Bluesky 2019

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Bluesky 2019

Hello for the very last time.

This is now my 3rd exhibition since I missed the Winter one. However the other two (Bluesky 2018, Winter Exhibition 2017) I’d gone to hadn’t exactly gone well. This year I was determined to make my project better.

We’ve been working on this for about a month.

At the start I was completely out of ideas. But then I was in the middle of a soccer game and I got my toes stepped on. And boom.

I was going to make an insert for my cleats to protect my toes.

Launch cycle:

With my idea approved from the start, all I had to do was get my prototypes ready and look for materials.

While thinking about what to do for my materials I talked to my teacher who happened to also be a FIFA referee to discuss what would be legal and illegal. She said that as long as the ref couldn’t see what was inside the cleat or it wasn’t to hurt anybody else it was completely legal.

 

Highlighting and fixing:

The problem about my insert is it would crowd the foot to much so I made a drawing of a cleat that is wider at the tip to fit the insert better.

My presentation:

My teacher made us a template for Keynote that would let us show how we went through our process to get our prototypes.

https://youtu.be/blatE-hg7ko

The exhibition:

On our second last day of school, we had our PLP wide spring exhibition.

I think it went pretty well. I know lots of people who came by have kids who play soccer and have seen many times that their kids get their toes stepped on.

It was a really simple final prototype, and super cost-effective. It was a sponge with tape and cardboard cut into the shape of my foot.

 

Well, that’s it. See ya.

TPOL Time!! Going to Grade 10

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TPOL Time!! Going to Grade 10

Hello for the second last time this year.

This is now my second TPOL or Transitional Presentation of Learning.

I’m going to start off by saying that this year has not been my best. And I have learned from that. School is only going to get more challenging from now. I’ve been struggling pretty much the whole year and it hasn’t been until the third and last term that I have stepped up.

Highlights:

Humanities:

Personally I think my best projects for Humanities this year were my last two. WW1 and the Heritage minutes.

http://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/2019/06/19/ww1-billy-bishop/

http://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/2019/05/09/les-voyageurs-heritage-minutes/

Over the year in Maker and Humanities we’ve been heavily focusing on video so I feel my video making skills, from editing to filming have greatly improved. At the start of the year I was very uninterested in video making. As well as I like being the actor and not the filter or editor. I feel it’s what I’m best at, presenting/acting. So I tried to use that to my advantage for the year like when in groups choosing to be the actor as my main responsibility.

Maker:

Although it was a very rough start with maker, I think I’m finishing pretty strong. It took me awhile to find interest in Maker and I just kept snowballing. So I eventually had to sit down and grind out a few videos and blog posts to catch up. After that I’ve kept on top of things. I think I did pretty well in D.I. I could’ve improved if I would’ve focused a bit more at the start of the Unit but we ended up performing well.

https://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/2019/04/15/4-dis-4-podiums/

Areas for Improvement:

PGP:

PGP has been interesting. I going to be honest, I was extremely skeptical about it even a few months in. The 7 habits and goal setting especially I found not very helpful and boring. And productivity was not to far. But I started using Things more and more to get task done it’s helped, mostly because it gives a satisfaction that I finished a task every time that I check off on that little blue checkmark. I’ve doing goal setting since grade 7 and it really pisses me off for lack of a better way of saying it. No matter how or who assigns it to me. If I have a goal I truly want to accomplish I have no need of writing it down. So I could work on being more open-minded about it but we’ll see.

Scimatics:

I used really like math and science but this year, not gonna lie it’s been pretty boring and that has led to me not really wanting to do it. I put it into areas of improvement.

http://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/2019/04/01/a-lego-house-valuation-with-like-terms/

This year I will say has been fun. We all knew each other better, so socially it’s been great but academically I’ll just leave it a “meh”. So that’s my TPOL.

Well that’s it. See you soon.

WW1 — Billy Bishop

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WW1 — Billy Bishop

Hello. This is my last grade 9 humanities post. And it’s about WW1. Let’s get it.

For the past month and a bit we’ve been studying WW1.

Learning about WW1:

Like a lot of people know, the event that really started the war was when a Serbian Extremist killed the Archduke of the Austri0-Hungarian Empire, Franz Fernidand. Many other things led up to the war but when the Archduke got killed, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia came to Serbia’s aid, Germany was allied to Austria-Hungary and so it became a tangled and complicated war that would spread out across the world.

For a better explanation check out the video below.

https://youtu.be/U7EFh0Jl1Gg

A few of the boys and I made a short video about what happened in WW1 if it were a bar fight. It isn’t super clear but it helped us understand the conflict a bit better.

We’ve also watched plenty of videos from the YouTube channel “The Great War”. My teacher really seems to like the guy in it Indie Nidel.

The project:

We each had to create a video about a certain aspect of the war through a Canadian Perspective.

Other people who chose to do a stop motion were Kyle, Taylor, and Sam.

My video:

https://youtu.be/SkTIuk_aoEg

I decided to make a stopmotion, partly because I’d never done one and it looks cool and also I thought it would be the best way to show the information and story I was trying to bring to light.

Screenplay:

My screenplay was essentially my script. And it was almost the first screenplay I’ve written by myself for this year.

It served mostly as my script because I only had voiceovers in my video.

Cove Cliff visit:

As part of the end of the project we went to Cove Cliff to show our videos to the Grade 6 and 7s. My little brother is that age so I was expecting them to Behave similarly to him. Since the start of the project we had to focus on making our videos for a younger age. I presented to three groups. The first group was 2 boys who were really engaged but I could tell they were losing interest when I gave them questions to answer. I then went to a group of 8 girls. Honestly I felt very intimated in front of them. And my last group was a group of boys who were really interested in all the videos in they watched. However I could tell they were starting to lose interest. So talking to them about what they like to do outside of school worked a lot better.

Reflection:

I really enjoyed learning how to make the stop motion, it was a lot easier than I thought. I’d been told it was very time-consuming but it wasn’t so bad. I’d say I already knew a fair bit about the war but this unit made us think about it differently and in more depth.

Well that about wraps it up for this year.

See ya.

If I could send one thing back to myself at the start of the year.

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If I could send one thing back to myself at the start of the year.

Hello again. This time we’re talking about PGP A.K.A. Personal Growth Plan.

We were introduced this year to a new class, extracurricular yet mandatory. It was made to help us out after lots our problems last year were linked to procrastination.

It is once every month and a half or so that we have a meeting for it. We get assigned a project to do each month.

However this post is mostly about my Time Machine, our last PGP project of the year. The Time Machine was if you could send one thing to your formal self (your formal self at the start of the year) to help them out through the year.

I decided to write a book about

Goal Setting:

Pour goal setting part, we had to read the book below, What do you really want? Honestly I found it very boring and not very helpful.

It kind of wants you to right down your goals but for me  if I really want to accomplish something I don’t need to right it down.

Productivity:

Personally, I may have taken the most out of this part. At the start of the year I was falling behind. But then we got to the productivity. Initially I thought “what’s the point”. I already had TeamSnap to tell me what’s going on after school, I don’t need anything else.

But then I started using Things and putting more assignments in there. And I eventually caught up. It gives me satisfaction every time I check off an assignment.

7 Habits:

Our third project of the year was the 7 Habits. It explains 7 habits of teens that would be successful if they used them. The book breaks up the 7 Habits into 4 parts. The Set-Up, Private Victory, Public Victory, and Sharpen The Saw.

I liked the Sharpen The Saw part the most because it tells you that to be successful and to want to be successful you also have to rest once in awhile or do something you like. Beneath I put my creative reflections in which Part 4 is Sharpen the Saw. For me Sharpening the Saw is Traveling, Hockey, Soccer, Golf, friends and reading.

Well that’s it. See you soon.

Luciano

 

Coming soon:

WW1

Bluesky

TPOLs

How to clone a dandelion (Cloning and cell life)

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How to clone a dandelion (Cloning and cell life)

Hello again, you are now reading another science post.

We just finished a project about mitosis and asexual reproduction. So I got to clone plants with my partner Jason Guan. We initially started off with some dandelions and then we did some garlic.

Mindmap:

Well of course there’s the mindmap, that’s always there.

Project:

We started off the project with a bit of planning.

Then we went and picked out some dandelions. Jason and I made sure to grab the biggest and healthiest ones we could find but it didn’t end up being much use because none of our 12 dandelions broke the surface and we only had like 2-3 or three that started growing.

However to get there we went through several steps. Obviously first went to pick the dandelions, but the most important thing was to grab as much of the root as we could. We then cut the roots into about 1inch pieces and put them into cups with dirt. We then watered them every day in hope that they would grow but not enough time.

We then tried to clone some garlic which turned way better, although I was away for a few classes in that time. When I came back we had some garlic pods. And some pretty good ones at that.

After we grew them, we prepared some wetmount slides to look at our garlic through a microscope and actually see the mitosis happening.

We also made a keynote on all the steps to making fro preparing the slide. Below is two of the phases of mitosis we found through the microscope.

Curricular Competencies:

Planning and conducting:

Collaboratively and individually plan, select, and use appropriate investigation methods including field work and lab experiments to collect reliable data (qualitative and quantitative). We decided to clone some garlic which turned out to be a very healthy specimen. We did almost the exact same procedure we had with the dandelions but they grew a lot better.

Evaluating:

Connect scientific explorations to careers in science. Throughout the unit we thought like scientists by making a hypothesis gathering materials, designing procedures to test our hypothesis and drawings a conclusion from what we had done.

Communicating:

Formulate physical or mental theoretical models to describe a phenomenon. We made a document that showed all the stages of mitosis in our garlic and compared them to some drawing of the stages of mitosis and pointing out the similarities.

Questioning and predicting:

Make observations aimed at identifying their own questions, including increasingly complex ones, about the natural world. Our initial little project toi clone dandelions wasn’t as successful as our garlic. Although we did get one that was starting to re grow.

Well that’s the end of this post. See you soon.

Why matter cycles matter?

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Why matter cycles matter?

Hello. This is another science post about matter cycles.

So the hydrological (water) cycle, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the phosphorus cycle which are all crucial to life on Earth as we know it.

My partner Kyle and I chose the water cycle. Our driving question for our presentation was how can we help fix pollution in waters?

We decided to do a bit of research on biodegradable plastics because these could stop us from throwing out so much plastic into our waters and instead just let them decompose quickly.

Below is our presentation.

Below is my staple mindmap for every Scimatics unit.

Curricular Competencies 

1. Make observations aimed at identifying their own questions including increasingly complex ones, about the natural world. We showed this by identifying a problem in our world’s waters however it isn’t exactly tied to the water cycle.

2. Contribute to finding solutions to problems at a local and/or global level though inquiry. We showed this through our research and idea of starting to use more biodegradable plastic instead of having millions of tonnes of waste lying around for generations.

3. Communicate scientific ideas, claims, information, and perhaps a suggested course of action, for a specific purpose and audience, constructing evidence-based arguments and using appropriate scientific language, conventions, and representations. We showed this by laying down several facts and numbers about the pollution in our waters and how we could try and help.

Well that’s it. New releases in a few days.

Les Voyageurs (Heritage Minutes)

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Les Voyageurs (Heritage Minutes)

Back at it again. This time it’s Humanities. I was a Voyageur (which if you don’t know what that is, I can explain later).

My group members were Emerson, Taylor and Kiera. We were assigned the Fur Trade as a topic. But that’s very broad so we narrowed it down to the Voyageurs.

We researched what they did, what they wore, and how they traveled. The Voyageurs were mostly French Canadians who worked as contractors for the Fur companies. They rode canoes up and down rivers across Canada to deliver goods, and receive furs. They tended to be short to have the most space on the canoes. To keep morale up while on their canoes, they sang.

Our initial filming was pretty rushed and way ahead of everybody’s because Kiera was leaving and all of us had busy schedules. However we got the most important footage down. We later had to refilm the talking seems because the French wasn’t good, we had a little profanity, and some of the shots we just thought about better angles.

 

Here’s our video.

https://youtu.be/xuPCvpELGAc

I mostly realized from this project that it is not easy to try and film something and make it look like it’s form another time, partly because you can’t find props from the era. If I were to change something with the video is more preparation for certain shots because we already knew we didn’t have too much time to film.

 

We finished off by sending the videos from our class to Historica Canada, the company who makes the actual heritage minutes.

We emailed Historical Canada to get some feed back from them. We got responses from Ryan Barnett and Joanne Archibald. Joanne is the Heritage Minutes coordinator.

Well that’s it. See you soon.

Workplace safety

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Did you know that 34 young workers are injured every day in B.C.? Did you know that young workers are more at risk than any other workers? Probably not. And that’s why we are taking the career education class. To help us out when we do get a job or if we already have one.

We started off by watching a very old video that turned out to be very gory however educational.

We would also take notes like the ones below to have for later.

These classes have come at a perfect time because a bunch of people in the class started getting spring and summer jobs. Some of us are still looking for one including me most of us realized we didn’t have much money. Also our parents are making us pay for things more and more. Which is good but no comfortable.

 

One of the biggest things we learned is the requirements of the employer. Orientation, training and supervision. If your employer hasn’t given you this they are breaking the law.

There are many pages with laws an regulations about workplace safety which are made by WorkSafe BC. An entity from the provincial government that has makes he regulations and enforces them.

We also learned that if you feel that a part of your job is unsafe you have the right to refuse it however you have to immediately report it to your boss so they can investigate. They in turn have to immediately investigate what you said was unsafe. If they find something, they can give you extra training or make a deal on what do to do. If they don’t find anything that imposes a risk, you have to go back to work. If you still find it unsafe, the employer has to report it and bring in somebody from WorkSafe and a worker member of Union you belong to.

My artifact:

I made a short video about workplace safety and how you have to have the proper training before working with my friend Nik.

https://youtu.be/sfMoJ0tZzt4

The point of the video or just an artifact was to show what we’ve been learning in the last few classes.

And it was very fun to film. It is now like the 3rd or 4th video I’ve made with Nik and it’s always a great time. As you can probably tell however we were on a time limit and you could say no budget but we made it work.

This unit has been very useful and helpful. To top it off we take a 25 question quiz about it and if you pass with 75% or more, you get a certificate for life.

Well that’s it. See you soon with another post.

4 DIs 4 Podiums

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Hello. As you see in the title, I have yet again been on the podium. Jason and I are now the only to have accomplished that.

Above was our magical performance. No just kidding it wasn’t that magical but it was better than anything we’ve done up tot that point.

I was literally a sheep for the whole performance but apparently I make an astoundingly good sheep.

I think the main difference between our first and second performance was that we practiced a lot more. Before Regionals we got one or two rehearsals in a class. After we were getting 4 or five. Also Aedan wasn’t there so it took off a bit of creative aspect but less distraction.

We improved massively. We took a 185 point performance and turned into a 264.40 point performance. All we really did was practice more. Cause it’s improv, you can’t really change much. We had a 26% improvement.

We made the document above to show our scores for the regionals and provincials to show the difference.

Ultimately it was a fun day, we were told not to explore the school much but you put over 500 kids into a building for a day what do you expect them to do.

Overall it was good and it wasn’t as bad as we always complain in class.

Well that’s it for DI 2019. See ya.

D.I. Strikes Again. (The Reappearance)

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Hello and welcome back to Eppie #3 on the fundies on how to perform with a stressed out group. You know it, it’s D.I. My class always complains about it but in the end it always turns out fine, so that’s great.

For this year, I got put into a group with Izzy, Amelia B. Gabby and Aedan. And our challenge was Improv. We were dubbed Common Cents, which I found a very clever name. Amelia being the great artist she is made us a exquisite sign with our figureheads on it. Looks sick.

It was a hard challenge let me tell you that. However we didn’t have to build anything so hooray for 7 straight weeks of practice.

Above are the characters I researched. Simon Bolivar, the father of independence for 5 countries in South America. And Merlion, some mascot for Singapore that didn’t have much info on. However we decided that Amelia would play Merlion and we got lucky for our skit. I’ll explain later.

Our challenge consisted of making a 5 minute skit with 2 figureheads that are on coins around the world (each of us had to research 2 characters). At the start we’d be able to talk and then comes a dreadful thing called the flip where after we picked it up the skit would change from comedy to tragedy or vice-versa and even worse we’d switch to non-verbal.

Below is our performance.

My group got lucky because our scene was a class of rowdy students so bad they made their teachers quit. So Aedan and I fit into those roles perfectly. We had Izzy be our chorus (sort of narrator originating from Ancient Greek theatre). However that luckonly went so far because that dreadful flip gave us the most random switch your could think of. The piece of paper said the monster was good at cooking. Made no sense whatsoever even tho our group’s name was Common Cents.

Honestly, this latest D.I. competition has helped warm up to it a bit. I learned that Improv is really hard with a group especially when you’re not allowed to talk.

Well see you soon for Eppie #4. Coming soon to blog44.