DRIVING QUESTION

Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?

This year has been one exciting, hectic, project filled year. As a student and as a learner I would say that this year has been outstanding in one aspect in particular, learning. Every year I never realize how much I have learned until the very end where I reflect on the year, and in astonishment try to remember all of the different project that we did.

I constantly think when picking projects for this post, wow I cant believe that that happened this year. I think that, without putting words in your mouth, the teachers don’t even realize how much work that they have taught. One moral that I learned from the Louis Riel book by Chester Brown is that knowledge is power, and to actually make something of your life you need to use your knowledge to your advantage. The outcome  could be your source of income, the people you influence, or the constant chase of happiness, it will help you in some way. knowledge is like the cheat book of life, without it you won’t pass the test, because life is difficult and and even if you study really, really, really hard you still wouldn’t be able to pass it. 

At the very beginning of the year we when on a field study in Calgary. On September 9th we debarked on a once in a life time journey to Calgary. To see the sites, to walk the path of ancient historians, and most importantly to learn. Some of the stops on this trip where incredibly interesting and like I said before once in a life time experiences. Even if we tried to relive the experiences once again it would not be possible because of weather, time of day or even the lucky of how nice the employees at the time. Our main assignment on this trip was to create three videos. The first video was about a fictional story that you had to create in a ghost town.

This video was exceptionally hard because of how I was raining on the actually day of the filming and we didn’t have time to finish our movie. That meant that in the next few day searching for a piano to finish our final scene. The second video is about a fictional story made in the setting of a enchanted forest.

The third video was a non-fiction video about a town on the trip. The town that I chose was Drumheller, a small dusty town that was built up on oil revenue. One cool aspect about the town is that it is now based around the collection of dinosaur fossils. Many esteemed archaeologists use the area as one of the major archaeological sites in canada. 

The next project that we did was a science project called the card game project. I liked the card game project for many reasons. One of the main reasons I like the project was because of the artistic elements that it had to offer. You were able to create you own card backs and fronts so that the cards were fully personalized. For my cards I decided to be extra artistic by not only hand drawing the cards but also making, and printing them out in colour. On the back of the cards I drew an eye behind sheet metal, and the fronts were much like a basic deck of cards, except for the new symbols and colours that I added.  I learned a lot from this project, including it’s stem algebra. You cold use my cards to play a fairly basic algebra game that could be traded like a trading card game. 

Project Frankenstuffie, was probably the most complicated projects in my PLP history. It wasn’t only complicated because of how it was a fiction non fiction story, but also because you needed to use stuffies. Now you can see how this project could get very silly very fast. Unfortunately, that was a little bit of an restraint, because it couldn’t be silly. Even though on one hand this project is about a stuffy that physically morphs or adapts to its surroundings by changing its physical features.

Though on the other hand its about matter cycles a some what complex scientific theory. So basically you had to keep your story between a fine line of fiction and non fiction, whiteout it being too silly or to serous and boring. When I was creating my Frankenstuffie it was quite a struggle to find the right stuffed animal to use, your not just going to find a beluga stuffie at your local toy story. It was actually quite hard to track down the stuffie that I had for the actual video. This project was the first project of the year that we used the Launch Cycle for. I think the Frankenstuffie project really raised the bar for how our well made our projects really have to be. 

The final project of 2017, was a very creative, multi subject project based around four different elements. The first element was Revolutions, the second was Crain Brinton’s Theory, the third was steampunk ascetic, and the fourth was circuitry. Together this unrelated elements made an amazing project, that was not only entertaining for the creator, but also interesting for the viewer. I picked the French Revolution because it was the one that interested me the most. Next we had to pick five to eight different events from our revolution. For our first metaphor machine element we picked the 1789 storming of Bastille.

This was the first big event in the French Revolution showing the incubation stage, that’s when something out of the ordinary happens and the people were just getting ready for what was about to happen. the second metaphor machine element is the forming of the jacobin club which shows intellectual opposition, this is where the people speak against the government.

The Next element is the 1791 flight of Varennes, this is when the king tried to run away from the revolution that he saw coming. This was an act of class division and moving into the moderate stage of a revolution, it was also a crisis stage this I will talk about later in the four steps to Crain Brinton’s theory. The fourth element to our machine is about Robespierre a Revolutionary leader, he was overthrown and locked up in jail in 1794 showing the crisis stage and a radical revolution. Our last element shows the end of the revolution and the lives lost during it. The revolution ended in 1799 with Napoleon Bonaparte coming in to power. Like I stated before, in this project we also learned about Crain Brinton’s theory and the steam punk athletic. For more information on these two topics resort to my earlier blog called Metaphor Machine: The Last Project of 2017. 

During our history lessons, we worked on a project called the Heritage Minute Project. Coming from the US, I had never seen a Heritage Minute before, but if you were born and raised in Canada, you have probably seen many. When I watched my first Heritage Minute, I didn’t know what to expect, although the name is pretty self explanatory. Basically, it’s a minute of video that tells a story of people, places, or events that are important to Canadian history. Over the weeks during this unit, we watched many Heritage Minutes. Each Heritage Minute was successfully able to cover a person’s biggest accomplishments or a life changing event in just one minute.

The main characteristic of the project was creating our own Heritage Minute. In the creation process, we had to follow a timeline of assignments. These included a story, a script, fact checking, filming and editing. We each picked a topic that occurred between 1700 and the early 1900s. Our topic was the Oregon Boundary Dispute or the Oregon Question as some may call it. We created the story on an ever-growing shared Google document. After a few drafts and lots of critique and revision our group came upon our final draft. Without the skills of my fellow partners we wouldn’t have been able to make a video with such high production quality as our final draft. 

The final project that I did this year was the Blue Sky Project. The Blue Sky Project is a PLP project that is based off of a 3M program where they give there employees the opportunity to spend a portion of their time researching the next new invention. Our teachers use the same idea, although there are some changes they do to the actual project to make it much more gradable.

One of the changes is the integration of the launch cycle into our work. The launch cycle is a six step proses starting with asking lots of questions, and ending in presenting to an audience. Im not going to go in-depth on the launch cycle because I have written a post directly related to the topic.  This year for Blue Sky, I decided to base my project on Fashion. I like Fashion an I think it plays a big part In my life.  An aspect of my final project that I liked was the accessibility of the product. I actually think that it could be used in a work scenario. Here is my final project:

In conclusion I think that this year has been very eventful and project filled. I still can’t believe all of the different thing I learned. I think my perseverance has decently shifted a few times this year and there is decently a causation between work and perseverance. This last term has decently stood out when it came to quality of work. Even though it has been difficult, I have decently stood my ground and kept up a high level of work. I look forward to next year and all of the new learning experiences I will have.