🌲What Was The Impact Of Global Exploration?🌲

🌲Hello and welcome back to the forest of learning! Today I shall show you the process of me be dipping my metaphorical toe into the metaphorical sea water of AR and pirates! In this project we will create an AR video explaining the age of exploration, so lets dive right into it!🌲

As always, we followed the project path throughout the project: 

We started this project off with a bang! As a class we all went down the the theatre and watched the movie “Captain Phillips”. The movie was good, but a bit too gory and violent for my personal taste. I would definitely not watch this movie on my own, but as a class it was okay. Captain Phillips is about a Captain (Captain Philips) who was delivering cargo to Africa with his crew. While he was travelling through Somalian waters, his boat was attacked by pirates. He was than kidnapped and had to be rescued by the US navy. It is a true story which occurred in 2009. I would recommend this movie to people who don’t mind blood and violence, and are fans of action. After watching the movie, we needed to fill out a question sheet.

After getting a little bit of a taste about pirates, we needed to learn more! We all learned about cause and consequence. With every event, there is always a cause and a consequence to that event. We used this web as a class to identify what the causes and consequences were in “Captain Phillips”.

And once we were educated on what cause and consequence was, we were at milestone one. In milestone one our task was to create a story with cause and consequence in AR Makr. We learned to make objects spin, flash, bounce, shake and more with AR. AR stands for Augmented Reality. Which basically means you can add virtual items and creations to the world! Here is a very helpful video explaining a little bit more about Augmented Reality:

We used the app AR Makr to create our very own story. We needed to draw at least one object in our video using Keynote! AR Makr is an amazing tool which you can even add your own creations into. To go with our video, we also used the cause and consequence web to explain our story as well. I made my story about a diver who discovers a new species of pufferfis in the ocean! I personally believe I really showed a great representation of me understanding cause and consequence in my video. I put effort into my story, and created something I am proud of. 

After we had an understanding of cause and consequence, we spent an entire afternoon learning about pirates and European exploration! The class was split into two and we each had a group of about 3 people, we read about piracy and then filled out questions as we went. 

The next day we learned even more about pirates and exploration. On this day, we learned about the technologies that explorers used to travel. After we learned about it, we created a sketch and than explained that sketch to a partner as well as wrote about it on our “sketch and tell” document! I actually learned a lot by doing this activity, explaining it to my partner really helped expand my knowledge on this subject. Her was my sketch and tell sheet: 

We then spent an entire day learning about European exploration. In the morning we took Cornell notes and learned about European exploration and travel. I learned so much about this topic, and it was very interesting. One main subject we focussed on was “The Columbian Exchange” in which resources, disease, and people were exchanged through Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Than, in the afternoon we spent time on milestone two where we created another web of cause and consequence in which we showed the effects of europeans “discovery” of the new world. (We say “discovery” because they technically didn’t discover it first, there were people before them) 

Then, we jumped right into milestone three where we had to choose an event in history and create a story using the Story Spine to tell the story. Beside the story, we also drew a rough sketch of how we would represent these events in our final AR video. Here was my story  spine:

The next day we worked on writing our final story which we would use as a script for our AR video. We also learned more about European travel and took notes throughout learning about it. For my story, I went through MANY drafts before getting it to be great. Here was my final  story and script:

After writing our final script, we finally got to the best part! We spent an afternoon drawing out our images in which we would use in our AR video. I found this part to be very calming, the class was quite and everyone was jus sitting and drawing with no distractions, I enjoyed that. We used Keynote to draw all of our images so they could have a transparent background. Here is how my drawings looked like in keynote: 

And then came the most tedious and annoying yet extremely satisfying part of the project, filming our AR video. For class time I went outside and filed in the forest, the problem was that it took a while to find a flat area for me to work on, and when I had placed all of my images where I wanted them, my iPad had died. It was not fun, AR Makr takes up a lot of my iPads battery and so even if i would have charged it to 20% my iPad would die before I would be able to film it. So, I went home, charged my iPad, and filmed my video. In the middle of filming, I actually got the “5%” pop up on my iPad, so there is a little glitch in the final video. I am so thankful I was able to film it though! I think I expressed being an empowered learner in my video very well by how much detail I went in my script, and how much effort I put into my drawings. I think my video is very clear and informative, and I am overall really proud of how it turned out.

So, without further a due, here is my final video!

After our videos were finished, we had a celebration day where we got pirate packs from White Spot and ate as a class! The vanilla ice cream was very delicious.

 

We also had a special surprise, we downloaded the WS kids app and they had an AR feature where you could interact with your pirate pack boat! Here are some screen shots of the experience:

🌲In reflection, this project was probably one of my favourite of the year. I learned so much about exploration and piracy, and had lots fun doing it! So, what was the impact of global exploration? Well global exploration effects us in so many ways. The gathering of resources is extremely impactful to life we live. Without the columbian exchange, we wouldn’t have so many things that we love like coffee, potatoes, tomatoes, avocados, pineapples, and more. Being able to have a number of different fruits and vegetables to pick from at a grocery store is a privilege that is all thanks to those Europeans who brought them to Europe long ago. I enjoyed learning about this topic a lot, and I found this project really interesting and engaging. 🌲

As always, thank you for watching me grow in the forest of 

🌲learning🌲