Hello it’s Raymond welcoming you back from winter break, this last PLP winter exhibition we worked on a blue sky project and a project called mazer tag were you can find here. For our blue sky project (do anything you want)  the driving question was “How might I design and build an answer to my own inquiry”. This brought me to my own how might we question which was “how might we create something to express different emotions using Star Wars music”. This is what kickstarted my project and had me going on a good path. This was what the first milestone was about.

What we used throughout this project was the LAUNCH cycle. Starting with the “L” phase Look, Listen and Learn, Saw the first Star Wars movie and heard music that was used in my final project. This phase included lots of research and figuring out how I could use this in my project. I learned lots of things from classmates and teachers wether is was important parts of the movies to understand more design opportunities  or even just encouragement with your ideas for a final project. The competency that was assessed was the Look, Listen and learn competency.

The next phase was the “A” phase ask tons of questions. In this phase I created a chart of questions ranging from robot questions, detective questions, judge questions and inventor questions, these questions could be answered by a simple google search or YouTube video, or it could be more complicated and required a different approach to answer the questions. This phase helped me refine my task and make it much easier to handle. The competency assessed was Ask the Hard Questions, doing this makes you have a strong understanding of what you need to know to create your product.

The “U” phase which was understanding the problem or process was where we had to use finer search terms while researching to find the exact bit of information we needed. Some of these questions needed some different or imaginative solutions. This is where the innovative designer competency came in, this included using a variety of technologies to create imaginative solutions to solve difficult problems. The other competency assessed was Understanding the problem or process. This included stating the source of information which could be in MLA format like we used in our third milestone. This competency also had choosing an idea to pursue but still keeping other ideas open.

The next phase was the “N” phase Navigate Ideas, this phase we made a video to show our innovative designer competency. The video included what our steps were to create our end product and what we have done so far towards our goal. The “N” phase included thinking inside the box but making the most as possible with the constraints we had. I use iMovie to make the video that showed these competencies. 

The second last phase was the “C” phase Create a Prototype, this phase i created a prototype of a Star Wars music remix the competency assessed was Create, Make, Design and Build and Computational thinker. This is were I used the power of technology and created music on my iPad. My plan at this point in the cycle for my final product I would use GarageBand and iMovie put together to make a video with visuals and audio.

The last phase was “H” highlight and fix, this is where you finish up your project and just tweak your product for the actual presentation or. This is where I also showed my teachers fail evidence. Without this failing I would probably not have done as well because when you learn from your mistakes you focus on it more and you make yourself complete that task with greater detail. I also identified the sources of feedback and made changes even self critique like if there was a little thing wrong with my product I would fix it. As for being a computational thinker I used apps on my iPad to show the power of technology and ultimately develop a solution to my inquiry. At this point it was time to LAUNCH our project to the world.

 

 

 

The area we presented our projects in was the planet Endor… not actually on the Star Wars planet though. Myself and a group of grade 8’s and 9’s made a replica of Endor in one of our classrooms. This place was decorated with lots of green paper had many cardboard trees and even had a pine scent. The room was somewhat dark like you are being covered in trees and we had some ambient noise included in our area. Other groups were assigned different places like Tatooine, Hoth and The Death Star. Overall this project was quite fun especially finishing it off with taking almost the whole movie theatre to ourselves and getting to watch Star Wars Rise of Skywalker.