. These are some I (and the teacher) feel we excelled at.

Select and Use Appropriate Equipment

This competency involves making good use of the equipment given to you. In our case, it featured correctly using the microscopes and following the cloning procedures. In my opinion, we did great work with the microphones and got some great pictures. We also assembled out slides perfectly, using the acid, distilled water, and blue stain very well.

Transfer and Apply Knowledge to New Situations

This habit involves using prior knowledge and using it in completely new situations. I think a perfect example of using this competency well is when we took our knowledge of using the acid and blue stain procedure we learned to analyze the dandelion and garlic root tips. I think we definitely used the procedure very well, other than maybe not using enough dye.

Formulate Physical or Mental Models

The last competency I want to talk about is formulate physical or mental models. In terms of our project, this involves taking photographs of the Mitosis in our root tips, and organizing them into charts plotting out the stages of Mitosis. Interphase, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase, and Cytokinesis. We made some great charts involving the stages of Mitosis, and I think that was a great contributor to our success in this competency.

So, that brings the clone army to an end. I enjoyed this project, as it allowed me to get hands-on and actually make a physical model.

This is Jason, signing off.