The Life Of Mimi

Metaphor Machines

These past few weeks we have been working on these “metaphor machine” they are basically one of those machines that start with a marble rolling or something, and cause a chain reaction. We first got in groups of 4 or 5 where we chose a revolution. Our group decided to do the Chinese revolution (Xinhai 1911-1912) we first created a timeline and drew out three lines on a big piece of paper, the top one was cause and consequences in our revolution, the second was metaphors which helped explain each part of our machine and finally the third was the 4 main stages of the revolution where we would research the most important stages of the revolution. When we were done our timeline it was time to move on for our drafts and blueprints! The criteria for this project was that it had to incorporate  simple circuits which we where learning all about in science. Here’s a picture of our timeline:

Our group decided to start by creating the headboard and placing the ramps down, the ramps would act as a pathway for the marbles to travel. The ramps took surprisingly long to glue down because you had to find the perfect spot for everything to be placed so the marble would roll at the perfect pace and land perfectly! Once everything was put together we spray painted it black and silver to give It a steampunk aesthetic. Once this was done we moved onto the clock which represented how the Queen never wanted to move forward in time and never wanted to reform. To make it all we did was created a cutout of a circle on a thin sheet of wood then used a hacksaw to cut it out. Once that was down we spray painted it, drew some numbers and we had ourselves a clock!
Next we worked on creating a simple circuit which we have been learning about in science. We needed to create a circuit because we wanted to have a spinning gear, what we did to create it was we started with attaching a battery to a motor then we added some resistors and switches to the battery pack, this would make the motor spin witch would be attached to a gear making the gear spin! We wanted to have all the spinning gears because it represented the opium addiction in china. The spinning gear was the workers and people living in china, and the other stationary gears was the opium which slows down the gears representing the impact in opium. Here’s a picture of a plan I drew out in Paper 53:

(If you want to learn to draw schematics click here)

After all the hard stuff was out of the way we moved onto the fun stuff which was using the 3D pen! A 3D pen is something that essentially melts plastic down into a glue type form, one the plastic is melted you can drag the pen across paper or up in the air to create designs! We decide to use this because we needed a way to create mini trees and crops to represent the starvation in china during the revolution. Here’s a time-lapse of us testing it out!

So far I have learned a lot about my revolution from all the drafts and revisions we had to do on our timelines. I think that at the pace we are going we will be able to finish our machine by the due date!

Dream house project!

Since the school year started we have been learning scale diagrams, scale factor and similar triangles. So to tie our chapter 4 unit all together our teacher decided to let us get into groups and design our own house!

I really enjoyed this project because we got to design our own house and at the same time we learned something. When we created our design we had to keep in mind all the rules of designing your house like an architecture would. For example when we where designing the kitchen there had to be 18 feet of countertop space, the dishwasher had to have countertop space on ether side and there was also something called the work station triangle where all three of the “main” appliances (dishwasher, stove/oven, fridge) had to be a certain amount of space in between them. Below is a screen shot of how it turned out!

In the end it was lots of fun, things like the kitchen and calculations the price and square foot made it a little bit more challenging. Aside from all that this chapter/unit has been pretty useful and interesting!

How The Railways Impacted The Industrial Revolution!

So… these past few weeks we have been creating drafts and drafts of explain everything’s (Explain everything’s are basically just animated slides and videos kind of like power point. If your interested in downloading it click here) we had to create a video which explained three reasons why and how the railways impacts the industrial revolution in Britain. We started with filling out a outline sheet basically to guide us through the video and make sure that the paragraphs were well structured. On the outline it basically just asks you for a paragraph explaining the topic to introduce the whole idea to the audience. After that we listed the three things that we thought the railways impacted. Afterwards we explained each one with a 5-6 sentence paragraph. For my 3 main topics I chose mail, more job opportunities and the coal and iron industry. Below is a screen shot of my outline (each section has a little area where I can comment on the animation I’m going to do.

Once we where finished our outline and it was approved it was time to move onto the explain everything part where I first started out with recording myself speak, then I went on with the animation I decided to go this way because I thought it would be easier to match up the slides with the voice recording rather than try to speak and move the slides around at the same time. After the voice recording was done I went in and tried to match everything up. During the video I tried to change the pictures quickly to keep the audience intrigued. Once I finished the video I handed it in, but that wasn’t the end of this project! The day after we got into lairs and switched iPads so the other person could see your video then we critiqued it so that our second draft would improve. My partner for the critiquing stage said that I needed to talk a little bit faster because I was pausing to often to find where I was on the page. Below will be my first draft, hope you enjoy!

What did you think? Know that we knew what we needed to change we could go ahead and fix them, the only problem I came across with the voice recording was that before I matched the pictures up with my voice and since my voice had to be faster the slides would be totally off! Here’s what it ended up looking like in the end!

For the last stage of critiquing I got into a group of three and we swiped iPads again to watch each other’s videos. Once we where done we went on showbie (the site where we hand in all our homework) and commented in each other’s accounts. I Took a screenshot the comment so you could see it:

Finally after we got our comments we could revise our videos yet another time, but this time was the last! as you can read in the picture above I had to work on revising the recording so it matched the slides and pictures I was talking about. I also had to switch out a few of the picture for other high resolution ones, so that’s exactly what I did and this is how it turned out!

In the end I learned quite a lot, and I also learned a lot of new editing tricks. I hope you enjoyed this post!

The Architectural Designs Of Steampunk And More!

For the past few weeks we have been learning about the different aspects of steampunk and on top of that we read a book called Leviathan, this book is about a world war incorporating guns and high-tech/futuristic machinery which we then have to do a mini book report.

Now if you don’t already know what steampunk is, it’s basically just a sub-genre of science fiction which incorporates technology and aesthetics, this was inspired by steam powered machines.

For this blog post each person in our class had to choose an interesting question just like what I did for the Crane Brinton post where I made a mini iBook (if you haven’t read that yet click here) Anyways, for my question I decided to ask…

Were steampunk houses built for easy access or style? Basically what I’m trying to research and find out is if there are certain aspects that are just for style or do they have a purpose? (By the way this is for steampunk architecture) For example when you look at modern day houses and you see the slanted roofs they aren’t just there for style but for easy rain and leaf drainage making the roofing purposeful.

For this blog post I’ll be following along the same lines as the example above and will only be covering a few aspects that I research and that I saw repeatedly in various websites and images.

Two or three story houses:

To start off I’m going to talk about two and three story building. I think that most people who have a two or three story house would be lucky but at the same time it’s probably not very practical. First of all imagine all the sets of stairs you would have to climb just to put your laundry away versus having a lower house with only one or two story’s where you would have more width to put more practical things inside of it you would also have taller rooms and smaller closets and living spaces.

Obviously I’m trying to figure out how practical it is and I think that just by comparing the two houses I think that the three story aspect of the era is more a style than purpose.

Steep roofs:

Next is steep multi faceted roofs so just like I was explaining in the example the triangular shaped roof is a great, practical idea for drainage and if you make it even steeper like they do in the steampunk architecture it will improve the drainage even more because the water can flow faster.

But just like the three story houses it narrows down the living space which isn’t very practical either for everyday use. So in the end I think that it’s more for style then purpose because today drainage is something you would want to have on your roof but I don’t think that was a big part for that genre back then when it all started

Wood or stone exterior:

The majority of houses in the steampunk era had wood siding and not stone or glass. This is practical for 3 reasons, the first being easy access and installation, two being cheaper and easy to purchase in bulk and small portions and finally the third reason being you can style the wood easily and paint it easily. The only thing I can come up with that would be a “con” is that the wood will be an easy place for ants and insects to build there homes in and also that it won’t last as long as the cement would.

Overall I think that the world characteristic of these house is a practical and easy way to install and have.

Decorative trim:

Finally the last aspect is the decorative trims around and inside a house. For example there are many houses in the steampunk era covered with elaborate and various materials like metal, wood and even paint. A popular trimming in the Victorian era and steampunk genre is the Crowning and Decorative Moldings.

These Aspects of the steampunk genre can be very beautiful sometimes, but not always practical, for a few reasons. The first being that the molds can be very flimsy and can chip off easily, you would most likely have to repair it every few years and finally it is also most of the time made with wood, paint and dry walling mud which like I said in the other paragraph is easy for insects to dig away at and eat. I think you already know what I’m going to say for the outcome of this one… that’s right its probably not the most practical aspect of the designs and more for decoration and style.

So to answer my question using all the information I just researched I have came to a conclusion that during the era of steampunk and also today in the era people are more focused on the stye of architecture then the practicality and purpose of a object or design. I came up with this conclusion by just looking at the pros and cons of each design I chose, which wasn’t all of them but was just a few that I thought were the most important. I hope you enjoyed this post, and If maybe you thought most of the design had a purpose and wasn’t there just for style comment and tell me why.

Bibliography:

Wikipedia

Architect website # 1

Architect wbsites # 2

Clarence Crane Brinton

This week I’ve been working on an iBook about a philosopher named Clarence Crane Brinton. You may have already heard of him from my past blog post and if you haven’t, go ahead and click  here to catch up! As I was saying I created an iBook, but don’t expect too much! It’s just a few pages of information with some widgets (widgets are basically just mini interactive games) and then I had a mini quiz at the end just to review some little facts. In class we were learning about his theory which you will find out about when you read the book. Once we learned about his back story and theory we had to make a diagram which showed the cycle of his theory of revolution, and here’s mine:

The first stage is a citizen realizing how much money he’s paying, the second represents the same person in stage 1 doing something non violent about the situation, the third stage is citizens creating groups to rival the government and kill the king so the town can change and finally the fourth stage represents the kingdom and laws changing for the good of the citizens. So once we finished the diagram and understood his theory it was time to come up with a question! My question was… what inspired crane Brinton to come up with his theory of revolution?

I wanted to ask this question because I was interested in finding out about more of his life and seeing if I could find a pattern or a part in his life where he did something that could spark his inspiration. In the end I decided to make a mini iBook about it (like I explained in the beginning) once I was done all my reasearch I came up with a conclusion and even my own theory. I thought that my iBook was kind of boring at the beginning because I had way to many words, so I decided to cut everything down and then I added some widgets on a site called Bookry, I also got some links of places that I referred to in the book. Hope you enjoyed my post and reading my book!

If you want to download my iBook click the link below!

Click here to download iBook!

Crane Brinton And The Anatomy Of Revolution

If you didn’t know who Crane Brinton was he basically had a theory in which he took a bunch of revolutions and tried to find a comparison between them. These stages are kind of like when you get the flu or a cold.

Stage one of the revolutions were compared to the first symptoms of a cold like when you wake up and have a sore thought and a dripping nose because when the revolution began to start things where just starting to bubble underneath the surface and people where starting to realize what was wrong and what they wanted to change.

Stage two is just when you feel like your going to throw up or start violently coughing this is a comparison because in the revolution people weren’t violently protesting yet but trying to figure out something in a moderately civil way.

Next stage three, this is where you feel so sick you have to skip a day of school or stay home from work, in the revolution this part is where people start chopping heads off and violently protesting.

Finally stage 4, stage 4 is where everything starts to calm back down, at this point everything is back to normal except a few laws or other things that are altered.

Crane Brinton was born in 1898 and died the September of 1968.Crane Brinton was also the author of a few books including the anatomy of revolution. We are studying in class his theory and while we where reading a question came to mind, what sparked Crane Brintons inspiration and interest to research this topic?

I decided to go further with that question and research what age he was interested in learning about those revolutions and why he decided to go further and make it a career. After doing a bit of research I found that crane was a very focused student who received a scholarship to Oxford, studied philosophy, then later on worked at Harvard and taught ancient and modern history.

During all this Crane started researching 4 different revolutions and came up with his “Anatomy of revolution” so to answer the question, I think he was a very focused and studious child which led him to an amazing school which then inspires him to think deeper into what a revolution really was, why they happened and what was the outcome.

My Summer!!!

Hello!  As you can tell from the title I’m going to be sharing my amazing summer which was full of travelling, swimming and lots of sleeping! This summer, like most summers I started off going on a road trip to Jasper (in the Rocky Mountains) for my grandmas birthday and to see all our relatives who live in Edmonton, Alberta. Then we drove back to Edmonton with them where we saw my dads, mom and dad AKA our grandparents. A few days passed and it was time to drive Teva (my brother) to the airport so he could catch a plane to Calgary then to France, where he would stay with my aunts for 2 whole months! When we got back from the airport my dad drove back to Vancouver and we stayed with my other grandparents for a few days then flew back to Vancouver.

Once we got back my days where full of sleeping and swimming and a few soccer camps at a nearby university called SFU. My brother had dance everyday for 2 weeks and once that was over we took a few ferries to a nearby island called Hornsby it had a very small population with 1 gas station 3 or 4 restaurants and a grocery store and you can bike around the island in just a few hours! We have been going to Hornsby island with some friends ever since I was just 5 or 6 years old. We usually rent a house that overlooks the water so our days would be packed with swimming, bonfires, marshmallows and hotdogs. We only stayed on the island for a week.

A few days after we got back my dad and I paddle-boarded to an island called The twin island. The paddle board was about an hour and we had to bring tents, food and our clothes so all the pressure was on to not fall in. Once we got to the island, there a dock that we pulled our paddle boards on to and then we carried our camping gear up to a perfect spot where we could see the water and a little bit of the sunset. That night we had macaroni out of those bags you can get from MEC and it was honestly the best mac n’ cheese I’ve ever had. The next day we had hot chocolate and a cliff bar for breakfast. We packed up our tent and went back home, when we got back we went swimming for a while.

A few weeks later we took a plane to Toronto then to Paris and drove for 5 hours to pick up Teva from Brittany once we got there we stayed with our great aunts for a little less then a week. She lives with 5 dogs, 2 geese, 2 chickens, 2 horses, and a new kitten! While we where there we helped out with feeding all the animals and we visited where they grew up and some other towns and beaches.

After a few days we packed up and drove to “La Pointe A Torche” and went surfing for a while then we kept on driving to the south of France, we ate baguettes, strawberries and croissants. Once we got to the house we rented we went out for pizzas. The next few days we went surfing, and on the second last day we went to Spain and had hot chocolate which in Spain if you’ve been there before you know that it’s basically just melted chocolate. After that we had to pack up and drive back to Paris to catch a flight to Toronto then back home!
Once I get back I have a soccer tournament and then back to school! Hope you enjoyed reading about my summer!

Secrets Of The Sailors

So we have been doing a unit on pirates and European navigators. This has led us to learning about many historical figures and landmarks which in the end turned into a big meuseum exhibit that we would present at the exhibition night along with Blue Sky and our science projects.

So to start off at the beginning we started learning about if the European exploration had a positive or negative outcome. I chose negative, because if you really thing about it there were tons of disease that were spread causing millions of people to die and since there was so much war over land there were so many murders and deaths that impacted the outcome. Next we started to go more into what they discovered, how they did it and there motivation to do it. We leaned that they where motivated by land, religion, gold and knowledge and we learned about the passages that they took and we covered the outcome.

So now that all the learning was done it was time to present our knowledge and what we learned through a exhibit that we created by splitting into three groups. Each group had a specific topic to cover means, desire and outcome our group was the means which was basically how they did it. First we had to come up with a title and as you might already know our title was The Secrets Of The Sailors. Next we had to pick out a few headings (basically the top things that influenced how they did it) and we chose ships, gold, tools and nationality. Now it was time to decorate it. Our class chose three main colours wich where burgundy, navy blue and white. Then we picked out a few pictures and we where all set! In the end the meuseum was quite successful and I learned quite a few things!

Sciemathiques And How The Raven Stole The Light

So in math in science AKA sciemathiques we were learning about geometry, light, symmetry, Ibn Al-Hathaym and colour. All of those characteristics had to be included in one big project that at the same time represents light. Here’s a picture and a explanation: Read More

iBook!

So for our religion project (that you may already know from This post) we created an iBook. In this iBook included Poems, Explain Everything’s and a few pictures and some wright ups. This book was a class effort so each person had a job, we where split into five groups: videographers, illustrators, graphic designers, writers and poets. I was a a graphics designer so that meant I had to keep everything together, collect projects and add them in the iBook. The writers job was to write the intro paragraph, the poets was to create a poem for each religion, the illustrators was to create drawings that the graphic designers asked from them, and finally the videographers edited the Explain Everything’s and created a little intro video. Although we haven’t finished the iBook yet it is making very good progress and I have learned a lot so far. I will add the link when I am done the book and hopefully it will look amazing!