The Ones About School

It’s that time of year again. Another TPoL (or SLC, take your pick). If you’re reading this online, hi. Sorry you’re not getting the full experience. For those of us actually talking, also hi.

I’d like to start by talking about something I’m proud of. Something that I’m really proud of this year would be our WWII website. I feel like, given that I was working alone, I did quite well with it. I had to learn a bunch of new things about website design, and had do to all of the research on my own, and it’s one of the strongest projects I did this year. I’m very proud of how it all turned out in the end, considering how much time I put into it.

Next, I’m going to talk about something I feel like could have used improvement. Something that could have used improvement was my disruption podcast that I did with Claire. We actually wound up turning our video project into a podcast last minute because we didn’t fully take advantage of everything we had at our disposal in California, and even then it wasn’t the best podcast we could have made. I would have put more effort into the script, as it was very rushed, and planned everything out better, maybe gotten a few more interviews. It’s still alright work, but it definitely could have been better.

Another thing that I’d like to add in here is: what’s the most valuable thing you have learned this year? I’d like to say that it’s knowing your team members’ strengths and weaknesses, but don’t play it safe. During DI is when this really set in for me, because we all played into each other’s strengths and didn’t stick anyone on a job that they either didn’t know how to do or weren’t good at. But we also didn’t play it safe. Personally, I’m not a great public speaker, I never have been. Yet I wound up getting the second most lines in DI, with Claire (who also isn’t big on public speaking) having the most. We could have been super simple and given Adam all of the lines, as he’s confident in it. It was a challenge, but we did it. Another thing would be Claire’s makeup skills. We knew Claire could do makeup, but we asked her to push her limits by asking her to try and do things she’d never done before, like draw on tattoos and make a fake beard. There needs to be a good balance between doing what you’re good at and challenging yourself.

Finally, I’d like to talk about something that shows my growth as a learner. For this, I’m going to pull upon our Sins of the City unit. In the end, we created a podcast talking about homelessness in Vancouver, specifically the issues surrounding a homeless shelter being build across the way from an elementary school. I feel like this shows my growth as a learner because I had to learn to work in a group, which (if we all remember from last year) I tend to struggle with. I also had to deal with editing a podcast, something that I wasn’t too great with before, and hearing the sound of my own voice on tape. I’m very proud of my team, and I feel like we all grew as learners during that time.

So, why am I ready to move into the next grade? Because of all of these things. I’ve grown in my public speaking skills, and I’ve done excellent work this year. Personally, I think it’s the best it’s ever been. I’ve also learned important lessons about team work, strengths and weaknesses, and challenging myself. I’m really looking forward to grade 11. Until then,

Read you later

Sincerely, Me

The day started at 7:30 am, when we went to pick up Willa (she was shadowing my dad all day). We drove down to the office, where we were a bit early. The first person I met with was Yvonne. Yvonne is in charge of all of the digital marketing. Any signage you see for COBS is all run by Yvonne. She also contacts people such as food blogs to help promote Cobs.

Next I talked to Jane. Jane’s job really interested me, because she’s a graphic designer. This means every single thing to help promote Cobs has been made by her:

She had a whole colour palette at her desk, to help her figure out colour schemes. When I was shadowing her, she was designing how to fit window art into a new store.

Next up: Brad. With Brad, I actually got to sit into a campaign meeting, talking about the logistics of the Breakfast Club campaign that they have. It went from everything from what outfits kids in the advertisements would wear to the adhesive on the stickers the donors would put up around the store. Seriously, so much talk about adhesive.

Afterwards, Brad talked to me about what Cobs’ goal is. Everything from good customer service, making sure that your store is the go to instead of other bakeries, and making good sales.

(It doesn’t show up well, but the text on Brad’s screen says “how do we win?” Truly iconic)

We went to lunch, which was good. Then I talked to Kelsey. Kelsey is in charge of all of Cobs’ social medias. This means Facebook, Twitter, instagram, possibly MySpace, and the blog. She told me a very weird fact: as long as you have the weather app on your phone, you can be tracked. But not just where you are: if you click on the Cobs bread website, from there your phone can tell which bakery you went into, how much you spent and how long you were in there. It’s freaky, really.

I went into a meeting where they talked about creating a mobile app. They had a prototype, which demonstrated how it would work like ‘Skip the Dishes’.

The final task: my dad and his co worker filming an educational video for franchisees. My father, mind you, had not read the script before hand. We were only there for half an hour, but apparently it took another hour after that.

(Note the professional green screen of green paper duct taped to the wall)

All in all, marketing sounds like an interesting job I’d like to be invested in! I really enjoyed shadowing, and I’ll definitely consider it  as an option in the future.

Read you later

Sincerely, Me

I’m back! This time, with graphs! We did a math unit on graphing linear equations. We got to look at three different cellphone plans and graph out what’s going to be the cheapest if you go over on data and over on call minutes.

Let’s start with the basics:

So, upfront, it looks like PC Mobile is the most expensive, and Freedom is the cheapest. This is where a lot of people mess up with cell phone plans, because they don’t look into overage costs (Which surprisingly doesn’t mean you get charged if you’re over 18). Because, let’s take a look at the cost for going over on call minutes:

Freedom stays cheap, yeah. But Koodo quickly becomes expensive if you go over 12 minutes of talk time. This is why you get unlimited call and text, people. This is why!

Heres another thing: data. So many people use to to quickly google that one word, or look up Tom Hardy’s instagram. But it’s so easy to go over on data and the companies sneak in those extra costs:

Freedom doesn’t have any data, as shown. But if you’re on Koodo, those charges are piling up quickly, despite starting out cheaper. So, let this be a lesson: READ THE FINE PRINT ON YOUR CELL PHONE PLANS!

All in all, if you use data, probabky go with PC Mobile. If you don’t, Freedom is fairly cheap!

As always, I worked with the Wonderful Willa on this. I hope you learned a bit about graphs and stuff!

Read you later!

Sincerely, Me

So as a class, we went to something called the BC Tech Summit. It’s a three day conference held in Vancouver that has a bunch of really cool nerdy things. There were speakers (whom I will talk about later), universities showing off programs, just generally some cool projects, entrepreneurs, and so on. We got to go to Youth Innovation Day, which gave us a one day experience of all of the cool things. Let’s dive in.

As I mentioned before, there were speakers. I think my favourite was Brent Bushnell, who was pretty much the coolest engineer ever.

He talked a lot. But honestly, it was so interesting it felt like five minutes. He covered everything from VR and how it can be improved with video games, to education. A fun fact he gave us: 65% of schoolchildren will be employed in jobs that don’t exist yet. Isn’t that crazy? To think that I could be doing a job that right now doesn’t even exist. That’s so cool to think about. Another thing: he helped make the really cool Okay Go Rube Goldberg Machine video that I am OBSSESSED with.

The other speaker was Andy Bird. First of all: great hair. He is a professional wrestler, which sorta made me wonder what he had to do with tech. But he was talking more about being motivated to go do what you’re passionate about, and to never give up. He told us a bit of his back story, about how he was homeless at 14 and wanted to become a wrestler. And, soon enough, he was the heavyweight champion for 441 days. Awesome!

After the morning session of speakers, we got to talk to a guy from Microsoft! The room wa sreally loud and we were at a table of people, but talking to him was really cool. I asked him about how his job is helping improve education, and we luckily got it recorded:

Also, there were universities there. They talked a lot about how technology was helping them with their education. One of the cool ones was a 3D scanner I saw. It helped scan a car engine, and then made a digital model that students looking to be mechanics could learn to take apart and build up again. There was also the weird baby birthing robot that simulated birth. It was… something.

All in all, the Tech Summit was really cool! I would go again next year for sure.

Read you later

Sincerely, Me

Moving forward in history in socials, we studied World War II. World War II is something I know a bit more about, most likely because of my obsession with Captain America. But really, it turns out I only knew the basics: Hitler rose to power, wasn’t a great guy, America and Britain defeated him, the end. This unit opened my eyes to everything. The battles, the politics, economy, civilian life.

For this unit, we chose to focus on perspectives. When we learn about the war usually, it’s always from the one perspective of Canada doing everything right and Germany doing everything wrong. But we wanted to capture everyone’s perspectives.

To start off, we had to take a survey. This survey asked us what country we wanted to research. There was an option at the bottom that caught my eye: choose your own. I noticed there was a country that wasn’t on there that interested me:

Thats right, I got to study America’s role in WWII. It turns out there was a lot I don’t know (Captain America comics can only teach you so much). This project had a lot of elements. Let me break it down for you:

Literature:

In class, we each had to pick a book about WWII. There were three options: All The Light We Cannot See, Code Name Verity, and Unbroken. All three are amazing books, but I chose Code Name Verity. It’s very compelling, an excellent read about a female spy in the war. I actually already did a book review on it, so you can read that.

Helmut:

This part was actually really cool to me. We got a WWII veteran in to talk to us. Though, not only was he a veteran, but he was a German soldier who went to Hilter Youth. His name was Helmut, and he lives in Canada now. Going back to the idea of perspective, it was really interesting to hear him talk about what it was like to be in Germany. We got to make podcasts, which link in to the final (and most important) part of the project.

The Website:

That’s right: we made a website! This is going to be the longest part, so buckle in. We made a website called PerspectivesOfWW2, which has different pages for each country involved in the war, give or take a few. Most people got put into groups to complete this part of the unit, though myself, Calum, and Isobel were titled ‘independents’, because we were working on our own. This means: all the research, all the media searching, all the citations, and the page design was all done by one person. Personally, I think we did really well.

The research was one of the hardest parts for me, because we had to do citations, which involved us saving the link to put into the citation, as well as mark stuff like who wrote the article, when I accessed it, who the publisher was, etc. I think it’s worth mentioning that my timeline took about a day to do (I had to cut it down a lot).

We got critique from Cathleen Barter, who was actually our teacher’s teacher. It gave us a chance to revise some things, and fix some facts. If you’d like to see the full website, click here.

For the independents:

Mine | Isobel’s | Calum’s

This was a really great way to learn about WWII from all perspectives, and I feel like I got a lot out of it. In BC, we only really learn about Canada. It was cool to see all the different perspectives of the war. The idea of having to publish this to the world gave the added pressure of double checking everyone was right, which is good (because now everything about America in WWII is engraved into my brain). I liked this style of learning, I hope we do more projects like this in the future.

Read you later

Sincerely, Me

So for this unit in science, we focussed on energy and how to get energy in nature. Personally, I don’t know much about all this stuff. But, I got assigned to a group that helped me learn a lot more about it. Our task: we had to make a generator that could produce power from nature, and then create an advertisement about it.

If you go all the way back to grade eight, we know bout advertisements. The bigger issue for me was learning about how to generate energy. Turns out it’s fairly simple. We had a hand crank generator, which spun a mini motor inside which helped power some LED lights. We went through a few prototypes of our generator. First with spoons, then we used plastic containers and wood:

The current of the river got caught in the containers, which then spun the motor inside and lit up the lights. But just how much energy did it produce?

This is when we got into the math. We had to make a graph about how many joules the generator would make, and how long it would take to charge an iPhone. An iPhone takes 1800 joules to charge, which would normally take around 2 hours and 40 minutes in an outlet. Our generator only produced 24 joules ever 20 minutes… so if you wanted to charge your iPhone, it would take around 25 hours. Happy waiting.

The advertisment was the easiest part. We filmed the generator spinning, and added in a few statistics, and then filmed. Ryan played a character called electro boy. It was a good time.

As always with these posts, I gotta add in the mind map.

At the beginning of the unit:

At the end:

Read ya later

Sincerely, Me

Title: Code Name Verity

Author: Elizabeth Wein 

Genre: Young Adult, Historical

Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity is the story of a British spy named Julie, or Queenie, or Verity; whichever one you prefer. Julie gets captured in 1943, Nazi-occupied France, where our story begins. Her captor, a man named Von Linden, gives her two weeks to give up as much information she can on the British war effort. Though, as Julie recounts, “the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France – and Allied Invasion of Two. We are a sensational team”. Thus begins a long story recounting how Julie and her pilot friend Maddie (code name Kittyhawk) came to meet each other and become friends. 

The story is really a wonderful depiction of how the war was from another perspective. So many times we hear the stories of the soldier who saved lives on the field, but it was really refreshing to hear it from Julie’s point of view. It paints an eerie picture of just how dark being taken prisoner during World War Two really was, and how much it can break someone’s spirit. Julie so quickly goes from making snarky and sarcastic comments to contemplating that “there’s no efficient way to kill yourself with a dressmaker’s pin (I wouldn’t call contracting gangrene an efficient way to kill yourself)—I puzzled over it for a long time, seeing as they’d left the pins there, but it’s just not possible”. The narrative switches from first person to third person quite a lot. The first person would be Julie recounting her times as a prisoner, and experiences such as her hair being washed with kerosene and commentary on her prison guard, Engel. The third person is of Maddie, talking about how she joined the war, how she met Julie (formerly Queenie), and how the two became part of the war effort. 

Another subject that it touches beautifully on is friendship. Julie and Maddie meet under impossible circumstances, and become the closest of friends. The admiration and adoration Julie has for Maddie is evident in the way she writes about her, never a word of disrespect is written. Julie’s statement of “It’s like being in love, finding your best friend” is the perfect way to summarize her feelings towards Maddie, and vice versa. It’s interesting to read how two individuals can find friendship among the times of suffering and war, and seeing their friendship grow is truly heartwarming. 

Personally, I really enjoyed this book. The beginning was a bit hard to get in to, as a lot of the military slang was new to me, but I was soon hooked. I’m not too sure if it was the suspense of Von Linden breathing down Julie’s neck, or the plot of Maddie and Julie becoming friends while also fighting in a war. The historical points in it were fascinating, and I actually learned quite a lot about women’s roles in the war, as well as how the technology had changed  from then to now. Overall, I would definitely recommend it for those who are up for reading something not entirely light hearted, but captivating and suspenseful at times.

Read you later,

Sincerely, Me

More DI! And I’m not going to explain the ominous title until later in the post because… suspense.

Anyways, unless you wanna do more reading than necessary, let me recap: I went to a tournament called DI with my team where we did an engineering challenge in which we had to drop weights into a structure. We also needed to include a dramatic impact, an even depicter that depicted said sudden event, and two team choice elements. We wrote a story about social anxiety in which I played the embodiment of anxiety and scared everyone. We got third place in our regional tournaments and moved on to provincials.

First, we had to change and improve some things. We fixed our background, and added in sound effects. School bell noises, mainly. We cut out some scenes, due to us going over time. We also improved makeup, like giving Michael freckles and Mimi wrinkles.

Provincials was… a time. Getting up at 7:00am on a Saturday wasn’t fun. We had our instant challenge at 10:00, but before that we marched into the gym.

Allow me to elaborate. We walked into the gym with this:

I can’t explain the monster I made. Do I start with Adam, who looks like a witch? Or Michael, who’s face I had to elongate? The fact that I look like a little boy on Chandler’s body? I can’t… I give up.

Instant challenge went well, though I’ve been told we can’t talk about it. There’s no legal punishment if I do, but my teacher reads these and I’d rather not have her get mad at me. Sorry.

Moving on to the main event: our team challenge. Tender Greens walked into that room with confidence. We set everything up, it was going awesome. I looked like a raccoon. I have no photos to capture the true beauty of it, so here’s a drawing I did:

Anyways. We had all the confidence in the world. Then… it was shattered. Let me go into more detail.

Scene one: Chad and Claire talk about homework. Chad, upon exiting, trips over the wire. No big deal

Scene two: Ths school bell doesn’t ring. Fine, we can handle it. Everything goes fine.

Scene 3: Doesn’t work. At all. This is supposed to be a filmed phone call scene projected onto our background. No audio, nothing. Nãda. Zilch.

Scene 4: Oh dear. Claire goes up to do her presentation, in which Anxiety (played by Myself) drops weights on the structure while Claire builds up to a panic attack. The structure decided our story was bad and snapped under pressure. Literally. One weight made it break.

THIS IS WHERE THE TITLES COMES INTO PLAY. While thinking of a title, I got really bummed because Breaking Chad would make EVEN MORE sense for this because something actually broke! Not Chad, he’s not mangled, he’s in one piece.

Needless to say, we were all disappointed. But, you know what, I learned a few things. I always talk about this, but I learned about team work. This group in particular proved that dividing and conquering sometimes work, but not always. It was easy to trust Adam to work on the structure, but I needed help with the story. I also learned, as they say in show biz: the show must go on. If things don’t work out, roll with it. Our phone call scene didn’t work, so we rolled with it.

Let’s get nerdy about DI!

More nerdy than usual. There’s a study out there that talks about student engagement and creative attitudes among students who go into DI versus those who don’t. People who do DI were actually more engaged andcreatuvewhen given tasks, and more imaginative then those who didn’t do DI. They were more self-confident and tenacious, and were able to think of more ideas. A whopping 86% of DI students thinkthat their teamwork skills improved in the 1-2 years of participation they did, and 92% agree that problems can be solved with multiple perspectives. Really cool, huh?

Anyways, read you later!

Sincerely, Me

Yep, I’m back. And it’s DI! Don’t make me explain this again.

Did you read that link? Understand? Okay, cool. So, we got assigned the engineering challenge. We being Chadam, Claire, Mimi, Ryan, Michael, and myself. This was the video we got to describe our challenge:

This had a lot of deliverables. But most importantly, we had to think of a name. Originally we were French Vanilla (don’t ask), but we didn’t like that. So, we thought of a much more sophisticated and professional name:

(Above, our team outside of a restaurant called Tender Greens)

Then we had to think of a story. In years past, we’ve always gone with a funny story. I find it easier to write funny (as you know if you’ve ever read my blog) because I like making people laugh. So it was a step out of my comfort zone when we decided to do a serious story on the topic of social anxiety. Claire volunteered to be the main character, a girl with anxiety. Mimi got to play the teacher, Adam played a jock-esque character named Chad, Ryan played Claire’s brother, and Michael played a nerdy character named Garrett. Naturally, I got to be the antagonist. I was the physical embodiment of anxiety.

So we have Claire, Teacher, Chad, Garrett, Claire’s Brother, and me. An actual demon. It’s like the Friends cast, but a lot worse.

Anyways, our story talks about the life of a girl who has anxiety, the physical embodiment of anxiety following her around telling her everything that she’s doing wrong. Eventually, our Sudden Impact is that she has a panic attack in class.

Our structure that we had to drop weights onto wound up being a simple cylinder, with a lot of self-deprecating words on them. The point in the story where we dropped the weights, I would be shouting at Claire things such as “you suck”, “you’ll never go anywhere in life”, “Chad is judging you”, etc. It was a fun part to play.

For the Event Depictor, something that has to predict the sudden event, we had Michael make a podium with built in speakers, that would play disruptive noises as Claire has her panic attack.

Finally, we had to have two Team Choice Elements, that show off our team’s skills and interests. First of all, Claire is really good at making things aesthetically pleasing, and makeup. So Character Design was our first one. Chad had tattoos, Ryan got a beard, I got angsty raccoon eyes. Our second TCE (let me abbreviate things in peace, MOM) was our background, where we projected images to help support the story telling of where we were.

Next came practice. It was hard, at first, to get our whole team to get together. But it worked, and we banged out an amazing performance.

(Editor’s note: to “Bang Out” is not a phrase. It sounded right at the time)

Then came performance day. I was nervous, partially because I had a splitting headache and my head was screaming at me

But we went, and the day went really well! We got a few photos, and you can see what we looked like on the day:

(Chad discusses important things with Claire, such as French homework, as a Wild Anxiety judges them silently)

(Anxiety gets to scream mean things at Claire while others watch. Fun times)

(The teacher explains the homework. No one wants homework, so they’re all just pretending to listen)

I can confidently say that’s the best I’ve ever felt about DI. Our raw scores were very good, better than I’ve done in the past.

We wound up getting 3rd place out of 7, so that’s not bad!

Thats all for this post

Read you la-

We did math! It’s math class, after all. This unit was focussed on algebra. Algebra: When the alphabet gets incorporated into math to make it more confusing.

Also, are you enjoying the title? I’m proud of it.

(Whoops, that an old meme)

Anyways, back to algebra. We were given the task of created an algebra game using algebra tiles. For anyone who has ever used algebra tiles, you know that this was a pain. And the logistics of making a game is so hard, surprisingly.