Let’s Get Riel

Cheefer Kiefer on June 20, 2018

Part 1: Comic Book.

Our first part of this project was to read the Louis Riel comic book by Chester brown. While reading this book we had to create a chapter summery for each chapter. In each summery we had to answer a few questions like who had the power in this chapter and how Louis Riel was portrayed.

Heres my first Summery to give you an exsample of what they where like.

“In part one John a McDonald pans to buy Rupert’s land in December from the Hudson’s bay company. This creates a problem for the red river settlement because half of them are French and might not want to join Canada. So when they send McDougall to govern the fort he is met with opposition because the people want to vote in there leader so they decided to get 400 men to hold the fort from the government. So McDougall make a proclamation with a fake signature saying that the fort is Canada’s. Then riel decided to execute Scott do make his men gain his respect. After that they have to leave because the Canadian government is coming.

In this section of the book Louis Riél was vary stern and a good leader but also sometimes didn’t make the best choices. But the power in the part was to the government because they where able to force them to leave the settlement.”

Part 2: How Dose Power Alter Relationships?

During this part of the project we had to answer the question “How dose power alter relationships?” so I desided to answer this question by giving an exsample of a historical figure and how they altered a relationship. My historical charicter was John A. McDonald and I was going to animate his story.

Topic

At the start we had to pick a person in power and a group of peaple who are effected by that persons power. They also had to be a Canadian. So science no one else’s wanted to do John A mecdoanld I did and I chose the First Nations as the group of peaple he effected.

Research

Next I had to do a lot of research on John a McDonald’s life this part wasent that hard but it was pretty time consuming.

Story/Storybord

The last step befor we could start animating was to make a story board so we could have a rough draft of what the video would look like. Once we were done the story bord we could start animating.

Animate

For the animation proses we had to have at least three drafts eac of them being better and longer than the last and for the last one we got a bunch of critique.

Our first draft was only 30 seconds but it dident need to have audio.

Our second class needed to be at least one minute and have audio.

The final one needed to be over a minute and be a complete animated and audio story.

Part 3: Reflection

Now that my project is done I need to reflect on what I did well and what I could improve on.

I feel that I made a entertaining and engaging story that the class enjoyed. I feel that my use of comedy in the video was used well and apropietly. I also think my video was a good length.

A few thing that I cloud have done better where making the animation more fluid. I also could have added music to the video to fill up empty air.

S-L-C you next year

Cheefer Kiefer on June 19, 2018

TPOL 2018

This will be my last TPOL (Transitional post of leaning) so I better make it a good one. In this post, I will be talking about my strengths and weaknesses and what I have learned this year. So without further ado:

What I learned

I will show what I have learned this year by giving a few examples of projects that I believe show my learning the best.

D.I.

D.I. was a project that showed my strength as a team leader and my learning a team member. At the start of D.I. I was a very good team leader but not a very good team member. What I mean by that is I was good at giving instructions but not too good at listening to them; a skill that I learned as the project went on. The problem was that for this project my group had two good team leaders, me and Emily, so during this project I had to learn how to just be a part of a team and not just a team leader.

Atoms Science Project

During our Atoms science project, I learned a lot about perseverance and determination. I learned this thing by having parts of animating or video editing not working over and over and learning how to cope and not give up to get it done. I also learned it helps to have someone to do the project with because then you can get it done faster and they can motivate you if you are feeling like you cant get it done.

Battles and Rebellions In Canada’s history

In this project, I learned how to edit videos and work with limited time and resources. This project helped me learn how to edit videos because we didn’t have very good source material so we had to make up for it in post-production. The first problem that I had to overcome was the lack of people for filming so I had to create an entire army with just two people. I also had to learn how to add green screen effects and sound effects to make the project better.

The Reasons why…

There are a few reasons why I love PLP and there’s a few why I don’t and I will share these with you to help improve the program in the future.

What I really like…

I like how the program challenges you to think. l like how it helps learn team building and group skills. I love the learning tool of the iPad. I love the interesting projects. I like the idea of field studies.

What can be improved…

The amount of work that we get over the year gradually increases and the expectations but I feel the amount of time per project decreases. For me, the increase in time pressure reduces the quality of my work. One way to solve this problem could be to plan the year so that time for projects is more evenly spread out over the year. Another problem that I have with PLP is that some of the projects take up too much of our free time. There were times where it wasn’t possible for me to have a healthy amount of free time with the work that was assigned. I found it was hard to balance school with other demands of a healthy lifestyle.

The End.

Overall this term I set out to learn how to tell a story, to ask for help, and motivate my self. Out of those three things, I feel that I learned best how to tell a story. This showed in all my projects. I showed my determination through getting my animation and blue sky done. Finally, I showed that I could ask for help by asking for a bit less work when it got too stressful near the end of the year.

Comic WWI

Cheefer Kiefer on May 18, 2018June 17, 2018

This project about how did WWI impact Canada’s identity was pretty interesting. It started on March 16th and ended on May 17th it was interesting also because during April we went on a trip to the capital and in turn the Canadian war museum.

Our first part of this unit was reading a book over spring break. I chose the book Generals die in bed it was about a Canadian soldier on the frontline of WWI and his tragic story.

After we finished that book we came back to school we went on a field trip to our capital Ottawa. During this field trip, we learned about the battle of vimmy ridge with vas the Canadian army’s first major wartime victory. We also went to the Canadian war museum and saw a lot of cool artifacts and my favorite part of the war museum was the military vehicles collection in the basement of the museum.

After we came back to Vancouver after the trip we had to make a comic book about a technology or event in WWI and present it to grade 6-7 kids.

My comic book was about artillery in WWI and how it impacted each side of the war.

My first and second page was an overview page and about the history of artiliry.

The third and fourth page are about the impact of artillery and a story about someone who was impacted by artillery during the war.

Overall this project was pretty long being over three months but it was one of my favorite projects of this year. I learned a lot about WWI and comic book creation during this unit.

I’m D.I-ing to go to provincials

Cheefer Kiefer on May 8, 2018June 18, 2018

Well, it’s that time of year again. Recently the PLP classes of grade 8, 9 and 10 competed in Destination Imagination and it went ok. It’s a competition where teams are assigned a task and must create a presentation which involves the solution of the task, it is a global event and offers a fun and competitive experience.

This year was my fifth year doing D.I and it went alright, I just think our group could have done better at the competition but overall we did ok. So let me explain what our group did for our challenge this year in di.

I was in the maze craze challenge with Jamie, Emily, Kai, and Lucas. Our group had to make a maze traveler to navigate a maze chosen at random. We needed a prop to transform in the maze and a prop for the maze traveler to extract from the maze. For the transformation prop, Emily built some moving dragon wings that would act as a costume to go with her character. For the prop removal, we had a cardboard apple with a magnet which was to be picked by the maze traveler. The maze traveler itself was an RC car that was able to navigate the maze successfully. In the regional tournament, these all worked really well except we forgot to fully extract the apple from the maze.

I think that we did a really good job in regionals especially as our team pulled a lot of stuff together at the last minute. In the last week, we revised the majority of our stuff and a lot of us weren’t in the best mindset for it. Our team had a few issues regarding decision making and work completion in my opinion. We had a few things that weren’t completed until the last week and we had little time to fully go over our script and performance together. I think that this showed in our performance and it may have hindered us a bit. We have been working hard on our lines since regionals and we are going to have them all memorized by provincials.

My jobs for this year’s di I had to build the maze Traveler, be our team’s organizer, drive the maze Traveler, narrate and paint some backgrounds sounds like a lot I know. During the performance, I think I did well but we did have a few problems where someone forgot their line or a prop fell over or didn’t work properly. We did get second so that’s plus side even if it was out of two teams.

I think the props we made looked good with the story that we came up with. The story was Norse themed and had backdrops and a soundtrack made by Lucas. Other than the soundtrack needing a few more tracks nothing really needed to be fixed in regard to the story which followed a chief as he embarks on a quest to save his village.

Overall I really enjoyed Destination Imagination provincials went pretty well but there’s a lot that I could improve on and would do better for next time.

Have a nice TRIP. See you next FALL.

Cheefer Kiefer on February 26, 2018February 27, 2018

I got invited to be on the Illest road trip of all time. It’s an show where you go on a road trip to any location you want but you have a budget of 18,000 dozers and you have to at least spend 17,500. On this trip you get to choose up to 7 peaple to take with you. The show hoasts give you some options for vehicles lodging so that you can price out your road trip quite easily. Let’s get planning.

Step 1: Location

Ok so the first thing we need to do is find out where we should go. We have to start at NYC U.S.A. I choose to go to my house. I know it sounds wired but I’ve never explored the us so I thought a coast to coast drive through the use could be fun.

I went to google maps and started plotting. My trip looked a little like this.

So you might be thing well what is there to see along this trip well I’ll tell you.

The first place I will visit will be Times Square

After that I’ll go to the shicago cloud gate.

and finally I will visit the Seattle Space Needle

Step 2: Math

A big part of the illest road trip of all time is that I have to calculate my spending for the trip to be within 500 Dollars of my 18,000 budget. For lodging, food and bags whe where given a few options.

I desided to travel as luxuriously as possible. So that worked out to be 700$ a day on Lodging and Food plus 300$ for the Baggage.

Now we need to figure out witch car I should use. The show host gave us a selection of these cars.

Science I’m traveling in style I want to use the Lamborghini. The Lamborghini cost 160$ and gets 8/13 mpg so far f gas costs 2.80 a g. So my trip is 5,978 miles long so devided by 13 to get 469 x 2.80 gets you 1,288$ Dolores for gas on the entire trip. So I will be spending 160$ dollars a day plus 1,288$ on gas.

Each days costs me 860$ + 1588 for gas and bags. So if my trip takes 19 days it would cost me 17,928. I’ve made some graphs to help show my budgeting.

Step 3: Sponsors

So for this road trip three companies offers to sponsor our trip Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Snapple we had to figure out witch one was the best using liner equations. For my trip Pepsi was the best sponsor for this trip becuse in 19 day it would pay me 250 Dollars.

heres the graph that I used to figure out that.

Nation Puzzle

Cheefer Kiefer on February 20, 2018March 6, 2018

We recently wrapped up our latest socials project on confederation and Canadian heritage and I have left it feeling pretty confident. We took a look into the forming of Canada as a nation and how it became what it is today. The main part of this project was the Heritage Minutes that we did. These were based off 1 minute videos made by Historica Canada which are used to inform people of great and influential people or events that were a part of Canadian heritage. We watched many of these and Learned how to make one. We made these heritage minutes in groups of 3 or 4. My group was Alivia Daniel marshal and me.

This project was us researching confederation and Canadian history. We interviewed the chief editor from Historica Canada and learned how to make Heritage Minutes. We learned about John A Macdonald and how he and many others brought the British controlled provinces into one nation and we looked at some short story’s involving Canadian history.

Our groups vidoe was about the battle of St.Eustash. The battle of St. Eustache was a small French resistance hiding out in a church fighting against the British. It wasn’t much of a battle. The British desided to set the church on fire. The French where smoked out and shot when thay left the church.

My role on this story was the general who lead the British attack. I also did a lot of green screen editing. Since we dident have an army of actors I desided to green screen two peaple so that we could copy and pasted to make it look like an army.

We filmed the battle at 3 difrent scenes the filed, one of our houses and a old church. The filming took about 2 or 3 days to do but it worked out well in the end.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5eJDlXxo-E

What I learned from this unit.

i learn about Canadian history

l learned about residential schools, politics, how country’s are formed, how to tell a story through video, how story’s change how we see the world.

mmmmmmmmm…POL

Cheefer Kiefer on January 23, 2018January 23, 2018

Wow, it’s already 2018! It seems like only yesterday I was in grade 8 (I still think I am sometimes). Since I walked back through the school doors in September, I have been building, learning, creating, and having fun in PLP. Now that I have done all this amazing learning, you might want to know what I have done so far and what I plan to learn next.

So what have I done so far? I have gone to Calgary, made a monster (Frankenstuffy), learned about hot air, crafted some cards, made some revaluations and “star”-ted some “wars”.

Since the focuse of this post is not to dwell in the past it’s to think ahead and show how I can improve my learning, I won’t go into to much detail – I have other blog posts for that.

So what now? I’ve learnt a lot but I still have a lot more to learn. I am here to show off what I learned and ask some questions to help improve my learning for the year to come.

Let’s start off with Frankenstuffy. I think this project showed a lot of how I learn and what my strengths and weaknesses are. Let’s start off with my strengths. I felt that during this project I was very invested into it. I was wondering why I felt more excited to do this project than most other ones. I figured it was the amount of creative expression I could have on the project. For example with my Revolution metaphor machine project, it had to be about one pre chosen revolution, so I had less influence on the outcome. With other projects such as D.I where I have full creative expression, I found myself more motivated and happy to undertake a new project.

This leads me into one of my weaknesses: motivation when the goring gets tough. I find that when something goes wrong or the project is not as interesting, it is lot harder to complete it. Some things that I think I could do to improve how well I keep on task and motivated is set aside one hour every day after school for homework and chores just to make sure that evryday I at least get one hour of homework done if I have any.

Another one of my weaknesses is not asking for help. I know that I’m having trouble with something but I don’t ask I think this is becuse I feel that if someone helps or spell checks it takes away from my contribution to the project. One way that i think would make me feel more inclined to ask other people for help on my project would be to be near peaple who want to help. So then I’m in an inviroment that encourages help not in the basement alone.

Now that I’ve talke about how I learn I want to ask you for some help. I have a question for you and it’s about my learning and how I can improve for the year to come. The question is, Out of my weaknesses witch one is the most important to overcome.

Thank you for teaching me how to learn.

Russian Revaluation

Cheefer Kiefer on December 6, 2017March 12, 2018

So we finished our metaphor mashine unit. You might be thinking “What is a metaphor mashine?”. A metaphor mashine is a Rube Goldberg a shine that has an event of action of meaning represented by the section of the Rube Goldberg mashine. So our metaphor mashine was about revolutions and spasificly we learned about crane Brintons revaluationary revalution theroy. His theory was that you could see revaluations befor thay stoped and so there would be no chaos.

Crane briont wrote a book called the anatomy of a revaluation. This book compared revaluations to desises. He said that revaluations had a few stages one where the revaluation started. This stage was when there was something Rong that needed to be changed. The second was where the revaluation started to happen and the final was where the revaluation ended in ithere peace or war.

so now that you know the history of this project you might want to hear what we actually did.

We were a asignd the Russian revaluation. The Russian revaluations included the start of WW1 and the rise of the Soviet Union. Another part of this project was that we had to give our mashine a steam punk design for the English portion and it also had to include circuits for the math portion.

Now that you know the history of this assignment here’s the history that we researched.

Now that you’ve seen our video I’ll give a play by play of what happens. The first step of the revolution was Bloody Sunday, so to represent this we had dominos falling down. We chose dominos to show Bloody Sunday, because the dominos are a metaphor for all the people who fell as they died protesting.

The second step in the revolution was World War One. A metaphor for the beginning of World War One, was a book falling. This symbolizes the quick snap that surprised many when World War One started.The book lands on a wire completing a circuit.

This triggers a pulley, which is a metaphor for the soviets rising to power. The pulley also raises a red flag symbolizing the rise of Vladimir Lenin, which is a red flag for the rest of Russia.

When the flag goes up it knocks a ball down a ramp. This is a metaphor for
the provisional government falling down, and how russia is going down hill.

The ball rolls down and hits a cup full of confetti, and knocks it into a fan. This is to represent all the people who died in the Russian civil war. The confetti is people and the fan is well, bad news.

Though the fan does blow open a flag, representing the beginning of the Soviet Union.

So thats the end of my revolution project, I hope you learned something new about the Russian revolution!

Frankenstein Frankenstuffy*

Cheefer Kiefer on November 7, 2017November 17, 2017

So recently I finished one of the biggest projects in PLP other than D.I. This project was called Frankenstuffy. It was about how animals adapt to an environment and about the matter cycles (ex:Water cycle). It was also about one question – who is in control, people or the environment?

Our first step in this project was to read the Martian which is a book written in epistolary style like a diary. While we were reading it we had to fill out these sheets about our knowledge of the story. During this book I felt the the people were in control becuse the people survived and beat the environment.

Our second step in this project was to create a a 6 part epistolary story about an animal and how it adapts to a change in the environment. So for example if there is a flood it would grow wings. I chose a moose for my story, my story took place in the Saint Lawrence lowlands. The change in the environment was a flood and my moose grew goose wings to adapt.

After we finished making the story we had to turn it into a script for a four to five minute video. The script that I made was around 1000 words when my 6 part story was around 3000.

When we finished the script we had to create a storyboard for each seen. The storyboard had to include what audio what camera transitions and what action. We also had to do a drawing for each one.

Finally when the storybord was all done we could start filming our video. For my video I went to the trails near my house and took pictures of all the cool screeners for my background. Then I took pictures of my stuffy and green screened them over my backgrounds. Finaly I did my voice over and editing and my video was done.

During this project I felt my video creating and editing skills inproved a lot just from trial and error. I also felt my brainstorming and story writing skills inproved. Also I felt I know a lot more now about the matter cycles.