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.

Workplace safety

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

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)

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.

Video Reflection

Helllo I´m back. This post will focus on my experience with video making. Up until now we have been making video after video in Humanities, Maker, and Science.

So far for me video making hasn´t been too fun. I haven´t really enjoyed it especially having to edit the videos. That´s why in several group videos we´ve made so far I´ve ended up as more of the actor instead of the editor. A few good examples for this past point were the 2 videos below.

https://youtu.be/MPxmLIhNsAI

https://youtu.be/jLR4cqKVN0A

Probably my best individual video so far has been my Identity video. I probably put the most time into this one and took the most photos and videos for it. Here it is below.

https://youtu.be/k38_9mXWsyA

I think another problem, was that we had lots of requirements for each video and that made a lot less fun. I think maybe the teachers were a bit too picky for a video. But that´s what they´re teaching. I made a video completely separate without any restrictions with my friend Nik, and making that one was way more fun and somehow easier to make.

Well you have reached the end of my reflection about videos.

Oh No MPOL

Well it’s back. Mpols A.K.A. Mid-year Presentation of Learning are something that we do twice a year. If you don’t remember from last year, it’s a meeting with my parents and my teacher where I talk about some good things I did and somethings I can improve on.

Scimatics:

So far in Science we’ve worked chemistry and electric currents. I´m prouder of my electric current unit where we incorporated that into the Metaphor Machines project. Although a minor part, we had to make a circuit with LEDs and put into our machine.

However, the Chemistry Unit was harder in my opinion. The task was making an animation with two characters (atomic elements). I had a partner for the project, Fraser. And learning about chemistry seemed more confusing than the electric circuits, and currents.

A chemistry reflection

In math all we’ve done exponents as an actual project. We´re not done yet this part so all I can say is we were tasked with creating a card game that includes exponents and exponent laws. I´m with Jason and Izzy.  Since I got back a week late from winter break they already had a game pretty much so I have mostly just done like smaller suggestions fo the game itself.

I think overall in Scimatics I mostly just need to work on listening a bit more because i often find myself pretty distracted.

Humanities:

Humanities this year has been focused on the Canadian history. We’ve had to incorporate the video skills from Maker into several of our Humainties projects. In Humanities I think I’ve done a lot better than Maker and mostly staying on top of things. I’ve had a few slip ups like my Identity video, but in the end I was actually pretty proud of that video except for the fact that it was late.

https://youtu.be/k38_9mXWsyA

I think honestly for Humanities the biggest thing I can improve on is handing things in on time. I think that the work I have done has had a pretty good quality. If I get things on time, I can get more feedback and try and improve on my projects.

Another project I was proud of was our metaphor machines. However I think I could improve on my engagement or idea contribution. For the project I did a bit of everything and went to where my group needed a bit of assistance.

A Metaphorical Revolution!!!

Maker:

Maker’s main focus this year has been making videos. Something that I have particularly struggled with. I have kept falling behind but now I’m caught up and I’m going to try and stay on time for the rest fo the year. Liked I talked about in my video reflection post, I haven’t enjoyed making all these videos. I don’t like doing it very much.

Video Reflection

 

https://youtu.be/S9_pF5BqfRk

Probably the best individual video I made so far has been my live event video. I handed it in pretty late and never got time for feedback. I kept telling myself I was just trying to improve it on my own time, but I really wasn’t. It would’ve been better to hand in something not that a good and get some feedback instead of having nothing.

PGP

This year’s new class of PGP has had a huge emphasis on goal setting. Which I understand to a certain point however I think maybe it’s a bit too much. Goals help, but so far my motivation has come more from like playing hockey or being able to go play some golf or basketball with my friends. It gives me more of a drive.

We were asked to read the book below, and I’m going to  be honest with you I found it very boring and I didn’t read it. I was given a book pretty similar or at least overlapped in a few things in my opinion but it was s more sport based. That one was less boring.

My dream board:

We were asked to make a dream board for this Mpol. Dream boards ar supposed to remind you what you want to do and keep striving for those things. MY dream board, I’ve got sports at the top. Hockey and socccer are the biggest part of my life that’s not mandatory. I want to keep playing as much possible and I would love to play college hockey when I get into university. Below, I wrote my boys. My little brother and my friends are what keep a day light at school. Without them life wouldn’t be to great. And it’s just good make friends anywhere you go, because they keep you entertained, and friends could eventually open new doors for you, like when you’re looking for a job and then you would return the favour. Below that is future interests. I’m still not certain what I want to study in university but law sounds interesting, and business, could be open lots of doors. And finally in the bottom right, I wrote down Fun stuff. If all goes well there will be time for fun stuff, so I should use those things as motivation to succeed in whatever I’m doing and have time to play golf with my friends or go to the beach.

Well this is the end of this post. In six months a similar one to this one will show up and hopefully I have improved my work by then.

A Hockey Game (Live Event Challenge)

Hello there. Welcome back. This post is going to be about struggling to film a hockey game with an iPad.

https://youtu.be/S9_pF5BqfRk

You’re probably wondering what the video above is. Well we were given a task. Which proved to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. The task was to make a live event video.

To go into a bit more detail, we had film and edit a video of a sports event, party or something with action into a 2 minute or less video. Other criteria for the video included: incorporate an interview with a participant or someone there, had to have music in the background, and it had to have different angles, and types of filming (time lapse, slowmo, normal, pictures).

 

I don’t know abou you but when you watch sports on TV they have all different types of angles. They have whole teams of people on different jobs (filming, commentating, editing) and they make it live. They also have prime placing to film the games, and very expensive cameras and professional editing programs. I have one iPad.

My filming device

My first try at making the video, I went to my brother’s soccer game. This choice had way to many flaws I realized after the first few minutes. First of all I had no elevation, I was at the same height as the play. Second, you couldn’t really see what was happening on the other side of the field unless you were running down the sidelines but the footage would be really bad.

They know how to capture the sports events properly.

 

Third, I tried to capture only the highlight moments and no the whole 50 minutes. I missed the first few goals of the game. In  my plan, I wanted to commentate over the footage, but trying it to do live with only one person, while holding the iPad was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.

Professional reporter with camera

 

My second attempt was way more successful than my first one, in my opinion. I went to my brother’s hockey game, instead of soccer. Since a rink has boards, usually the seats are more elevated and lucky for me this particular rink has several rows above so I could film with a lot better angles.

View of the rink.
I was were the red circle is.

 

For this game, I was able to get the warmups and the coaches talking. And from the point I was filming at, I could zoom in and out, and you could actually see what was happening in the game more clearly. I decided to film the whole game instead of constantly stopping and starting. That proved to be a problem later in the editing part of the video.

Hockey commentators. Probably the most famous in Canada.

 

I was able to comment over the warmup since it’s introducing the game but I tried for a bit of the game and that turned out to be horrible. So I abolished that idea. Probably my biggest setback, however was, I wasn’t able to get an interview. Nobody wanted to get interviewed and I didn’t want to interview any parents because lots of them don’t know much about hockey so it just be weird.

Editing the video was actually not bad. It was very time consuming since I had to cut a 70 minute video and put it into a 2 minute video.

Overall the making of the video was good challenge but a good challenge never hurt anybody.]

Well you have reached the end of my rant and you’re free to go now. See you soon.

Reflection Time (Week 10 SBC)

Hello there. So SBC just came to an end and this is the last post for it. It was 2 and a half months of constant blog posts.

My favourite of the 8 weeks was week 4, which involved emojis. I had a fun time using emojis to make a nhl teams quiz. I liked having to find emojis related to the name of the teams which proved to be harder than I thought it would be.

Guess the team with emojis (Week 4 of S.B.C.)

 

Final reflection:

There’s quite a few things I learned throughout the challenge. It’s honestly a pretty good idea, however I thought at times it was bit to time consuming. I enjoyed a few of the tasks like the emoji one and the everybody’s different. They were more fun to do than say, the non-copyright images post that was kind of annoying. Anyways I think overall the challenge is good for kids to teach us a few things about the internet and learn how to communicate our thoughts in a different way.

Below are the links to all my previous weekly challenges.

Week 2: http://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/my-commenting-guidelines/

Week 3: http://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/2018/11/12/non-copyright-images-week-3-of-s-b-c/

Week 4: http://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/2018/11/11/guess-the-team-emoji-version/

Week 5: http://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/2018/11/11/were-all-different-on-the-outside/

Week 7: http://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/2018/12/11/i-live-for-hockey-ice-hockey-week-7-sbc/

Week 8: http://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/2018/11/30/christmas-has-9-parties-in-my-family-week-8-of-sbc/

Week 9: http://www.blog44.ca/lucianos/2018/12/17/a-quick-coding-experience-week-9-sbc/

Well I hope you enjoyed my Blogging Challenge more than I did.

Luciano

A Quick Coding Experience (Week 9 SBC)

Hello again. We’re so close to Christmas now, it going to be great. However school is still in so here’s my coding experience. Week 9 was all about coding.

What is coding. It’s everything that’s happening behind the scenes in your computer, it’s how developers create games, or write text. Below is a video about coding if you want to learn a bit more.

This week’s task was to try an hour of code activity. Hour of code is also a website with a bunch of different activities for children to help them learn how to code. It’s a pretty cool website, if you want to visit it, hit the link. Hour of code

I did a mine craft activity. It consisted of putting commands in the right order so you could the less possible commands. The commands would make Steve or Alex walk, swim, paddle, or turn. Some commands let you repeat as you wanted which helped quite a bit. Hit the link below for a video of my coding experience.

Mine craft coding

The activity had 12 levels, each level introduced new more complicated commands but they made the activity simpler. At the end of the 12 levels you receive a certificate.

I’m not sure of knowing and using all the command shortcuts counts as coding but I’m going to say that it does. With older computers a few years ago, I learned to use quite a few command shortcuts instead of having to go to the top of a document and change the format or selecting everything, Because of this I also learned a bit of ASCII code to write some letters that weren’t on a normal keyboard. It’s useful knowing this because it takes less time to type things with the shortcuts. ON my keyboard, if I press and hold command alone, a guide on what to press shows up.

Well that’s the end of this post. See you soon with Week 10.

I live for hockey. Ice hockey. (Week 7 SBC)

Hello. Again. This is my week 7 Student Blogging challenge. This week we were just supposed to make a post about something we liked so this is it.

 

Hockey has always been my favourite sport. I started playing when I was five. I would have one hour sessions every Wednesday at the rink closest to my house. That rink ended up being almost a second home for me, it was my home rink for 8 years. I actually played through some changes at the rink. They added a new arena to the two that were already there and they changed the name of it.

Picture of the rink

 

The speed of the sport is one of my favourite things about it. It’s unpredictable and momentum changes really fast. Sometimes it can be frustrating that you’re losing but that also means it’s great when you’re winning. When I’m on the ice, I get an adrenaline rush that I don’t get doing anything else.

Hockey frees my mind from homework, school or any other problems. The only problem while I’m playing is losing the game. But I manage to still have fun even when I lose. Obviously it’s better to win but you can’t win everything.

My little brother has also been playing hockey since he was 5. He’s a goalie but we’ve always enjoyed the sport. At home we’ve had a mini hockey area set up for years in our basement. We used to play all the time whenever we were in the house. My dad, my brother and me also have tournaments whenever we can.

That’s why I like the sport. And hopefully I can keep playing for years to come.

Well that’s the end of this post.

See you soon.