Ah, the PLP Summer Exhibition, a time for hard work, passion, and lots of rejection… Just like every other year, we completed the norms of Blue Sky such as looking at the LAUNCH Cycle, brainstorming ideas/running by pitch forms to our teachers, and being put in groups to create a special area dedicated to the theme of our projects. So these are all normal things we’ve done and have continued to do in PLP since grade 8 yet this Blue Sky was by far the most different one we’ve done so far…

But why was it different? (This year’s Winter Exhibition being an exception,) We did everything we normally did in PLP to prep for Blue Sky. The one thing was, we were introduced to the concept of constraint and learning how to work with it. So although we’ve obviously worked with some sort of constraints with every project and assignment we’ve ever done, we were used to the fact that Blue Sky could normally be whatever you wanted it to be. In previous years, we just got to focus on projects that interested us. We got to find problems which interested us (which would affect a group of people) and we were able to create anything we wanted to in order to present a solution. After having a solid project, THEN we would be put in groups of people with projects that have similar themes to our own and we would start preparing for the exhibition. 

This year, we were put in groups straight off the bat and we were given a selection of topics to pick from the UN Sustainable Goals site.

I was originally paired up with Kyle, Parker, Ryan, and Willa but it was eventually whittled down to just Ruby, Willa, and I. So we had our groups and NOW was the time to pick our topics. There were a lot of things we could’ve worked with but my group seemed to lean more towards “Quality Education” so I went for that as well. So now we had our groups and our project and now, it was time to create our projects. 

This year has been one of the most important years to use the LAUNCH Cycle as it was vital to the specific work which we were doing because we had to create realistic projects that could really cause changes in the world. If you didn’t know, the LAUNCH Cycle stands for 

L-Look, Listen, and Learn

A-Ask Questions

U-Understand

N-Navigate Ideas

C-Create a Prototype

H-Highlight

So with that said, here was my process of the LAUNCH Cycle for this year’s Summer Exhibition Blue Sky…

LOOK, LISTEN, AND LEARN:

I struggled quite a bit with this aspect of the cycle as we were told to look at the specific goals of the UN Sustainable Goals site and to sort of find a driving question from those goals but I kind of went a different way at first. So I was looking at my topic (Quality Education) pretty abstractly and I wasn’t necessarily taking the time to really understand what my topic was and what the main goals of it were. I focused more on getting an idea out right away that dealt with my topic than identifying underlying problems that education faces and why it’s facing it. This was challenging for me to realize as I kept on getting sent back but eventually I found a specific goal which interested me and I was encouraged by my teachers to look at the WHY of my goal. In my case, I wanted to focus on the goal of reducing drop out rates for boys and girls as a whole. I did a little bit of research to learn WHY students drop out so much and I learned that a lack of academic support can lead to a student dropping out as they’d rather leave school than risk the failure. This touched upon me a little bit as I’ve felt like I didn’t know what I was doing in school and I wasn’t sure if I was taking the right steps to achieve my goals for the future. Although the thought of dropping out hasn’t really entered my head before, I was completely able to relate to the students who have gone to those lengths for the reason I mentioned. With that in mind, I was ready to move on to the next step…

ASK QUESTIONS: 

So now, I had to come up with a solution. After I had figured out which problem I wanted to pursue, I immediately came up with an idea which I thought could really work; I would create a platform that allows students to easily navigate through different resources in which they think they need in order to succeed in school (e.g. If a student struggled in math, they would be able to easily find a math tutor in their area based on a certain price range). Although I still think it’s a good idea, it seemed a little too similar to the myBlueprint site we’ve been using in our Planning 10 course, except that myBlueprint can do a lot more than help students find a mentor. It also seemed a little too big for a project we only had a few weeks to accomplish. As you might guess, it wasn’t approved, BUT I was given a counter-project. I spent so much time arguing why my project was different and better than myBlueprint that I didn’t realize that I could just IMPROVE myBlueprint. I already knew that lots of students had trouble with the site and that we could all benefit from some improvements, so why not just make that my project? I could create mockups that would show changes to the site and I could send it to myBlueprint to see if they would change anything! This excited me a lot as I knew that a lot of students like me who feel like they need some extra guidance from time-to-time could benefit a LOT from some improvements to the site. My idea got approved and now, I was ready to start the creation process!

UNDERSTAND:

There were two things that could make my project 

1. Beneficial to students
2. Realistically make a change

One thing was being able to interview students about the site. The other thing was that I had to be able to know the site inside-out in order to understand what needed to be changed. Interviewing students was fairly straightforward as I simply asked them what they thought about the site, what challenges they faced with it, and whether or not they had any ideas for changes. I recorded all the answers and I came to the conclusion that the most common theme was how difficult it is to navigate their site as well as understanding specific functions of the site. As for knowing the site well enough to understand what needed to change, I basically dedicated a few hours one day to deeply analyze the site, taking notes for EVERY page to see what could be removed, added, or changed (also taking in the students’ ideas into consideration). After that, I felt like a had a vast amount of knowledge and information at my disposal to start thinking about how I would accomplish my product. 

NAVIGATE IDEAS:

So I had all this information, but I still wasn’t so sure for how I would be going about my project. I started off by putting all my notes together which consisted of changes that I would like to see as well as changes that other students would like to see. Everything was organized into sections such as additions, subtractions, changes, general notes, etc. I compiled all of this onto a “ticket” which I learned how to do during my job shadow funny enough. A ticket is essentially a document in which you can identify problems with things such as a company product and give brief instructions for routing, resources, and overall goals in order to improve the product. By the end, this had turned into my first prototype as it was the structure of changes that I was going to be using to change the site and it essentially described all the changes that I was planning on making to the site as well as how the mockup would look like. 

CREATE A PROTOTYPE:

Now came the hardest part, creating the main aspect of the project… So I already knew what needed to be done in order to do my project; create a mockup of each page showing the changes that have been made to the site. The problem was, I wasn’t so sure how to go about it as I’ve never done mockups before and everything was very new for me. I ended up finding a program called Balsamiq 3 which essentially is a tool specifically meant for mockups. Although there was a learning curve to it, I ended up getting pretty good at using Balsamiq and I figured that I could make a whole new website from scratch rather than just drawing on screenshots of the current myBlueprint. With that in mind, I started the long process of re-creating myBlueprint. Everything ended up going pretty smoothly but it definitely was very time consuming as I was constantly coming up with new ideas and realizing that some things wouldn’t work. I took things slow though I went from page to page, creating versions of the site that us students want to see. After I was done, I sent my mockups to myBlueprint and awaited for a response in order to create my final draft…

HIGHLIGHT: 

AND THEY RESPONDED! To be fair, I had established connection with the myBlueprint team in order to give them a heads-up about the project and what I would be asking of them. Luckily, they were interested enough to offer me support and I have to give props to them for responding so quickly. Anyways, the results were in and they had a final verdict… Although they didn’t touch upon some things such as some formatting suggestions (worth a shot), they DID change a lot of things which will prove to be very useful for students who use myBlueprint. The two big changes which I would like to highlight is that they:

1. Are making changes to the site in order to make things clearer to students (e.g. they are clarifying some things such as how the “suggested _____” functions will now be “in demand ____” due to the fact that the suggestions weren’t based on a students’ results.”
2. They also changed a lot of the problems that were in the High School Planning page as there were a few errors in the functions such as how it showed that Seycove had AP courses even though it doesn’t.

Overall though, they’re doing a lot more to make it easier for students to understand what the purpose of each function on the site is and what the point is for each page. This is awesome as like I mentioned, the difficulty of navigating understanding the site was the main problem for most students so I’m very glad that they will be focusing most of they’re “changing efforts” into making the site more user friendly. 

We didn’t just have our projects though. We would also have our dedicated areas! This year, things were a little bit harder to organize than other years as we were a little pressed for time and the new order of which we were doing things for this year’s Blue Sky threw us off just a little bit. Either way, there was no point in sitting there and complaining about how hard Blue Sky was going to be this year… Life’s hard! Anyways, we were finally put into our groups and just like every year, the groups were determined via similar projects. Another difference about this year though was that WE were the older kids now. WE had to lead the groups to victory. WE were responsible in making sure that everyone knew what they were doing! Although it sounded kind of intimidating at first, it was pretty simple as everyone was pretty capable and knew what they were doing, even if it was some of their first times doing Blue Sky. That’s why we did an exercise when we first got our groups where we had to basically figure out what our section would be looking like and how everything was going to be pulled off. I guess it wasn’t as much of an exercise as it was a time to plan, but to each his own. Anyways, my group consisted of:

GRADE 8:

–Lucy

–Jason

–Gabriella

GRADE 9:

–Jessie

–Kailey

–Robin

GRADE 10:

-Me

–Parker

–Willa

There’s not too much to say about this portion of Blue Sky as it was fairly straightforward. We were assigned our section (half of the Annex) and we organized our group to bring food, decorations, and things that could make our area look extra “school-ish” as our theme was “Quality Education.” The one thing we struggled with is that it’s ironically difficult to make a classroom look like, well, a classroom! In the end, we needed to clarify what our area was by making a sign but aside from that, I think we all pulled-through in making a classroom!

To end this post off, I just want to bring up how extraordinarily cool it feels to have your work make some kind of change in the world. Although it might be as small as some changes to a website, there’s a lot of people that will be affected by these changes whether they notice or not. And sure, I didn’t solve the problem of dropping out but that’s not really important. What’s important is that my work was able to reach out to the great big world and make some actual changes for the BETTER! It’s something I’ve never gotten to experience before and although this might’ve been a tough Blue Sky, I’m just glad to know that somewhere, someone is actually benefiting from the little changes my projects made. I mean, that’s something, right?