Ok, the mPoLs of 2018 are here.
For those who don’t know, the mPoLs are a time during January where every student talks to their teachers and parents about what they’ve been learning. In this blog post, I will be talking about some projects and assignments that I learned a lot from.
The first project I really learned from is our Math Card Game project. In this project, we made our own Card game. Our game had to use the math we were learning in some way or another. My game was based on the game Boss Monster. In both games each player builds a multi-card linear dungeon that a hero must travel through. Both the hero cards and dungeon cards deal a certain amount of damage to each other, and both can die. If a hero dies in your dungeon, you gain a point, but if you don’t kill the hero in your dungeon, you lose a point. First to 10 points wins.
During this project I learned a few valuable lessons, the most important being that tasks often take longer than you may think they will. I was drawing the cards on my computer, and the first couple cards took about 15 minutes. So I thought that doing 1-1.5 hours on them for a week would give me plenty of time. However the cards afterwards took 20-30 minutes each, so I had to stay up late for a few days to get them done.
I also learned how to better use Gimp, the drawing app on my computer.
The next project isn’t really one project, but one specific aspect of a lot of my projects; Teamwork. During my elementary school experience, we didn’t do a lot of group projects, and in the ones we did do, my group was kinda sucky. So during that time, I learned to not expect a lot from other group members unless I knew them well. But in my one-and-a-half years in PLP, my group members have shown that they usually are trust worthy, and I dont have to feel like im doing all the work.
Our last project in 2017 was a project called “Metaphor Machines”. We were put into groups based on our choice of Revolution that we wanted to do. My group (Jamie, Melika, Maggie and I) chose the American Revolution, and we build a Steampunk themed Rube Gold-Berg machine. Each part of the machine was a metaphor for an event within the revolution. This really put our teamwork skills to the test, as each of us had something we had to be working on at all times. And with everything on a large piece of plywood, we couldn’t do much outside of school. If one person slacked off, they had to work extra hard to make up for it.
https://youtu.be/acW02eX3ZxM
Back up to room 304, we were learning about the Matter cycles in Science. The Matter cycles were incorporated into our Frankenstuffy project for humanities, but not as much as Mr. Gross may have liked. This was challenging and a good learning experience because I had trouble incorporating the water cycle into my story. I had wanted a problem I could get footage of for my video, and the Seymour River is partially blocked off due to a landslide, so my problem was a landslide. However I needed to incorporate the Water cycle, not the carbon cycle, into my project. At first, my explanation was lame. “Due to the landslide, the Bear couldn’t get enough water to live, so it had to move to a new area”. But thats lame. My new explanation is much less lame, and incorporated both the Water and the Carbon cycle. “Because so many trees had been cut away, the water that soaked into the ground wasn’t being used, turning the water to mud. With the more muddy water, the ground eventually slid into the river”.
I learned that sometimes a simpler answer is not always what one is looking for. In this case, the simpler answer is the “lack of water”. It’s much simpler and more likely what would actually happen, but in a story with bears in birthday hats growing wings, a less-believable answer is often better.
https://youtu.be/LxGElOd2vHE
And back down stairs we go to Maker class! *queue Imperial march* For most of November we were working on a Star Wars themed exhibition. We chose an inquiry question that we then had to build something to answer. I chose to ask “could primitive technology destroy an modern armoured vehicle?” Or in other words, “could the Ewoks smash an AT-ST with two logs?” This question required lots of math to figure out and calculate, so my dad helped me a bit. I learned a lot about the math required to answer this question. I learned how to calculate the speed and size of any given object on screen. I also learned that, like drawing cards for a game, math that requires lots of steps like mine did takes longer than you expect it to.
This awkward and unsure conclusion is going to be a bit different today, as I have a question I would like to propose to my teachers (and the 4-6 of you who actually read these posts). As you may know, I’m lazy. In fact, there’s this part of my brain that will do just about anything to divert me from productive work. So I want to know, What can I do to ignore that little part of my brain? One of the reasons I joined PLP is because I was hoping that part would fade or become less prominent in my brain. So far, not much progress has been made, but I am still committed to removing this part of my mind.
During my first year and a half, I’ve learned quite a lot. I learned how to work in a team better, I’ve learned about story writing, I’ve even learned some fun facts about Star Wars. For the rest of the term, I hope to double what I learned in the last half-year. Bring it on 2018.