This was easily THE longest unit our PLP class has ever done. The Frankenstuffie Unit which all was answering one question Who’s in control, human’s or the environment? It was a combination of an ecology unit, math unit, geography unit, literary unit and English unit.
ECOLOGY
Ecology, the study of the interaction between living oraganisms. I’ll never be able to forget that. Anyways, the science piece of this frankenstuffie unit involved many worksheets on UV Rays, habitats, niches and the way our world is organized, right down to single organisms. When we had first started this lesson it didn’t seem to tie in extremely well into what we thought our end project was going to be but as we learned more about it we all realized it would be a crucial part of our frankenstuffie project. Since we were going to change history and take a changing environment which is being affected by human’s and take one animal form that area and have it adapt in a matter of minutes. In our frankenstuffie story we had to include our knowledge from our ecology studies and go into detail about our stuffie environment, for mine that was the forest surrounding St. Lawrence River. 
MATH
Ok, so how on earth does math tie into a project about an animal adapting to a human controlled environment? Well, let me tell you. For this math unit we learned all about surface area and volume of 3D shapes. Cylinders, rectangular prisms, cones, etc. etc. However, for our changing environment we needed an antagonist which would change and destroy it. Whether that was humans or some huge human created robot that could summon floods which caused more water to flow through the humans new hydro dam but along with it brought massive water damage and destruction to the forests ecosystem. That example had a lot of detail since I spent about two weeks developing that antagonist character. This robot was created out of 3D shapes found in my house, coke cans, chocolate boxes, toilet paper tubes and a field hockey stick grip case. Once created we had to have the final calculations for it, how much surface area did it have? What was it’s volume? All extremely strange and long calculations but eventually figured out.
GEOGRAPHY
This tied in perfectly with our ecology unit, since we also needed to study the actual landscape of our stuffies location as well as how the ecosystem worked. The St. Lawrence river area is a fairly populated region with few hills and a very rich flora and fauna.
Latitude : 45.333. Longitude : -73.500. Just in case you wanted the exact location.
This unit also involved learning about all the other areas and regions of Canada. Mainly focusing on the cordillera, the prairies, the Canadian Shield, the Great Lakes, the Atlantic and the lowlands.
ENGLISH
This was by far my favourite part of this monster of a unit. The writing and planning of our frankenstuffie video was all done in this part of the unit. We started off with writing eight epistolary stories, short stories in the form of journal entries or letters. As always we first had to plan out the story on a plot graph.
Thankfully we only had to do one of these for all of our stories, not one per episode, that would’ve just been insane. The general jist of my story is this: A porcupine has woken up on the bank of a river in a new area he doesn’t recognize, St. Lawrence River. He gets up and decides to go and explore, finds some food and decides to take a nap. Is woken up by a flood rushing through the forest, realizing he’s fairly slow he decides to start training, climbing trees and running often. After hours of training he adapts in the form of now having gorilla arms with the body of a porcupine still. Another flood comes and he sees a robot summoning it right before it happens. He goes, fights the robot and defeats him. Even with the villain gone the environment is too badly destroyed from water damage that all the animals areas forced to move out of the area. The environment wins. I’ll put the actual epistolaries below but feel free to skip over them, it’s quite a lot of reading but in my opinion it’s fairly interesting and I promise I’m not just saying that because I wrote it:
BACK TO THE BLOG POST
Moving on to the actual frankenstuffie project. The final video which tells the story of our frankenstuffie.
You pretty much just read a version of it, (if you did read all that) but I took all of that and compacted it, less detail making it easy to create the actual movie. For this video we had to pull from even last years learning, mostly for the planning. We needed to include the camera angles and kinds of shots we needed into our plot graphs as well as EXACTLY what we wanted to happen, all things we learned last year in our still photo unit. My video started off fairly rough and had to undergo multiple drafts, editing the voiceover, animation improvements, making it cleaner and smoother.
Be First to Comment