Isabelle Geffroy es naître mai 1, 1980 dans tours. Elle commencer chanter dans le 2000 à 2010, et elle chanson très populaire est « Je vous ». Elle va le surnom « zaz ». La genre elle faire est Gypsy jazz.

Nous choisir elle parce que nous amis elle musique et surnom. Nous sommes de peu à pièce petit de vie, mais nous sommes toujours importante. Nous aime elle musique parce que elle est intéressant et amusante à regarder.

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.

Imagine this; It’s December 16, 1776 and you’re walking around the Boston Harbour, when all of a sudden you see millions of dollars worth of waterlogged tea floating in the ocean. What do you do? *bing* That’s correct! Fight in the revolution or move north to Canada!

During November, our class started a project about revolutions. We started with a man named Crane Brinton, and his theories about revolutions throughout history. More info here, but to summarize Brinton theorized that all revolutions follow the same 4 stages. These stages are the:
Incubation stage, where people are unhappy with the way the government is acting.

Moderate stage, where popular leaders and celebrities share their opinions on the matter and people follow them.

Crisis Stage, where violence, riots, and political overthrows start.

Recovery stage, where the government rises again with the new ideology of the people. This could end with either peace or war.

Brinton wrote about these stages in his book, “The Anatomy of Revolution”. He also compared a revolution to a disease, in the sense that diseases follow these same steps.

Now that you’ve had that refresher, what have we been doing? We’ve been making Rube-Goldberg machines about different revolutions throughout history. These machines were called Metaphor Machines, because each different part of the machine has to be a metaphor for events that happened during our revolution. Oh, and we were in groups. Maggie, Jamie, Melika, and I chose the American Revolution, not to be confused with the Civil War.

Along with the metaphors and revolution, we also needed a steampunk aesthetic to our machine. Again, more info here, but here’s a quick summary. Steampunk is a genre of fiction depicting a futuristic Victorian era of technology. This technology is powered mostly by, you guessed it, steam engines. A lot of steampunk visuals show exposed gears, pipes, and wires, along with a copper, brass, and bronze colour scheme.

Now then, onto the machine.

We start on the Marble Platform, with a marble rolling down the Marble Ramp. As it rolls, it hits a domino that releases an American quarter that rolls down another ramp. The coin lands in the box on the Tax wheel, just as the marble finishes rolling. The marble knocks a tinfoil support away from a lever the Tax Wheel is placed on, starting the Wheel. The Wheel rolls through a short canal on our board to hit a weighted down teabag. The tea bag falls, slides down a short slope, and falls into the box on another lever. As the teabag lands it weighs the lever down, completing not one, but two circuits to start playing the American anthem on a speaker. The other circuit lights up the stars on the American Revolution Flag (the american flag at the time), completing the machine.

https://youtu.be/acW02eX3ZxM

Whooo, man. That’s a lot to take in.

A quick explanation of the metaphors:
Coin = the coin represents America
Tax Wheel = the tax wheel spins around and dumps the coin out. The taxes imposed by the British spun the economy of the US.
Tea bag+Box = a representation of the Boston Tea Party, when Americans protested the price of tea by dumping tea into the ocean.

This project taught me a lot about teamwork and that sometimes, things wont turn out the way you want them to. Different parts of our project were reworked, redesigned, and completely removed. We once had a pulley system that would pull the teabag up, then drop it onto the final lever.
We also learned a lot about the revolutions and about circuitry and wiring for this project as well. With this knowledge and experience, we can start off the second term strong. 2018, come at me!

 

Another half-year has come and gone and with the Holliday’s just around the corner you know something great is almost here. The Winter Exhibition. What, you thought I was talking about Christmas (or whatever you celebrate at this time of year)? HA. I laugh at your misjudgment.

If you read my post about last years exhibition, you should know how this goes. We choose an inquiry question based around a topic for your grade. This year, Star Wars! The grade 8’s and the grade 9’s worked together on this one (already an improvement from last year), and we had a light side and a dark side. The light was in the PLP room, and the dark was in the library.

We were chosen for each side based on our questions that we came up with. There were questions about the morality of using a Jedi mind trick on people, or real life lightsabers, or wether or not Star Wars weaponry would overrun our current weaponry, stuff like that. I chose an incredibly unique question (at least I hope). My question was “Could primitive technology destroy a modern armoured vehicle?”. I looked at the scene in Return of the Jedi when the ewoks destroyed an AT-ST by smashing it with logs. Would that be possible in real life?

To find out this answer, I need to calculate a few numbers. The first is the joules of energy, requiring the mass and velocity of the logs. The second is the joules per square centimetre, calculated by finding the square area of the surface of the logs. Finally, the joules per square centimetre the armour of the AT-ST can take before it breaks.

JOULES
-Mass
The very first thing I needed to do was find out the mass of the logs. To find that, I needed to know how big they were. Here’s where things get interesting. To find the size of the logs, I needed to know how big something in both of the frames I was looking at is. I chose the window of the AT-ST. But to find that, I needed to find the height of the man I could see in the frame. I took the average height of a Canadian male, assumed their height were the same, and went from there. The average height of a Canadian male is 176 cm. We can only see half of the man in the shot, so we half the height to 88 cm.

Now, stick with me here, I need to make my own unit of measurement. I call it “IRL” standing for In Real Life. An IRL cm is one cm on my ruler, and IRL is used when measuring something on a picture.

Now then, back to business. The 88 cm of the man is equal to 4 IRL cm, meaning that 1 IRL cm is equal to 22 cm. The windows side is 2 IRL cm, or about 50 cm. From there, we can move to a different picture with different scaling.

On our new picture, the window side is still equal to 50 cm, but is equal to 2.5 IRL cm. The log in this frame is 5 IRL cm, making it 100 cm wide, or one meter. Knowing this, we can calculate the circumference of the circle and the length of the circle. First is the length. Similar to how we calculated the diameter of the log, we can find the length of the log by taking the 5 IRL cm equalling 100 cm, then find how many IRL cm wide the log is in our new frame.

On this frame, the logs 100 cm width is now 4 IRL cm. If 4 IRL cm is equal to 100 cm, then the logs length of 260 cm is equal to 8.6 IRL cm.

OK, now that we know the length, we need the circumference. With the width (diameter) being 100 cm, we can find the circumference by using 2 times PI times Radius. With the radius being 50 cm, multiplying 50 by PI gives us 157 cm. Doubling that gives us the circumference of 314 cm^2

And finally, the log is a cylinder, so we need to calculate the volume. The log is 100 cm in diameter by 260 cm in length with a circumference of 314 cm^2. Using this we can calculate that the volume is 2.04^3, or 8.489 m^3.

To find the mass, we need to take the weight of Redwood (the weight in KG/M^2) and use that to calculate the weight of the log.

Velocity
Alright, now we know the mass to be 918 kg, now we need velocity. To calculate velocity, we need to do some simple frame by frame measurements. After doing just that, i found that the log travels 1.4 IRL cm per frame, or 8.4 IRL cm over 6 frames. In the 30 Frames Per Second of the movie, the log travels at 14.58 M/S. Finally! Now we can calculate the last bit, Joules.

Energy
To calculate the Joules of the log, we need to fill in this formula “E=1/2M(V^2)” with our numbers. Half of mass is 459 kg. Velocity squared is 212.576 M/S. 459 times 212.576 is equal to…

97,572.56 Joules of energy.

Holy jeez, thats five times the energy of a normal armour piercing round! But is it enough when applied across one square meter? Who knows?

Well, I do. We need to find the Joules per square centimetre. To find that, we divide the 97k Joules of energy by 100, then divide by 100 again. Doing that gives us a slight problem. The log isn’t a square, so we cant say the log is a square meter. A perfect circle is about 75% of a square, so we make the 9.7 J/cm^2 into a whopping 12 J/cm^2. To put that into perspective, a single joule is similar to moving an apple 1 meter in one second. Now move 12 apples 1 meter in one second. That’s so lame, im not even going to se if the armour can withstand it. A bullet from a hand gun has more J/cm^2, and most bullets aren’t even armour piercing.

https://youtu.be/XZBElpLN7GQ

What would it take?
A 9mm round from a handgun hits with about 692 J/cm^2. The smaller area and much higher velocity boost the Joules up tremendously. So what would it take for the log to pierce the armour? We could do one or two things. We could decrease the surface area of the log by making it into more of a cone shape. Doing this would increase the J/cm^2. And/or we could increase the velocity by dropping it from a much greater height. Both of these would increase the J/cm^2 by quite a bit, and would prove more effective at destroying the AT-ST.

THE ROOM
Light side
I was on the light side in the PLP room, and the dark side was in the library. I dont know much about the dark sides decor, but the light side was pretty awesome. We split the room into three sections. The first was the outside of a rebel base on Hoth, and the other two section we inside the base. In these sections, we were with people that had a similar topic to our own. We had environment (outside on Hoth), Tech (Inside the base) and philosophy(Also inside). I was with Robin, Isabelle H, Isabelle L, Sam, and Kiera in the Tech section. In out section we had our snack on “The Admiral Snackbar”, and a game we called “pin the lightsaber on Yoda”.

We did have a schedule for people to be running the game, but my project was right next to the game, so I was in charge of running it when someone else couldn’t. We also had skits that certain people would act out. Two were scenes from the movies, and the rest were improv. The two scenes were Leia’s “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi” transmission and when Jyn Erso first meets Chirrut in Rouge One.

During the preparation for this exhibition, I learned some new and useful things. Obviously I learned all the things I needed to to calculate the answer to my question. But I also learned a few other things. First, I learned to be more accepting of others ideas. When the Grade 8’s suggested the improv, I was worried at first. I felt that it would end up going wrong and they would do horribly at it. But after seeing the improv, I thought it was good. While others definitely don’t share my opinion, the grade 8’s did a lot better than I would have done.
I also learned that having a lot of team members can help a group go along way. Comparing last years exhibition to this years, we did a lot worse last year. The grade 9’s (last year) didn’t help us at all, so we had no idea what to be doing.

I think that with that knowledge and with each of the grades helping, the June exhibition is going to be incredible!

 

Steampunk has been a very unique genre of fiction to me. A lot of steampunk stories are set in the past, but are futuristic for many different reasons. This has always been so interesting to me, so I decided to learn about the origins of the steampunk genre.

So firstly, the name. It seems like the creator just took two random words and made them a name. Here, I’ll do one, “Fryingpier”. Yea, no. The origin comes from the word cyberpunk (coined by Bruce Bethke), as sort of a tongue-in-cheek reference. They just replaced cyber with steam, because a lot of things back then used steam power.

But who created the genre? Well, the American author K.W. Jeter was the first person to coin the term, in his novel Morlock Night (inspired by H.G. Wells creature the “Morlock”). He used the term to describe a genre of speculative fiction in which steam drove technological advancements, not electricity.

The steampunk genre has inspirations all the way back to 19th century Victorian authors, such as Jules Verne (author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) and H.G. Wells (author of the Time Machine). Steampunk also plucked from a genre known as Dime Novels. Dime Novels were much cheaper than most other books, because the author likely put less time and effort into them. These books often had melodramatic (exaggerated or over emotional) romance and adventure, and were often targeted towards lower income readers and those with less sophisticated taste.

Well, now I know a bit more about steampunk. I now know about the origins of the name, the first person to use the name, and even some of the inspirations for the genre.

Did you know that Frankenstein wasn’t the monster? Frankenstein was actually the scientist who made the monster. I now know what it feels like to be Dr. Frankenstein.

During class, we were assigned a task. We had to take stuffies and cut them apart, then re sew them into a different animal. We then had to make a video documenting a disaster that affected the stuffy (not changed). Throughout the video, our stuffy has to change into our final stuffy. These were called (and will be referred to as) Frankenstuffies! Mua-hahahahaha!

Our first step was to create a story. We learned about a new style of writing; the Epistolary Story. Imagine a diary with different days being different events. On day 1, this happened, on day 2, this happened, and so on. We wrote 6 different entries into our story, but here’s the twist. Our script had to NOT be in the epistolary format. For me, that wasn’t toomuch of a challenge. I wrote my script in a documentary style, so I was talking to the camera about what was going on. Although I couldn’t get much movement in the video, my stuffy kinda just sat in one spot while I talked.

So you’re probably wondering, “what did I make my Frankenstuffie from?” Well that’s a good question. I had a fat toddler-sized teddy bear that I sewed wings onto. I didn’t get the wings from any other stuffy, so I made them with help from my mom. His name is Birthday Bear.

When I started my design, I ran into a few problems. The first was that Birthday Bear wore a large top hat, that was sewn directly onto his head. Removing it wasn’t a problem, but he didnt have any fabric underneath the hat, so the stuffing was exposed. I went out to Fabricana in Coquitlam and ended up buying too much of this long fuzzy fabric. I cut it into the shape of the hole in the head. I sewed the fabric onto the head of the bear, and it looked slightly odd, but otherwise fine.

Then came the challenging part. Filming the video (I don’t want to spoil the video, so go watch it below). Because of the natural disaster I chose, my video had to be filmed by a river. Now, there are two spots (that I know of) that would be close enough to a river where i could film and still have the river near the scene. The first place I chose was near Maplewood Farm. The Seymour river flows past there, so I filmed there for the first part.

https://youtu.be/LxGElOd2vHE

I moved upstream for two reasons. The first is because I thought it would be easier to get to and I could have shots of the disaster in the background. The second and actually true reason is because Birthday Bear had to move to avoid his home from being flooded.

After he moved, the wings started to grow. They started as small, little stubs on his back. Over the course of the next few days, they grew into beautiful, light blue wings. You have to stretch your imagination to see the “beautiful”, but I think they turned out well for my first time hand sewing.

So overall, what did I learn? Let’s go over the positives first. I learned how to hand sew, a skill that may come in handy later in life. I learned about the matter cycles, how they effect the world around us and each other. I learned good moviemaking techniques such as how to properly time a shot, how to figure out how far I need to go when walking with the camera, and I improved my skills with a green screen.

I only learned two negative things from this project. The first is that I absolutely hate the sound of my own voice. The second is that I am the worst at handing things in on time.

So aside from me handing this in late, I really enjoyed this project. Sure it was tiring and hard work, but I am proud of what I learned and the work I’ve done. I know that, with my new skills, I could make a better video.

 

VIVE LA RÉVOLUTION! Wait I’m not french. But I am learning about revolution. More specifically, I am learning about the theory of revolution and the man who came up with that theory. That man was an American historian named Crane Brinton. He wrote a book called The Anatomy of Revolution in 1938. He looked at 4 revolutions that all shared a similar cycle. He looked at the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian revolution, and the English revolution.

His theory states that all revolutions follow similar steps or stages. Most successful revolutions follow 4 stages that he described as similar to a disease. The stages start with the Incubation stage. In this stage the population has some government-related problem. Something like an economic crisis, government injustice, or class division and antagonism. Or a combo of multiple.

 

The next stage is called the moderate stage. In this stage moderate leaders share their opinions on the matter(s). Sometimes protests and minor violence break out, but things are generally under control.

 

The third stage, the crisis stage, is much worse. Violence is common, and the government may employ secret police. Secret police activities are usually hidden from the public. In this stage, radical revolutions break out. These revolutions usually start a civil war, and are dominated by a strongman. Though not the ones from a circus.

The final stage is the recovery stage. As the name suggests, the nation/nations are recovering from the revolution for better or worse. The economy recovers to a balanced state, the violence diminishes, and the government returns with minor alterations. The sad part is that the recovery stage ends with either war or peace. Need an example? World War 1 started as a struggle between European powers that grew to encompass much of the wider world. WW2 is similar.

So why am I telling you this when you can just google search it? Heck, I’ll do that for you. Well after researching this topic I had a wonder about this theory. Have any significant revolutions broken this cycle?

So Idid some research, and found that all my searches just brought me to the Wikipedia page about the theory itself. So I read the page and found something interesting and useful. While three of the four revolutions that Brinton talks about in his book, the American Revolution (stay tuned for more later) “Does not quite follow this pattern”. The bad news is that I have no way of getting a copy of the book, so I can’t go into full depth and read the rest of the book. If Iget more info I will either update this post or release another post with the updated info on it.
So please stay tuned for that post.

I do suppose it my be possible to stop a revolution, however. If a cause is eliminated during the incubation stage or the moderate stage, the recovery stage will start immediately, and should be rather peaceful. A revolution may even be preventable before it even begins. That would then eliminate the stage(s) afterwards and start a shorter recovery stage.

Hey everyone! I’m not dead yet! Quite the opposite, actually. We just got back from a school trip to Calgary for a week!

So what did we do on our trip to Calgary, Alberta? Why would we drive for hours on end just to go to a cold city? Continue reading to find out!

In case this isn’t obvious, we didn’t start in Calgary. The first place we stoped at was the Last Spike in Craigellachie (Cray-gal-i-key). The Last Spike area is the area where the last spike was driven into the Canadian Pacific Railway, the railway the goes from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. This specific spike is important to the history of most of Canada because being able to move people and goods across Canada, and it marks when British Columbia became part of Canada.

After we spent some time at the Last Spike, we went off to a hotel/château called 3 Valley Gap. While there we visited the ghost town that was connected to the château. During that time we were spit into groups of 4 to make a fictional video centred around the ghost town. My group, consisting of Emily, Adlih, Luca.O.G, and myself. We decided to make a video about a ghost cowboy who needed to find his lost treasure. Luca was the cowboy, Adlih and I were the school kids on a field trip to the ghost town, and Emily was the teacher. I think it turned out really well, but I wish we could have prepared a bit more than we did.

https://youtu.be/piNpKl70g60

After the first night at 3 Valley Gap we headed off to the Rogers Pass Discovery Centre in, you guessed it, Rogers Pass. Rogers Pass is a well maintained road that goes through the mountains, but it was originally build at a railway. We watched a short movie about why Rogers Pass is so dangerous and what people do to keep it as safe as possible. Turns out when in the middle of snow mountains, there’s a lot of avalanches, so authorities do controlled avalanches to keep it as safe as possible. Trained military guys come out with a large cannon and fire explosive rounds the size of a fire extinguisher into the mountain. If an avalanche occurs, a large section of the mountain has been cleared of dangerous snow. If one doesn’t, then there’s no dangerous snow at the moment.one highlight was when Luca. J stood near one of the statues they had outside and it looked like she had giant pants and a tiny torso.

Next was lunch, also at our next stop, The Northern Lights Wildlife Wolf Centre. The centre raises wolves for a few different reasons. The first and slightly outdated reason if for the film industry. These people raised grey wolves so they could star in movies, TV shows, etc. But now they’re more of a conservation centre. Grey Wolves are endangered in Canadian National Parks, and people seem to think that wolves are the really deadly creatures. With how bad of a spotlight wolves have gotten with fairytales like little red riding hood, 3 little pigs and more, people fear these creatures. And for very little reason, too. Wolves get attacked and killed by hunters and the wolves aren’t doing anything wrong. So the wolf centre takes in injured wolves and brings them back to health. And, at the end of it all, we got to pet one of the wolves that was super friendly and was literally just a big fluffy dog.

For our last stop of the day we stoped in Banff (the town inside the park) and went to the history museum. The museum was honestly… kinda boring. There were just a bunch of animal statues, heads, and horns. And while I did get some cool photos, the most interesting thing in the museum was a board game that Mrs. Willemse and I lost to Kailey. And we lost by a lot. Darn you Kailey with your totally luck-based winning strategy!

Third day: start! We just stayed in Calgary this day, and the first thing up was The Locked Room. The Locked Room is a bit different than what it sounds like. We were split into 3 groups, and each group was locked in a different room. We were given a hour to complete puzzles, riddles, and different tasks to find a key to open the door. My group was Lucas, Luca.O.G, Maggie, Adlih, And Lauren. We were unable to open the door in the first hour given to us, but we did get it done because we were given another 45 minutes. This is because we were in one of the least completed challenges at the facility. There is a leaderboard in the lobby, and your groups name goes on the board if you win within the time frame AND without getting hints. We didn’t do either of those so technically we didn’t “complete” the challenge, we still got out the door.

After we had some lunch at Wendy’s, we went to the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. Glenbow is an art and history museum filled with old artifacts, minerals and crystals, history about Canada, Calgary, and more. We first stoped to meet our tour guide in the lobby, the went up to the 4th floor. There, we learned about the history of the museum and it’s owner. Glenbow was first created by a man named Glenbow who fought in WW1. After coming back from the war, he didn’t want to just sit down and retire. He decided to go explore the world, collecting artifacts, trinkets and other items throughout his journey. Eventually, his wife got upset that all the stuff he had collected was just inside their house, and she told him to get rid of some of it. He thought, “why not both” and opened up a museum for all this artifacts. Great story, right? I thought so.
After the story we went around the exhibits some more, looked at fancy gems and minerals, got some upside down photos, and learned a lot about First Nations in the Alberta area. One thing that was super interesting to me was that First Nations in Alberta moved a lot. Their tipis were able to be transported easily and they didn’t build Long Houses. Quite different from First Nations in British Columbia.

Normally I wouldn’t talk about meals. They’re probably not as interesting as the places we went to. But if Mr. Hughes is reading this, I should probably mention the Endless Shrimp at Red Lobster. PLP has a tradition to eat as many shrimp as we can during Endless Shrimp. Those who are participating are given a little card, and we eat as many Shrimp as we like. We then write down how many shrimp we ate in that round. My record is 43, but heard Kai ate about 100.

Dinosaurs! Today we drove to Drumheller, and the Royal Tyrrell museum of Palaeontology. A Dinosaur museum. I could go on for paragraphs about how cool Royal Tyrell was, but Ishould limit myself. Firstly, I have been to Drumheller twice now. Once  a week ago and once a few years ago. Secondly, i made a video about one of the best preserved Dino skulls in the museum. Check it out below once you’re done here. Third was something actually new to me. We were given a tour of the Badlands, the area around Drumheller.

https://youtu.be/c6w5ErXNwLg

I actually have two vids from Drumheller. The first is above, talking about one of the best preserved skulls in the museum. The second is below. We had a surprise video to make, in which we found a dinosaur within the museum. We had to make a short video talking about said Dinosaur. I found the Ornithomimus to be quite interesting. It was one of the few reptiles that had feathers. While the feathers didn’t let it fly, the decorative wings may have been used to attract a mate.

https://youtu.be/4w4bwsMaJZs

Aaand… thats about all we did for that day. For dinner we went to a place that served delicious chicken wings, but i had eaten something that day that my body didn’t like. Needless to say i was feeling pretty bad for rest of the trip.

Ok, here’s what we’ve all been waiting for. The main event we came to see, PotionTop!
Wait, thats not right. The actual event was Beakerhead (see, i was close), and the different exhibits were spread across the city. For those who don’t know, Beakerhead is an art, science, and engineering event where people from around Canada and the world build stuff like giant claw machines and huge fire breathing snakes. In the morning and afternoon we walked around doing different activities such as the claw machine and getting lessons on how to spin a wooden pole around your neck. We did see the giant snake, but it was on and breathing fire after dinner and in the evening.

Speaking of the evening, i was very upset to see that we would be out from 7pm for 5 Hours. However, we did see the snake in action and we saw the egg it was protecting. When the egg hatched, pillars of fire shot out of the egg. I was a good 15-20 meters away and my face was getting warm. We also saw this exhibit called Musical Cubes. The people had set up a tent with this cuboidal structure inside. Some of the faces of the cubes had buttons on them that sent a signal across the river to these lights. Pressing the button changed the colours on the lights, and we had fun figuring out which button changed which light. Last but not least was a library with a bunch of projectors in it. To be honest, i was so tired and nauseous at the time that i forgot what was supposed to be going on. On one floor there was “where the wild things are” projected onto the wall. On another there was some people playing a 6 person game, and i dont even remember what was on the bottom floor. But afterwards we went straight back to the hotel.

My last night in this hotel wasn’t a good one. Stomach cramps mixed with being keep awake late didnt help me feel any better. Thankfully a lot of the day was riding in a bus. After that sleep we finished our final Beakerhead event. It was the Calgary Municipal Space Station. There, the beakerhead people set up something they called the Space Elevator. The Space Elevator project is exactly as it sounds. The top of the tower was redecorated to be like a Space station, and the elevator up to the top was supposed to be an elevator up to the station. The station itself was cool, but the elevator ride up was awesome! I got to use a device that I’ve never used before, a VR headset. For those who don’t know, VR stands for Virtual Reality. This headset I like a small screen that you wear over your eyes like a mask. The device itself has a gyroscope in it, so it can tell where you’re looking. With certain videos playing, you can look around and see things behind you, to the side, whatever. It’s pretty cool.

After lunch we drove to the Cave and Basin National historic site. This is where the Europeans discovered the first natural hotspring in Canada. We went on a tour of the area, with a tour guide who acted out different stereotypes of the people at the time. What’s interesting is that the main building had a cave in it that led to the spring. We weren’t allowed to go swimming in it because A: it was a public area. And B: the water was sulphuric, so we would melt (slowly). We were there for about two hours, and then we went to the next stop.

After, we drove to Lake Minnewanka for a boat cruse. The captain drove us around the lake, while the co-captain was our tour guide. He told us about the lake, the surrounding forests, even the famous lake monster. The story of the monster starts with a fisherman. He begins to claim that a monster lives in the lake, and starts selling boat tours to the public. The public begins to think that the man is crazy, and ask for proof of this monster. So the man sets out, and actually catches the monster. The monster is terrifying, the upper half of a rotting human corpse with the tail of a large fish. But thats exactly what it is. The man had animal parts shipped in from around the world to make this fake monster. Of course, the public saw through the fake monster, and stoped believing the lies the man said.

The next stop was a hotspring we could actually swim in! At the Banff upper hot springs, the spring water is filtered into a large, shallow pool. People can pay to swim in it, and those that do are given a towel, and as much time in the pool as they want. I didnt go, however, because I forgot my swimming stuff.

This night was definitely the worst of them all. Unlike all the other nights, we slept in a Hostel. For those who don’t know, a hostel is one large room with about 6 bunk beds in them. So all the girls slept in one room, while all the boys slept in another. At this point, i was too tired to care about getting ready for bed. It was late, so i just slept in my clothes.

The next day we went on a glacier walk. At the Columbia icefield, we were driven up a glacier in a really cool glacier bus. While on the glacier, we were shown a small creek that we could fill our water bottles in. I did, and then drank it all throughout the day. The next thing that we did was the glacier skywalk. Imagine a glass bridge over a large canyon. I didnt go, because im scared of heights and was really tired. Mrs. Willemse and I spent the next hour and a half just chilling on the front deck of the ice field centre.

Next up: lake Louise. Lake Louise is a beautiful lake of runoff glacier water. There is a hotel at the lake, but it was way to expensive for us. I had actually been to lake Louise before, but didn’t remember until i had spent some time there.

That night was an actually decent sleep. We stayed at a Holiday Express in Golden. I got an actually decent sleep that night, but not enough sleep.

Despite being the last day, we still had a lot of things to do. Well, ok. It wasn’t “a lot” a lot, but the single thing we did have to do was draining. In the Enchanted Forest (an odd outdoor fairy tale themed art museum), we had to make a fictional video. We were in groups, and we had two hours to think of, shoot, and edit a fictional fairy tale video. I was in a group with Daniel, Luca J, Jamie, and Luca O.G. We came up with a pretty interesting idea. Jamie and I were evil mages, bent on stealing the queens (Luca J) fortune and power. After kidnaping the queen, we run into the queens two sons, played by Daniel and Luca O.G. Jamie gives Daniel a poisoned apple, he dies and luca O.G. Sets off to kill us. The end.

The rest of the day was driving back to the school. The music on the bus got better until finally we were singing “final countdown as we pulled up to the school. After a short wait, i was home and in a decent bed for the first time in a week. And we all lived happily ever after.

The end.

Change. Some people hate it. Some like it. But it’s always here. Some people create lots of change, but sometimes not for the better. The most well known people like this lived during the renaissance era. These people include Leonardo da Vinci, Francis bacon, Raphael, etc. During our unit on the renaissance we learned about these people, what they did, and the tension they caused.

Firstly, we were put into groups. I was with Alivia, Jamie, and Raina. We were given the topic of agriculture to research. We had to make a notebook presentation about the changes in agriculture from the Middle Ages to the modern era, and each of us had to make one page about one era. I did work of the renaissance pages.

We researched a few deferent ways, brainstorming, Google searching, etc. After we found our info, we made a book in book creator. Our book focused on the topic of changes in agricultural tools and farming techniques that came into being during our assigned eras. My pages talked mainly about crop rotation and forage crops. Crop rotation was a technique used to allow nutrients to seep back into the soil. By growing different crops each season, specific nutrients can seep back into the soil for the next time the need to be used.
Forage crops are crops planted to feed farm animals. This was mostly hay, but sometimes farmers grew other crops like clover. Nowadays its still mostly hay, and this is where the common hay bale or hay roll.

Have you ever wanted a tree that takes care of its self? Have you ever wanted a tree that can move, pick, and prune itself? Well with the TreeBot, you can!
The next part of our project was to create an invention that would help people around the world in our field of expertise(our topic). We decided to make a robot that goes inside a tree and controls one branch to preform labor induced tasks. The goal was to reduce labour and free up time for farmers to pursue other things they wanted too.

We made our model out of paper towel tubes and paper. We put it in a plastic cup and stuck some dirt in it. Our model is a model of a fruit tree with a TreeBot inside it, and it goes off into a branch.

We had to pitch our idea to a company related to our topic, and we chose john Deere. Sadly, we couldn’t get John Deere to actually come, so we pitched our idea to Mrs Willemse and Mr. Hughes.

Change can help a society grow. It can also tear it to shreds. Very rarely to changes benefit everyone, and opinions are usually split when it comes to large change. One thing I took away from this experience was that even the most rediculous, crazy idea can be a worthwhile idea.

So the year is coming to an end, and there were some memorable moments throughout. I’m pretty proud of a few projects I’ve done, and I would like to share them.
Im still proud of my Learning Portfolio, because of how simple and fun it is. I really enjoy being able to post my work on a blog, and I like that I can post other posts about what I like to do. One post I am proud of is my DI Provincials post. I think this is one of my biggest posts so far, not only in text but also in photos. I’m proud of the post due to the content of the post. I’m still happy I finished and I’m happy that I did it. I learned a lot from DI and, while I don’t want to do it again, I think it was a good experience now that I look back on it.

I feel im ready to advance grade levels because I know how to manage my time well. I will need to manage time well to get assignments done on time. I also have a little system for prioritizing work. If i have multiple assignments due on the same day, I work on the one that needs more work. If their due different days, I work on the closest one for a while or until its done, then I work on the other one for a while.

I’ll be honest, blue sky was… interesting. For those who don’t know, blue sky is this year end exhibition in which we present a project we’ve been working on for the past few weeks. We are allowed to make whatever we want for this, but we have to come up with a question, get it approved by Mrs. Willemse, and build something to solve a problem relating to the question. I had a few ideas I was super exited for, but they all existed sadly. I finally thought about what problems I have, and i thought about solving a problem i have while swimming.
Lane ropes are a pain, and I hate bumping into the wall. I wanted to find a way to stop myself from doing that. I finally thought about building a fin that I can wear on my back. More information can be found on my designers journal. (This will be here at some point.)

Overall, I feel I have grown as a learner this term. I learned how to use a few new apps, I learned new tricks on my blog, and I am slightly more comfortable with recording myself. During maker I wasn’t able to do much work on blue sky because all my stuff was at home and hard to transport. I was able do do some work on my journal entries, and I helped other people with their blue sky.

In terms of work habits, I didn’t learn many new ones. I did learn that it is incredibly important to check Showbie every time a notification pops up, no mater what I’m doing. If I miss something like an assignment or a comment, I could be in serious trouble. I check Showbie when I get home from school, around 9 am on the weekends, and after dinner all days.

I feel I am ready for grade 9. I learned new skills and techniques to use during classes, and I generally know what I’m doing. I am ready.