Bluesky 2020!
Hello and welcome back to another blog post! Today I will be reflecting on our final maker project from Grade 9, Bluesky. In case you didn’t know, at the end of every school year in the PLP program, we would host a spring exhibition at the school. But, with this whole Covid-19 situation, there were quite a few changes that needed to be made. First of all, we couldn’t do it at the school because of obvious reasons. So, as we did our DI provincial tournament, we hosted it online for anyone who would want to watch, to see our presentations.
For this years bluesky, our projects were based on The Global Goals, created by The United Nations. These goals are 17 different goals that were agreed upon world leaders that they have the power to create a better world by 2030; ending poverty, fighting inequality and addressing the urgency of climate change.
Here was my pitch for my project idea:
The elderly need help since they can’t usually risk leaving their house because they don’t want to get effected by the disease so, I created a service and a website that helps with everyday essentials for the elderly such as groceries or staying in contact with their friends and family that are outside their homes. For groceries, I made a system where they can put in their order number, address, etc so that me or one of my volunteers would deliver it to their door. Although, there are a couple local stores that do offer delivery services, I made a way that mine would be much more affordable. Since the volunteers helping would not be payed(they would be receiving double or triple the volunteer hours instead) therefore, lowering the price. For communication, I made links to youtube tutorials on how to get set up on gmail and zoom, also teaching them the basics of them so they can communicate with their friends and families! Plus, I had some extra links, linking them to websites giving them the latest updates on COVID. Having these all in just one, simple to use website, makes it much more efficient and much easier for elderly to use.
After everyone figured out what they were doing and everyone had a general idea of what goals related to their projects the most, we were put into our groups. For this years Bluesky, it was a collaboration between the grade 8’s, 9’s and 10’s. We were all separated into 6 different groups: Consumption, Home, Public, Economic Inequities, Water and Climate and Energy. My group was Economic Inequities which was about goals 8 and 10.
The way our presentation worked was that we only had about 2 minutes to present for our whole group. So, what we did for our presentation was to have two people say a short introduction and then have only 6 instead of 11 people present the pitch of their projects. And the end, we did a quick game. This way, everyone had a role in our presentation and we didn’t have to go overtime.
Here was my Launch Journal:
Click here to see the link to the website I created.
In all, I would say that our bluesky presentation went just as we had planned and practiced. On the other hand, I still don’t think that we made our presentation as exciting and engaging as we wanted. But if we were to do so, it would make it much harder to incorporate our actual projects in the presentation. My group and I (Jordyn, Alex, Brenton, Holly, Ryan, Asha, Kate, Nya, Dries, Sophia and Evelyn), all worked pretty well together. Although we did have a couple disagreements at times, we all showed up to our group meetings on zoom as much as we could and made sure that everyone had a say in forming our final presentation.
-Alex