Monthly Archives: June 2016

Student Led Conference

Posted on by under About Me, mPols & tPols, School

It’s that time again.

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It’s Student Led Conference time. Which means I’m here to talk to you about my work this year.

So one of the major projects I’ve done recently was my Blue Sky Project, which I presented at the year-end exhibition. Although I think my blue sky project did go pretty well, it was pretty far from my original idea for it, which was about how to merchandise a comic book successfully, and my second idea, which was about redecorating my room. Although it wasn’t necessarily better than either of those would have been, it fit the criteria better, and it took a lot of rejection and revision to get there.

The year-end exhibition also featured the museum project. This was a group project involving creating a museum display about a part of the European exploration. My group was creating an exhibit on the results of the exploration, and whether they were negative or positive. We didn’t have a lot of time to pull this project together, and although we did manage to have everything ready in time, there were things that could have gone better with more time. For instance, with more time we could have done more research and built on the points we were trying to make, as well as including more examples. However, one thing that I think didn’t go so well that we just didn’t foresee going wrong was our interactive: asking people to comment their opinions on an Instagram account. I think this was a good idea, but the only people who really ended up commenting their opinions were people in our class before the exhibition, as opposed to the people there looking at it. The problem may have been that Instagram isn’t necessary accessible to everyone, or just that the audience for our exhibition weren’t engaged enough in the subject to comment an opinion. Either way, making things that interact with an audience accessible and engaging is something to work on in the future.

Now, I just want to take a minute to talk about the first blog post I ever wrote on this blog, “Hi, My Name Is… C3PO?”. This was quite a short blog post about the results of a Star Wars personality test I took, which informed me I was most like C3PO, a surprising but not disappointing revelation. That was really about all I said, and I included this picture of my results from the quiz:

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Although that was all I needed to say, it didn’t say much about my opinion, and it left a lot of unanswered questions such as how the results did and didn’t fit with my personality. It could have been a lot better and included a lot more information.

And now, nine months later, here I am, writing a much longer blog post, and reflecting on what I’ve learned this year. I’ve either become more opinionated and talkative or I have learned something about blogging, and writing in general. I’m going to say it’s probably the latter, because I’ve always been a pretty opinionated person, and because I had to have learned something from this.

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On the topic of things I’ve learned this year, I learned a lot about revision. The blue sky project, as I mentioned before, as well as the quilt project, both took a lot of revision, and I actually wasn’t used to doing that much of it. I mean, I would read over my work, and usually get someone else to check it for me, but it wasn’t something I took as seriously as I had to this year.

I also learned that I’m a lot like C3PO, how to create a good advertisement (well, sort of), how to sew a quilt (again, sort of), how to make a QR code, that Star Wars has some surprising Japanese roots, who Caius Cassius was, how to create a fake corpse (and a lot of Panic! at the Disco lyrics…), what Explain Everything is, that Mosques aren’t Jewish (and you probably shouldn’t wear pants with skulls on them into a Mosque), that my artwork needs more birds, how to motivate yourself , the story of Raven stealing the light (although I believe I had heard it before), how to reference David Bowie in your humanities project, and what everyone else actually did for a blue sky project. Just in case you wanted to check out the rest of my blog posts while I’m off enjoying my summer break.

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Toodles.

The Exhibition

Posted on by under Exhibitions, Humanities, School

*cue ominous music*

So. The Exhibition.

I mentioned that I might to a part two to this post, so if you haven’t read it, you may want to do that now, along with this one and this one.

Basically, we had to exhibit these three projects for our parents, families, and the future students of PLP, in sort of an open house style. Like we did with The Star Wars Project.

If I’m being honest, I was expecting the exhibition, at least for me, to go something like this:

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Now, setting up, and getting ready, actually sort of was like that, but the exhibition itself was more like this:

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Yeah, I don’t know whether I should have made my project more aesthetically pleasing, or whether the bowl of free Swedish Berries was repelling people… Somehow… Anyway, my blue sky project proved to not actually be that popular among the people looking around.

While this was a little disappointing, it was also kind of a relief, because I’m presumably not being graded on the amount of people who came to look st my project, and it gave me time to eat dinner, look at other projects, and awkwardly stand around being a greeter-type-person for the Scimatics projects. (Sorry to the people who I tried to talk to and ended up just awkwardly waving at, and the lady who “wasn’t talking to me”… I’m an awkward person. I’m working on it.).

So, yeah. The exhibition was actually pretty fun. We were told to take pictures or videos for our teacher/librarian who just got out of the hospital after having surgery on his leg, but as everyone sent him a lot of pictures and videos, I just took a blurry selfie of myself wearing a pink streamer hat/headband/whatever you want to call it.

Toodles.

The Men Who Sold The World

Posted on by under Humanities, School

Once upon a time, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans explored the world. This had quite an impact.

Now, there is not a clear consensus on whether the bulk of this impact was positive or negative, so we looked into it and then attempted to make a museum. And we eventually sort of did, with eight or nine people working on each exhibit (desire to explore, means to explore, and the one I was working on, results to explore.).

We decided to name our project The Men Who Sold the World after the similarly titled David Bowie song, because I made a joke, and because we felt it reflected the greed, male power, and rise of buying and selling at the time.

To recap the European Exploration for you: Europeans, looking for land, people, and goods, went out to sail the world, and they found North America, the “New World”. Short on time and communication, they reacted violently to meeting the natives, and killed many, or took them as slaves. They also spread disease.

But both sides got some payoffs as well. The natives got some new technology, and the explorers got to have tomatoes to make pizza for the first time, as well as new land and they even spread their religion.

I won’t go on about it too much. Personally, I think the results overall were negative, but I can see both sides, and hey, you could always go post your opinion on the Instagram account conveniently made for that exact purpose.

I’ve got to go explore the world now.

Toodles.

I Have Seen The Light….

Posted on by under Math & Science, School

Hi

So. Scimatics. If you don’t already know, it’s the combination mathematics/science class we take when we get hungry. (Everybody eats lunch in Scimatics. Even at 8:30 in the morning.)

And for Scimatics, we had to do a project about light, and geometry, and myths, and art, and a bunch of other specific things that I won’t list now. They were all pretty relevant to what we were learning.

The basis of this project was that we had to create a non-digital representation of the story of Raven bringing the light, while showcasing the properties of light such as reflection, refraction, etc., but also using geometrical features like symmetry and a cylinder.

We actually had to write up descriptions for this project so, being lazy, I’m going to put mine here.

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“Now, this was an interesting project to do, because although it focussed on science, it brought in some other subjects like a bit of art and math, and I think this says something about how integral science is to everything we do, even if we don’t think about it. I’m not great at art, so my representation of Raven bringing the light may not have looked amazing, but I think the ideas worked out. I used a transparent marble to refract the light ray and make it bigger, to represent the sun, and although when I designed this project I only had one light ray (from my phone), and I later replaced it with a flashlight, which has about six, I think it still works. I did find that I needed to have the light quite close to the marble to make it work, though, which could be a reflection on just how well the marble worked, or possibly how bright the light was. After being refracted by the marble, the light hits the stars, and the moon (represented by tinfoil vaguely-star-shaped-things and a tinfoil cylinder.). The tinfoil is a semi-reflective material, so it does reflect the light a little bit– enough to see, but not enough to cast light on anything else. I put all the stars and the moon behind Raven, as he had already dropped them all by the time he was dropping the sun, and I also made Eagle, who was chasing him, quite a bit smaller to show the perspective, so my project for the most part was asymmetrical. However, I did make the actual model of Raven symmetrical, using bilateral symmetry, as well as the moon and the stars; they just weren’t placed symmetrically. To make the ocean for this project, and to add some colour to contrast the large amounts of black and silver I had already used, I used blue construction paper, and covered it with some wax paper, which is translucent, so the colour of the opaque paper (and the light) still came through, just slightly diluted. The colour actually doesn’t draw that much attention, despite being one of the only bright colours in the project, because the light is aiming away from it, and, according to research by Ibn Al Haytham, light travels in straight lines. Additionally, colour is formed by a surface absorbing some types of light rays and reflecting others, which means that it would need light to be intensely coloured, the exception being that black, which absorbs all light rays, doesn’t technically need any to show up (which is why most of my project is painted black). That about sums it up. I hope I’ve been able to cast some light on the subject for you.”

And here’s a slightly dark picture for reference:

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Toodles.

Will An Obnoxiously Long Title Motivate You to Read This Post?

Posted on by under Humanities, School

Here, have some music while you listen to this post.

And if for whatever reason it fills up your whole screen… Well, I can’t really help you there just read this post first so you can understand what you’re listening to.

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So this is a piano cover of Resistance by Muse (here’s how it’s supposed to sound). Actually, it’s half of one as I couldn’t upload the full thing; it was too long. I apologize for the background noises, and also for any mistakes as I’m still learning how to play the piece.

In fact, my learning to play this piece is actually relevant. (Insert awesome clapping noise here). We have this project right now known as the Blue Sky Design project. Similar to the Star Wars project, this was a fairly open-ended project (although I still managed to get a couple of ideas rejected). We had to be solving a problem, doing a project on something that interested us, and designing something.

So, the problem I was working to solve was lack of motivation, and I decided to design a system to determine what form of motivation best to use in different situations. I also wanted to find out what forms of motivation worked best in different situations, as well as how you could use a few of them together. To test some different forms, I’ve been motivating myself to learn a song on the piano, which I’ve had trouble doing ever since I stopped taking lessons.

Some of the different forms of motivation I’ve tried so far have included:

• knowing that this is a project for school and I have to do it, which worked pretty well for a couple days, but eventually I became really busy and kept forgetting to practice. This was an excellent way to propel myself, and is a form of motivation to fall back on when one of my other methods isn’t going so well.
• rewarding myself immediately after I practiced I tried different kinds of rewards, from going on a walk to eating dinner, and while I found this definitely did motivate me, it didn’t motivate me to do anything really well. I found myself rushing and being careless as I mostly was just playing to get through the piece so I could get whatever my reward was. To get something done fast that doesn’t require a lot of work or thought, such as taking out the trash, I think this could work, but not so much for something that needs you to put a lot of time and effort into it.
• going back and listening to the recording of the first time I played this song and the most recent time (the time before the recording I have posted here) , which actually was surprisingly more motivating than I thought. I could really hear the difference and it made me feel like I was improving and could continue improving. As well, reviewing the recording made it easier for me to hear my mistakes so I could focus on learning certain areas. Overall, it was pretty helpful, but obviously only works when you’re partway through a project. It is important to review and edit things like essays, and seeing that you’ve done something well can be inspiring and motivating when you feel like a project is never ending.

So the recording above is my first try motivating myself with this last type of motivation, and although I did know ahead of time that I was going to be including it in my post, which gave me a second form of motivation, I think it worked pretty well.

I’ve been studying up a bit on the different forms of motivation. As far as I can tell, it can be broken down into intrinsic/internal motivation,and extrinsic/external motivation, and then into eight subgroups:

1. Emotional motivation, when you do something because you enjoy it, or out of anger or sadness or really anytime you do something driven by emotion. The connection here to my piano playing is that I enjoy playing, and I enjoy being able to play well. This can be a really powerful form of motivation, as it generally means that you actually want to be doing something, which is the best reason to do it, at least in my opinion. This is often a reason people do things like playing a game or going out with friends (happiness), writing poetry or doing other expressive arts (any emotion), or even learning a sport as an outlet for anger.
2. Incentive motivation, when you do something for a reward or positive result. The connection to my piano playing is both that I did use a reward system, and I want to do well on this project. As I mentioned before, it can result in rushed or careless work, but it really depends on the situation. This is what motivates a lot of people to do their jobs, especially jobs they don’t enjoy, and is often considered the “carrot” of the carrot/stick metaphor.
3. Achievement motivation is when you want to achieve something, as you may have figured out. The connection to my piano playing is that I would like to do well on the song, and on the project. This is also a pretty powerful form of motivation, but if you aren’t seeing a lot of results, it can get frustrating, and is a form of motivation that often makes people start things they later give up on. However, if you are dedicated enough, it can be an excellent form of motivation. This is what motivates award winning athletes to train, doctors to take many years of intense schooling, and little kids to do art.
4. Fear motivation is when you are scared of a negative consequence. The connection to my piano playing is that I don’t want to fail this project. This is the other half of the carrot/stick metaphor. It is a very powerful motivator, and can have varying degrees of results depending on the negative consequence. It can be especially powerful when it’s combined with an incentive, for instance if people do jobs they don’t like because they want money, they do them well because they don’t want to be fired.
5. Growth motivation, when you want to get better at something, be it a sport, a social interaction, or any other skill. The connection to my piano playing is that I want to improve at this song and see how I’ve grown. As I said before, seeing how much I’ve improved motivated me more than I thought, and it was really helpful, and I think it is something to do when you feel like giving up on a project. This is what motivates people to get help, or start something they want to get better at. Although it can be applied similarly to Achievement Motivation, it’s not quite the same thing.
6. Power motivation is a very interesting sort of motivation but I won’t get too far into it. Essentially, it’s when people do things to gain power, or to feel powerful. The connection to my piano playing is that I want to have the power to play a song well. I think you could do a lot with this type of motivation, in certain situations, but it has also led to negative consequences in the past. For an example of power motivation, I’d say any dictator, but actually a lot of politicians. If you don’t like politics, this is also part of what motivated Batman– he wanted the power to stop villains. That’s not really the prime example however as Bruce Wayne already had a lot of power.
7. Social motivation, when you do something to impress or please other people. This is often considered not to be as effective as the more intrinsic motivations,
as you aren’t doing something for yourself, but it can lead to people doing things like dares, and often is more effective when it’s something like trying to do what your parents want you to do.
8. Affiliation motivation is when you do something to fit in, such as conforming to a beauty standard because you think it will make you more popular, or pretending to like something because someone else likes it. I can’t say I really have a connection with this in terms of piano playing, but I have done it in the past, although I was about six years old and stopped watching Dora because “it wasn’t what the cool kids did”. After that I kind of stopped doing things to fit in because it wasn’t making me any happier.

So yeah, there will be a second part to this post at some point, but for now…

Toodles.

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