Another unit come and gone! We studied the brave, Louis Riel. A Métis leader and hero who fought for the rights of his people right t’ill the end. Let’s pretend that we’ve stepped into a time portal together and, for the sake of the exercise, we are both Métis.

We’ve just stepped outside of the time machine and have entered a world where Canadians are trying to take out the Métis by hunting them down and taking over their land. As a Métis, your living off the lands natural resources, but as the buffalo supply begins to shrink, the Métis need to come up with a solution to fight the Canadian government and secure their rights. Therefore, we turn to a man who shares a similar goal in mind, Louis Riel.

Currently living in Montana, Riel returns to Canada to help lead his people, they strike multiple attacks on Canadians and return victorious with the triumphant feeling of killing some of the government’s men. However, their bullet supplie starts to run dangerously low and Louis comes up with a solution. He decides to give himself up to the Canadians for the sake of his people. Riel is then tried and found to be guilty of high treason and was therefor hanged by the neck until dead.

To help us understand the full story of Louis Riel, we all read a Comic Book written by Chester Brown about the life of Louis Riel from when he became an interpreter for the Métis and Canadians to when he gave his final prayer as he was about to be hanged.

Now that you have a brief overview of Louis Riel’s story, hopefully you can see how power can influence people for good or for bad. The Canadians at the time held most of the power and were therefore able to create laws and buy up most of the Métis land in exchange for simple things such as horses and pemmican. However, Riel also held power. Unlike the government, he used it to inspire people to fight for what they thought was right. To fight for equality and fairness. For this unit’s project, we focused on powerful people such as Louis Riel. Each of us then chose one powerful person in history to research about and, eventually create a short animation to explain their story and who held the power. I decided to choose the Komagata Maru Incident, and, although not a person, the Komagata Maru went through quite a bit to fight the powerful government.

The process of the animation creation started with a few days of intense researching about my character and their story. I learned about Gurdit Singh, the man who owned the Komagata Maru as well as the Continuous Passages Act which stopped many people from immigrating to Canada. After taking multiple notes and researching my topic, I then wrote a paragraph in the form of a short story before creating a storyboard to plan out my animation.

I’m really proud of my story board because I put a lot of effort into creating it and added a lot of detail to my drawings to get an idea of how I wanted to animate the people. Finally, it was time to begin animating my story. I used the apps iMovie and FlipaClip to create the film. The actual animation creation process was long as it took many many drawings to make a character simply do a quick move and I did three different drafts before coming up with a good finished product. Below is my final video about the Komagata Maru which summarizes all my research about the incident and what happened. The video may be short, but explains who held the power at the time of the even, the Canadians. I hope you enjoy!

I spent a lot of time and hard work on this animation project. Although, if I were to change one thing for next time, it would be to redo my voiceover so it is t so muffled.

Well, another successful project done! Thank you so much for reading and stay tuned for more updates of my school life: Flow Through School, My Journey Through The Process.

Numbers after numbers after numbers. This to the power of that times that to the power of that=confusion. Welcome to the occasionally fun and confusing world of exponents. We’ve officially dived into the mathematical side of Scimatix and started off the math year with studying exponents. To add some extra pizzazz to the fun, our project assignment was to create a unique card game that focused on the Exponential Laws. We were paired off (I was partners with Fraser) and we began to brainstorm a card game.

Now, to create the game, we first had to understand the different exponent laws and how we could incorporate them into a card game. Below, I’ve attached a photo of all the exponent laws. I searched up quite a few charts but found this one the easiest to understand.

After understanding these laws and brainstorming multiple ideas for a possible card game, Fraser and I created a game called Bankrupt. Basically, the goal of the game was to be less in debt than the other opponents. Below are the rules to the game and a few photos of the cards we created!

The Bankrupt card game is a great party game as it can be played by multiple players at once as long as you have a good supply of cards. Fraser and I demonstrated different laws and math skill by creating a short and simply math problem or situation on each card. This could include having to pay your total balance to the power of a certain number or so on! We did our best to ensure that the game had a clear points system and a clear winner at the end and that it demonstrated all the different exponent laws.

The card game went great and we got to present it to the grade ten PLP students as well! The only thing I would change for next time would be to clearing a few of the cards so that they’re easier to understand. At the end of our card game Presentation, Fraser and I filled out a rubric form to ensure that we met all the competencies such as creating a clear card game with clear instructions, visuals and winner and that included all four exponent laws.

Lastly, to wrap up this math unit, I created a unit end mind map to summarize everything I learned and the original questions I asked.