Hello readers and welcome to another scintillating blog post by yours truly!
It’s that time of year again, where every PLP student gets a chill up their spine and know to grimace for the worse to come. It’s time for Blue Sky!
This was my first Blue Sky spring exhibition and during this blog post I’ll be reflecting on the path I went on to make my final product and the exhibition.
Let’s start off with a brief intro to blue sky. Blue sky has been used before at multiple large companies in today’s world. Companies such as 3M, Google and Apple have used this method with their employees to try to spark creativity and to create new ideas for their companies. Blue Sky is known around the world as many different things such as passion projects, 20% time or genius hour. Each name has the same concept for the project.
Basically, it’s a project that we get to design ourselves. There are limited guidelines and all the student has to do is make a creative solution to the driving question. Along the journey we had to do research and create prototypes to make our project as good as possible. What the students of grade 8 PLP had to do was answer the driving question: How can you create a solution to a problem to a non-PLP peer has?
Here was my friend’s problem: my friend Matthew Tattrie likes golf, but doesn’t necessarily have the time, equipment or money to play golf seriously. In order to come up with a successful solution to the problem, we had to follow something called the LAUNCH cycle. To learn more about the launch cycle, click here.
At first, we had to get our idea approved. I struggled with this because I had multiple ideas but couldn’t get a concrete base for them and most of them weren’t great ideas anyways. What I ended up with was the idea to create a community golf net for people that wouldn’t normally have time to play golf.
Let’s start with stage 1
L- Look, Listen and Learn
This stage occurred first, so obviously it occurred earlier in the process of the project. One activity we did for this stage was looking at something called How Might We. In this activity, we looked at our ideas for the project and asked questions about it. It went something like this: “ how might we… make golf more appealing to people that haven’t played before?” There were also different types of categories as to what the “How Might We” questions might look like such as “amp up the good” or “explore the opposite”. I thought this was a cool way to start off because it really got the creative juices flowing and made us think ahead about how we were going to plan out our project. Go ahead and click this Link to learn more about HMW.
Another thing we did for this step was create a project pitch. For the pitch, we had to answer different questions and show the teacher our vision for our project. Here’s a picture of my short project pitch.
What we did there highlighted the first stage. We then moved on to step 2:
A- Ask tons of questions
This stage is essential for any project. For this stage we did 3 important things.
For one, we created a timeline that we would refer to in order to complete our work efficiently. We would have to plan getting our work done around events that we already have. For mine, I had to plan working around golfing and I think I balanced it fine.
One other thing we did for this stage was to make a plan on how we were going to LAUNCH our project. In this stage we planned out what we already knew about our project and tried to figure out how we were going to make the project work for us. This helped me out because I was able to get my thought and ideas onto the paper for my project. Here’s couple pictures on how mine looked.
Looking back, this project really helped me out with the final outcome.
We moved onto stage 3 shortly thereafter.
U- Understanding the problem or process
For this stage, I tried to be able to understand what I was doing here. I looked at other types of golf nets or community golf programs. I found out that there were many other types of golf nets, but they were incredibly pricey (upwards of $150!) After learning this my goal was to create a affordable version of a golf net that would work for anybody from any skill level. I also learned that there were a few community golf places even here in North Van. (There is a putting green for the community to use somewhere in lonsdale)
After this stage, we went on to step 4.
N- Navigate ideas
This stage was all about solidifying ideas for your project. I had lots of ideas for my project and so I sketched out my “dream vision”
As you can tell, I was still searching though some ideas for my project. Up there 👆 was prototype one out of three that we had to make. During this stage, I tried to come up with ideas for my project that would make it as good as possible, but to also make it make sense. During this stage I realized I wanted to have a poster board in which I could present my ideas on and I’d present around that. All my knowledge would be on that. I also debated about which materials I’d be using to create the golf net.
This stage bled perfectly into stage 5
C- Create a prototype
This stage is where we got into the really nitty gritty part of the project where everything was just starting to come together and I needed to organize them and get my work done.
Unfortunately for myself, the Seycove golf team qualified for the 2018 high school provincials and so I had to miss three crucial days of school in the middle of this process. This led to a lot of last minute work because I wasn’t really able to work from where the provincials were.
Getting back to the process, I had to create a second prototype in order to get my project finished. Originally, I was going to use netting to create a background for golfers to hit into but netting was hard to come and also expensive for the time that we had to do the project. For my second prototype, I made a base out of wood and used curtain poles as a stand with my dad and draped a sheet over the whole thing to create the golf net. It wasn’t perfect, but I thought it worked really well for a second prototype.
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Click the link to watch a video of myself using the golf net!
This brought us right to the last step
H- Highlight and fix
This step was all about critiquing my previous prototype. For my third prototype, I used safety pins to pin down the net on the side of the frame instead of having it flap loosely. Another major adjustment I made was adding targets to the net which, in my opinion, made it more appealing for people to hit at. With these big changes I thought it was better than my second draft.
Here’s a video of me using my golf net!
Finally, it was time to launch my project to an audience.
Every year, PLP has two major exhibitions. The winter exhibition was earlier this year. Click here to read more about that. Now, it was time for the spring exhibition. We worked together with the grade 9’s and 10’s to design the room to make it seem “fitness themed” and it turned out pretty great!
It was interesting giving my project pitch to different people of all ages because you had to slightly adjust how you presented it. I think I have presentations to everyone from ages 9-89. (Approximately I’m just guessing.) Altought I cant say it was fun being at school for 12 hours that day, it was satisfying to see the room transform and to be over with the project
Overall, I loved being able to do a project about my passion and to have not a lot of guidelines for a project. It was a cool experience.
Thanks so much for reading my blog post. That’s going to wrap up my year in grade 8 for blog posts, so see y’all next September!
signing off,
Nik.
