Category Archives: Maker

Christmas has 9 parties in my family!!! (Week 8 of SBC)

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Christmas has 9 parties in my family!!! (Week 8 of SBC)

Hello, I’m back.

This week’s challenge was to make a holiday post.

I decided to make mine about  something that my family celebrates.

First thing is that my family is from Colombia. According to them this tradition has its origins there. They’re called Novenas. Now what are these? How my family celebrates it is nine parties in different houses leading up to Christmas Eve where the biggest of the 9 happens. These Novenas come from Catholic traditions. They’re nine days of prayer.

To understand why Novenas before Christmas come from Colombia, is because Colombia has a vast majority of people who are Catholic. My grandparents and my great parents and everybody else before them have been Catholic. My parents however aren’t really believers in a religion anymore even though they were brought up that way.

The Novenas are usually started off with a bit of prayers with some singing here and there, Spanish Christmas songs to be precise. After the prayers comes my second favourite part. The food. The host family makes food for the whole group and other families will bring a few things like dessert or drinks. After the food is my favourite part. We kids are free to go play around or watch a movie.

Eating time at one of the Novenas last year.

 

The Novenas are celebrated with friends and family. You can have 1 family come over or many more. Some of the families we celebrate it with are however more devout Catholics. They always start on December 16th no matter the day of the week. The last day is Christmas Eve.

I was never brought up with any religious beliefs at my house. So personally sitting down in prayer is a bit boring but if they’re your beliefs, go for it as long as you’re not hurting anybody. It also gets a bit more boring for me because I have absolutely no idea what they’re saying throughout the prayers so I just kind of sit there quiet and waiting.

The past few years however I have been missing more  and more novenas. Why? Because I’ve got soccer and hockey, my religions.

Well that’s our tradition. Hope you understood it.

Bye Bye now.

Take Your Kid to Work Day 2018

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Take Your Kid to Work Day 2018

Guess who’s back? It’s me, I haven’t changed. Anyways this blog post is about Take Your Kid to Work Day. It happened a few weeks ago. Apparently it’s a national thing where grade 9s in Canada can go to there parent’s office or like a friend’s parent’s work for a day.

Click the link for a blog I found with some stuff about Take your kid to work day. http://www.thelearningpartnership.ca/about/blog/thank-you-take-our-kids-to-work-day

Take your kid to work day this year was on Wednesday, November 14th. I ended up going to my mom’s office. She works at the City of North Vancouver. They had a morning tour planned for the people that showed up.

First we walked to the fire department that’s only two blocks away, fortunately it wasn’t raining. We stayed there for about 45 minutes and they explained to us there two divisions, a prevention unit and a rescue unit. They showed us a few of the younger firefighters go down the emergency poles. Turns out they actually use these. It was pretty cool watching them just grab on and slide down. They also explained to us the different functions of the different trucks they have. They ended with a video they made of a bunch of archived videos of firefighters in the 50’s in North Vancouver which was pretty cool.

Shoutout to Google Earth
This picture is a screenshot.

 

Next, we went to the North Vancouver Emergency Center for like an hour. They have like the headquarters of the RCMP in North Vancouver. They are one of the three center in the Lower Mainland that receive the 911 class and dispatch them or transfer the caller to another line. Our “tour guide” at the center was in charge of all the Police cars and making sure they’re in working order. We met the highest ranked officer in the station. He’s been working with the RCMP for over 30 years, which is a lot of time. The high ranked officers are called “white shirts” because they’re shirts are white while lower ranked officers have the darker shirts we usually see out on the streets. Our guide took us to several places including the dispatch center. It’s a room full of computers and phones and they answer them and will dispatch officers from that station or can transfer the call to another polic station.

Shoutout to Google Earth
This picture is a screenshot.

 

After the Emergency center we went back to the City Hall.

Shoutout to Google Earth This picture is a screenshot.

 

Our next activity was meeting one of the city’s councillors, Holly Back. Apparently her son is of the district’s councillors. We went to the council room and we made a mock council. We got to sit in some of the councillor’s chairs (they’re very comfortable, but they sometimes have to sit there for hours on end).

Now for one of the best parts of the day we had a pizza lunch 🍕🍕🍕🍕. JK, the tour was quite interesting but after walking the whole morning, sitting down was nice. We had the pizza in one of the conference rooms and the chairs were also really comfortable. They  had a bunch of different features as well. That was the end of the planned day.

After that I stayed there for a few more hours with my mom to make my project which I’m going to explain to you now.

We were tasked with making a sort of live event video except for our parent’s jobs. This part I wasn’t to excited for. As I may have mentioned in the past, making videos isn’t really my thing. Especially when it’s schoolwork. Doing it on your own time and no requirements is more fun and less pressure. However we have to do it.

Anyways that afternoon, my mom had a meeting that was supposed to be like 45 minutes but that ended up almost tripling and ended because somebody else had the conference room booked. Because of this I got to learn quite a bit about of my mom’s projects and I also got some pretty good footage (at least I though it was pretty great). The problem was I need a bit more variety and time to get some pictures or videos but I had to leave for a hockey game. So I had to go the next week on Wednesday to try and finish it.

Here´s my finished video.

https://youtu.be/FVJiWuMZKg8

Well that’s the end of my experience at take your kid to work day. BYE BYE now.

 

Non-copyright images (Week 3 of S.B.C.)

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Non-copyright images (Week 3 of S.B.C.)

Hello I’m back with my third post today. I’m catching up. On a few things and that’s why it’s my third post today. Anyways let’s jump into this week’s task.

Week 3 was all about copyright free images. I chose to write a poem about the image below but also about a previous experience I had playing hockey. I went on Creative Commons and searched “penalty box hockey” and got the picture below on Wikimedia commons. I then saved the image to my camera roll and inserted it into my post. And now it’s right below.

Below is my poem. It’s about a time in a game several years ago where I got really angry at the ref’s call and had a bit of a rage for a few minutes. I got the picture of the hockey player in the box not to happy about his being there.

The ref put his hand up,

and next I knew
He blew his whistle,

pointed at me
And went to the box,

to say it was roughing
The lights were bright,

but the rink was cold
I was a little kid then,

but I was frustrated
because my team was losing,

I headed to my bench
But the ref stopped me,

and changed my direction
My head was heating up,

from my anguish at the ref
I stepped in the box and,

threw my stick and gloves
Took my helmet off,

and tried to storm off.

Hope you enjoyed the poem. See you next post. (Should be coming shortly).

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

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

Hello and welcome back to my blog. A few of the next posts might be in the wrong order as I fell behind a bit. Anyways, let’s get back in to it.

 

 

This week’s task was themed around emojis and their usage. I chose to make a quiz with emojis. My quiz is guess the NHL team with emojis. It was pretty simple but sometimes I needed to put an emoji that doesn’t exactly correspond to what I was trying to get at. Well below is my quiz and answer key will be at the end of the post, don’t cheat.

Quick tip: If you’re stuck, think of what the emojis featured have in common or what they do and your mind will link them up.

How’d you do in the quiz? If you want check out the answer key at the bottom and comment how many you got right.

I personally don’t use many emojis and I’d rather type the words. However lots of people I know constantly use them. They are many times more efficient and quicker to type than words but in my opinion are causing a slight degradation of our languages.

Well I hope you enjoyed my quiz. See you on my next post.

We’re all different on the outside (Week 5 of S.B.C.)

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We’re all different on the outside (Week 5 of S.B.C.)

Hello, this is week 5 of the Student blogging challenge.

This week’s theme was our differences and similarities. Turns out blogging is actually a decent way to realize this. We’re all humans but we like different things. We actually just worked on a unit in Humanities on how the land where we live impacts what we do. Click the box below.

The land is part of our identity (Unit end)

 

I chose to make a video with a few questions to learn a few things about my readers, (I’m not sure I have many).

I was originally going to make a slideshow but that didn’t work. I had gone on keynote and put a few pictures on each slide with arrows pointing at them. You have to choose one of the pictures of what would you rather. I ended up taking screenshots of each slide and making a video out of those.

Well below is my video, I hope you enjoy it.

https://youtu.be/HcEvtjCqjQ0

Comment your answers below.

See you next week,

Luciano

Going Back Home (Alberta Trip)

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Hello I’m back with another post. It’s late by a few months and I just kind let it slip away and here we are now. This post will be about our one week trip to Calgary.

Main reasons for the trip:

1. Learning more about the CPR

Since we drove to Calgary from Vancouver, we passed many important parts of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Since this year’s focus in Humanities was Canada, we have to know about the CPR. The drive gave us many opportunities to see tunnels and the site of the Last Spike and other things. The part of the railway we passed on the drive was the most treacherous stretch of Canadian Railway made. Going through the Rockies, with lots of snow in the winter and wildfires, and mosquitoes in the summer, many died in the construction of the railway. Below are a few pictures.

2. Beakerhead

Beakerhead is an innovation, engineering, arts, and other creative things festival in Calgary. Although I lived 13 years in Calgary I don’t think I ever heard about this festival. It was actually pretty cool and there were a bunch of interesting stations. Below are a few pictures.

Videos we made while we were there:

We were tasked to make like 5 videos throughout the trip. A ghost town video, an enchanted forest video, an identity video and a fossil video. Two of them were in a group and the other two were individual.

In my ghost town video, I was with Kiera, Amelia R., and Gabby. In my enchanted forest video, I was with Kyle, Taylor, Lucy, and Caleb. Check the videos out below.

https://youtu.be/MPxmLIhNsAI

https://youtu.be/jLR4cqKVN0A

https://youtu.be/k38_9mXWsyA

Highlights of the trip:

Probably my favourite part of the entire trip was when Caleb and I ran up a mountain with over a foot of snow near the highest point we got to. Wasn’t very smart of us though since we were two boys running into Grizzly bear territory. However we came out safe. Here are a few pictures of that small adventure.

My next favourite part was probably the one week trip with my best friends. That’s always fun. Although school based something seriously bad had to happen to not enjoy a trip like this one. We got to stay in hotels and the first night with the pool was legendary. I brought along my mini frisbee that last year was thrown off of the Astoria Tower in Oregon (great memories) and this year we also had a mini football. On our stop in the Banff Village, Kyle Jackson and I played football on the field in the middle of Banff with a beautiful view of the mountains. Here are a few pictures.

Most things in Calgary we saw were still the same from when I lived there. I would’ve loved to meet up with a friend while I was there but unfortunately I wasn’t able to. I barely got to say hello to one friend.

Well you have reached the end of this post.

TPOL: Next Stop Grade 9

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Worldview:

With the theme of learning in Grade 8 being Worldview, several of our projects have been about studying our own and other culture’s worldview. It has helped me realize that depending on the group your in, you have to adapt to the environment and try to use everybody’s strengths. Mostly at the end of the year I would try to apply this in group projects. One of the projects in my drama class, where we had to make an advertisement, I applied this knowledge if different people have different strengths. I was the only PLP kid in this group and had the best skills and resources to edit our video so I was mainly assigned to this job. One of my group mates who was quite confident, we tried to put in the most scenes of our video and have him record several lines. Another group member, who left us not even halfway through project but had several ideas when we were brainstorming lead us in that aspect of the project.

Storytelling:

To go along with our focus on still images, we focused a big part of our time on storytelling. Perhaps for me the main project reflecting this was our Middle Ages Unit where we had to create a story about a hero. I find that I don’t like writing stories down on a paper like a book. The use of still images so as to make a quilt or making a tableau, has helped me in interesting me in the projects.

Still Images:

Since our fist project of the year we’ve used still images, we created poster ads for local businesses. I learned how different colours make people feel different emotions and associate them with certain industries.

While working on our worldview/religion unit I learned how to put two or more images together for a different meaning. This process is called juxtaposition on which our class had a contest to make something up.

I learned how powerful still images can be for storytelling or advertising. I think I would be ready to take the next step in Grade 9 where we would focus on videos and moviemaking.

Presentations:

We’ve been working on our presentation skills throughout the year from D.I. and Our explorer presentation to Colonizing in a Tempest and the Exhibitions. I believe that most of my presentations have turned out successful although I had a few scrambles like my explorer presentation were I panicked. I have learned that I sometimes find it easier to wing a presentation but a few times like my explorer one a script or even a small notecard with bullet points makes a big difference.

Well that’s the end of it.

See you next post folks.

LAUNCHing a sport

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LAUNCHing a sport

Hello dear readers. I’m back with another make blog post. This post will be particularly short as we only worked on the past project for two weeks. The project was to team up with a few peers to create a new sport through with guidance of the Launch Cycle.

Now you may ask yourselves what is the Launch cycle. You can watch the video below to help you understand what it is, but I’ll be explaining it as well as what we did to make our sport.

My group members were Anika, Caleb, and Lucy.

The L: Look, listen, and learn

At the start, we started reading about the challenge we were given, how to follow the LAUNCH process and looking at our time and material limits.

The A: Ask tons of questions

Our teacher gave us a booklet to fill out to guide us through the launch process. At the questions part, we started making surveys for our classmates to see if they were athletic, competitive, to see if they liked individual sports or team sports, and things like that. This step was extremely helpful in making a sport. We needed to know what would be successful among our class.

The U: Understand the problem

During this step, we were given the materials to look at them and start thinking about possible ideas. We needed to know what we were dealing with and taking in mind the information we got from our surveys.

The N: Navigate ideas

Our group had come up with many ideas for a sport, but we had to narrow them down. We started taking out ideas that didn’t seem like that much fun, or were too extreme and unlikely that people would succeed in them let alone try them.

The C: Create a prototype

I wasn’t at school when my group went through the majority of this step, but I was there when we were brainstorming ideas and tried to kind of play our game. However when my group made an intructional video of our sport and named it. Below is the link for our intructional video.

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The H: Highlight and fix

While trying out our game, we only had our four group members, and two volunteers from another group. We quickly realized that it wouldn’t have much success if we didn’t have more players. We decided that we needed at least four players per side + the goaltenders (so five aside). When we actually tried it, we had like ten players aside and it was a great as everyone was involved and running around.

LAUNCH:

Finally after all had been done we went out to the school’s parking lot and played our game with our classmates. It ended up 2-2 after the game. Most people said that it was like a mix of handball and basketball.

Click on the link below to watch a time lapse of my group’s game.

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Reflection:

After the two weeks I found the project quite fun and helpful for our next project (soon be making another blog post). The activity we did to follow the Launch Cycle I found was pretty fun and it kept me involved the whole project as well as everybody else in our group. An activity like creating a sport was interesting for me and I would do it again with no problem.

We came third place!

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I want to start off by saying that I think Provincials for D.I. went a lot better than regionals in terms of an environment and fun. But for the presentation I’d say it was pretty similar.

If you haven’t read my previous D.I. Blog post refer to the box below.

A D.I.ssapointment in D.I.sguise

My group members where Fraser, Jason, and Kyle.

Destination Imagination Provincials

The Sequel Is Never as Good as The Original.

http://www.blog44.ca/kyled/2018/04/11/di-pt2/

For provincials we had to fix several things from Regionals. Our biggest change was probably making a backdrop instead of using a projector in our presentation. We took a big piece of cardboard and then we covered it with paper. Then Fraser took it home to paint it. We also added some smaller pieces of cardboard painted like a temple and a sign. We tied these with ropes to the backdrop so we could flip them up when needed. The backdrop was painted on both sides, one was the Phobos landscape and the other was the inside of the Temple.

WIth D.I. there were five stages.

Stage 1: Recognize:

We had to recognize our flaws from regionals so we could make better performances in provincials. This included my friend Jason consistently showing his « sexy » back to the audience and not his face. This also included me not talking loud enough and not showing much emotion.

Here is a picture of Jason with his back towards the audience.

 

Stage 2: Imagine:

We then had to imagine how to solve our problems. Our projector idea from regionals hadn’t worked to well, so we decided to make a solid background. This way it would also be harder for Jason to cover it and make a negative impact. One of our Team choice elements was live music played by Fraser with a cello. In regionals we had lacked the cello so Fraser and I sat down and looked for more spots in the script were the cello could be played.

Stage 3: Initiate and Collaborate

For the third stage, we starte making the backdrop, Jason worked on his back facing the audience, I worked on my expressions and volume, and we snuck in more cello playing into the script.

Stage 4: Assess

To assess we were pretty much already at the school to present so we could only hope everything was ready to go. It turned out pretty great even if all our rehearsals were trash as we were focused more on chilling before our performance. Or at least me.

This is me in our group photo sitting on our sick ride with a VR headset on.

Stage 5: Evaluate and Celebrate

We were the only team in our class to place on the podium. We came third. We made sure to rub it into our classmates. That was pretty great. We thought we had nailed our performance at provincials but the Appraisers clearly didn’t. We significantly improved several aspects in my opinion but the Appraisers were harder on us on some things they didn’t even mention in regionals which to me makes them bad Appraisers just like bad refs in a hockey game. Of coure it’s nearly impossible to have good ones. Unfortunately I do not have my performance on tape nor do my group mates.

This is me and Fraser with our trophy and medals.

These are the Seycove teams in a group picture.

Here’s a picture of our group.

Below is the link to an article released by D.I. that is proving by some psychologist that D.I. is supposed to be making participants more developed in learning. Apparently it makes students more confident, tenacious, and creative. 82% of participants have reported that their teamwork skills have improved. D.I. participants have been able to brainstorm ideas more easily. I find some truth in this article but so far I haven’t enjoyed D.I. or felt like the benefits of D.I. be worth the time spent not enjoying something.

http://www.destinationimagination.org/proven-results/

If I’m forced to I’ll do D.I. again because I was forced to. Otherwise it was an interesting experience but I’m not to interested in doing it again.

That just about wraps it up for this year’s D.I. folks.

A D.I.ssapointment in D.I.sguise

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We recently had regionals for D.I. We hosted them here at Seycove but many of you are probably wondering what D.I. is. Also, this blog post is just for regionals, the provincials post will come in a month or so.

Explaining D.I.

D.I. is an international school tournament based in the United States. There are different categories and subjects, but all groups have to have 2-7 people. I’ll talk more about my challenge and my group later, but let me explain D.I. to you first. Below is the introductory video for D.I. To me it seems like a cheesy ad but it’s convinced people to join the tournament so it worked.

There are different challenges you can choose from, but all of them have one thing in common, they have to have a story based around what they made. During your performance, the Appraisers, keep track of what you’re doing to give you points afterwards. The Appraisers are almost like judges but at the end they tell you what you did well and celebrate that.

The different challenges for this year were:

Here’s the link for the Destination Imagination website.

Destination Imagination

 

Apart from this we also had to do the instant challenge. Instant challenges give the group something to build or act in a span of 5 minutes most of the time. They provide the team with materials like rubber bands or paper clips. They all mostly give you points for your creativity and teamwork and not what you had to build. Unfortunately for whoever is reading this, I’m not allowed to tell you what we do. That’s good for me because I get to write less. Below is the video for it.

 

My group’s challenge

My team was put into Unlikely Attraction. We were four and I think we had great teamwork. Our team consisted of Fraser, Kyle, Jason, and me. Our challenge was to make an attraction like something you’d find at an amusement park and put it into an unlikely location. After that we had to make a story about our attraction and how it impacts its surroundings. Our team name was the Space Cows.

Below are the links for my team members’ posts.

DI Regionals

We originally planned to make a bull ride that we could actually get onto. The fact that we wanted it to be rideable, changed our plans especially because we would need an enormous spring like the ones at playgrounds. Every team in our challenge had a 150$US budget. To buy a spring like the one we wanted, would alone go over-budget. We had to settle with a spaceship that looks like we merged the Millenium Falcon and a rocking chair.

 

Below are our original plans and drawings for what we were going to make.

This is what our ride looked like during the construction of it.

This is what our ride ended up like.

Our story was probably one of our best parts. We rehearsed so many times as I all other teams did. It’s about two explorers (me and Jason) going to Mars’ moon, Phobos, and discovering an abandoned festival/amusement park.

Below is the video for our performance, it was uploaded to YouTube by Fraser.

Our script was done and shared on Google Docs. Jason mostly wrote it but Kyle, Fraser, and I would contribute ideas and change things to be easier for us to memorize.