Category: PLP 8

The Body vs Bacteria

Hello everybody 👋🏼

Tis’ me, Brooke.

It’s almost summer! I am writing this with 3-ish days left of school and let me tell you, this year has flown by. But this post is not about that.

Driving question

How do cells and diseases interact?

The truth is, different cells will react differently to different diseases. One type of cell has a different job than another type of cell and each would have different jobs when it comes dealing with a disease. In my comic, you will see that some cells are battling head on with the disease and others have jobs that work in the background.

The Project

Our last project for scimatics this year was called “Comic cells”. Basically we each had to make a comic about some sort of cellular process. And as per usual with science projects like this, we started off with a mind map.

I’m really sorry that the photo is so blurry. And if I’m being honest, I’m not incredibly proud of this mind map. I feel like I definitely could’ve added more especially to the questions section.

I came into this project not knowing much about cells, so building knowledge was a very important part of this project. Khan Academy was helpful for general cell knowledge but we also had to do our own independent research for our comics. I decided that I wanted to make my comic about how the body reacts to a wound. And, just for added flavour, tetanus would also enter the wound.

Before we jumped into creating the actual comic, we made a rough draft storyboard. Let me say that again before showing you, it is a ROUGH DRAFT storyboard.

And the moment you hopefully have been waiting for, here is my final comic;

p.s. I couldn’t get it in here as a PDF because the file was too big so instead it is an image metaslider.

Core competencies 

Questioning and predicting

This competency is usually hard for me because it includes using class time efficiently and I am a person who gets distracted easily. But in this project I feel that I did the best I’ve ever done in this competency. I guess that shows lots of improvement compared to the beginning of the year.

Scientific communication 

I really like using interesting vocabulary so this project was a great way for me to use and extend this skill. Learning and using new words is something that I have done a lot of this year and I think it’s pretty cool that I know the pronunciation and meaning of ✨immunoglobulin✨.

Evaluating 

I did SO much individual research to insure that my comic was as accurate as it could be. I think that this project might have actually sparked my interest in biology. Trying to make the comic accurate  without making it overwhelming was something that I was constantly thinking about but I think that I did a pretty good job at.

Conclusion 

Well thank you for reading my post and I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about what you body does at a cellular level. Have a happy summer!

As always, Brooke.

The Ultimate Bedroom Setup Noº3

Hi there 👋🏼

Welcome back to another scimatics blog post.

Fair warning, I am writing this post extremely tired.

Project description

In this scimatics project we worked in a small group to create 3D objects. We had to calculate the surface area and volume of the object we created and then put together a presentation for the class.

Driving question 

How can I design a bed to optimize its volume?

The main contributor of a bed’s volume is it’s mattress. A thick and fluffy mattress makes for added comfort and volume.

The project itself 

My group decided that we wanted to make a three part bedroom set. The set consisted of a bedside table, a bookshelf, and a bed. The object I was going to create was the bed. Before we started creating, we had to decide whether we would be designing the object for maximum surface area or maximum volume, I chose maximum surface area (but that didn’t work out for me in the end).

We would be using a 3D design website called Tinkercad.com  to create the object. At first, I found it difficult to understand the controls but after completing lots of the Tinkercad  tutorials I finally started to get it. I made a few sketches on procreate to help guide me with what the measurements of my bed should be.

My bed ended up looking like;

I also recorded a video where I scroll around to all sides of the bed. Just in case you were curious about what it looks like to use Tinkercad.

As I said in the project description, we needed to create a presentation about our 3D models to show the class. My original plan was to record us giving our presentation but I was so nervous that I forgot ☹️. So I made my group do a screen recording with voiceover so that I could still show y’all our presentation. Here it is;

The curricular competencies 

Applying and innovating: Contribute to self, others, community, and world through personal or collaborative approaches.

This competency was both harder and easier to achieve when working in a group with your best friends. On one hand we really worked well together and had no problem helping each other out. On the other hand I think that we could’ve done better at trying to keep each other on topic.

Reasoning and analyzing: Model mathematics in contextualized experiences. 

My model consisted of 11 basic 3D shapes and of those were 3 kinds; rectangular prisms, triangular prism , and cylinders. Sure my model wasn’t the most complicated but I made the design clean and it matched the other models in my group. I had originally intended the bed to have maximum surface area but later realized that the bed would end up having maximum volume if I designed it as I had planned.

Communicating and representing: Explain and justify mathematical ideas and decisions.

The calculations I made for my model were accurately measured and calculated. My milestone 3 shows the calculations which you can also see in the YouTube video presentation.

Milestone 3 calculations

Conclusion 

In conclusion, it was really fun working with my friends in a group project. I enjoyed learning how to use Tinkercad and I am proud of how I was able to create the model. I definitely feel like my math skills in calculating surface area and volume have improved a TON during the project.

Here are my group members posts on this project

Dana – The Ultimate Bedroom Set Up Noº1

Makenna – The Ultimate Bedroom Set Up Noº2

 

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

 

 

 

 

The French and First Nations and British, Oh my!

What did European settlement mean for all the people involved? Well how bout I show you a video that will help answer that question.

As you may have guessed, I created that video along with my partner in this project. (Go check out Gwen’s blog here) The video was made using keynote magic move, then exported to YouTube. We made a QR code to out on the infographic that takes you to this video.

Just a quick overview of the project, We learned about European settlement in New France, the fur trade, daily life in early Canadian colonies, First Nations relations, and more things of that sort. We put three facts, one each of the British, French, and First Nations, into an infographic with an image to go along with each fact. We came up with a short thesis to answer the driving question using the three facts as supporting evidence.

Another part of the infographic was a statement on continuity and change between the time of the colonization of New France to Present day. We did practice on identifying continuity and change and at first I wasn’t very good at it but I think I’ve got the hang of it now. The general theme of our infographic was the power of human greed and we tried to make that the focus of the continuity and change statement.

Overall I thought that this project was fun and I really enjoyed working with my partner.

 

Here are the sources that we used for the information in the infographic;

Worlds Collide Episode 1, CBC, 2017

Coates, Sarah, James Miles, Janice Moase. Nelson Socials 8. Nelson Education, 2019.

HBC Heritage – Tales from the Bay

As always, Brooke.

Ah, the golden age of exploration.

Arrrgghh matey! Welcome back to my blog.

Before spring break, we finished another project. This project was all about the age of exploration. Our driving question was “What was the impact of global exploration?” And the answer to that question is very important so I’m just gonna dive right in.

Without global exploration, North America would’ve never been uncovered by the Europeans. Foods like potatoes would’ve never become a staple in the quintessential European diet without the Columbia exchange taking place between the Americas and Europe. 

The final product of this project was an informative video on the age of exploration, made with an app called AR maker. If you didn’t know, AR stands for augmented reality, similar to VR which is virtual reality. The video would follow a story that was guided by a script written with the technique called the “story spine”. I think that I have talked about story spine before but here is an example for a quick overview.

We learned a lot about analyzing cause and consequence, the premise of which goes really well with the story spine. You start with the underlying cause, then the immediate cause, the event, the immediate consequence, and finally the long term consequence. We did a lot of work with identifying cause and consequence of events and then we applied our knowledge to what we had learned about the age of exploration.

We created objects to put into the augmented reality that would help us tell our stories. I created my objects in procreate and then made the background transparent in keynote. In the end, AR maker was sometimes very frustrating to use but I ended up persisting and figuring out the ins and outs of the app. Seeing everything of mine come together in AR showed that I am an empowered learner that can use technology to appropriately and effectively construct my knowledge. Here is the final video that I uploaded to YouTube;

This project was very short and so is this blog post but I hope that you enjoyed learning about what I learned. Thank you so much for reading!

As always, Brooke.

 

Destination Imagination; In theory.

Have you heard of Destination Imagination?

Destination Imagination (or just DI) is an international competition that our school competes in. I am now going to direct you to the DI website because I think that they do a great job explaining what DI is all about. The Destination Imagination website is here. (I really suggest that you go to the website before reading further.)

I got the opportunity to be on one of the scientific challenge teams. The scientific challenge this year was called “In Theory”. You had to break or bend a scientific law using technical methods and create a documentary film about it. My group spent AGES trying to decide on a scientific law to bend. It was a tad bit stressful seeing as the scientific law is the most important part of out solution to the challenge. We ended up figuring out that we could bend the law of buoyancy by creating an electromagnet out of an iron bolt and some batteries. (Huge shoutout to my teammate Nolan for heading up the scientific part of this challenge!) Here is a video of the anti-buoyancy machine;

We also had to come up with a story that our documentary would follow. The story had to include a witness who sees and reacts to the law being bent/broken and an expert who has great knowledge of the scientific law itself. Again we had many ideas and a very hard time deciding on a plot for our story, it was a painful process.

Usually DI tournaments would start in-person at a regional level but with COVID-19 being a thing, the process changed to just handing in a video to be judged at the national level.

After many, many, MANY weeks of working on our challenge solution, it came to an end. Here is the final video;

We also made a Q&A video to go along with our challenge solution that explains some things that you may not have picked up in the final video;

One of my teammates also made this blooper video that I LOVE because it reminds me of how much fun we had during DI.

Overall, DI taught me leadership, teamwork, persistence, creativity, and so much more! I am really excited to see how I face future DI challenges in the years ahead of me. I want to say a huge thank you to my team members, Nolan, Jocelyn, Santiago, and Carter, without whom none of this would’ve been possible.

See you next year Destination imagination 👋🏼!

As always, Brooke.

Do I have a growth mindset?

Ah

Welcome back my friends.

I would like to present a book to you. This book is about something called a growth mindset.

I have been keeping a reflection journal as we learned about growth mindsets in class. I hope that you take a quick look through my book because I have been working pretty hard on it. Here it is;

 

The next part of this project is creating a statement/goal for my growth mindset. This statement will go along with a selfie of my face. MY FACE 😬. I think that the thought of a selfie of my face being in the class is a whole other challenge that I need to tackle  with a growth mindset. But what’s done is done and I know that I will move on from the embarrassment.

My statement for the selfie is “When I receive criticism, I will review my work with an open mindset and apply specific revisions so that I can feel more confident taking on academic risks when I know that I can deal with having a First Attempt In Learning.”. Now if you read my journal, you would know that I talk a lot about my fixed mindset on academic failure.

Page from my book

That photo is a page from my book where I went in-depth about my mindset on academics, achievement and failure. On the next page I talk about three things that I will try to do to change my fixed mindset into a growth mindset, and my selfie statement is basically trying to do the same thing.

My selfie w/ statement

I believe that this growth mindset challenge will be something that I have to work on for the rest of eternity and I challenge YOU to do the same. Thank you for taking the time to read my post and it would be awesome if you could leave a comment about something that you have a fixed mindset about that you want to change.

As always, Brooke.

Student Blogging Challenge; a reflection.

Hi everyone 👋🏼

Unfortunately this will be the last Student Blogging Challenge post for this year.

If you didn’t already notice, I have been taking part in the 2021 Student Blogging Challenge. We accomplished 10 SBC prompts for our blogs. You can find 10 similar prompts here.

I can definitely say that over the course of this challenge I have seen my blog and my blogging skills greatly improve. We started off the challenge with simply updating the about me page and making some commenting guidelines to improve the quality of our site. We also looked at the themes of our blogs and learned about blog layout. At the beginning, I was sceptical that I would really enjoy blogging. But now that I’ve had so much fun making cool posts, its not so bad.

I would have to say that my favourite SBC post would have to be either Worm the hero or A dive into literature; poetry. I was thinking of maybe doing a dive into literature series where I talk about different types of literature. Maybe I’ll crank another post out this spring break and keep it an on going thing? Possible topics could include classic novels, song lyrics, quotes, folklore, fairytales, legends, and if there is any other topics I didn’t already list, comment them down below!

The blogging challenge has given me the opportunity to learn how to express my ideas through a type of medium that I probably wouldn’t have used otherwise. I think that I have started to learn how to show my voice in my writing. Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

As always, Brooke.

p.s. – Here are all of the posts that I made in the student blogging Challenge.

Day 1- About me page

Day 2- Commenting guidelines

Day 3- Embedded content

Day 4- Fun with photos

Day 5- Appearance and Widget – this prompt wasn’t an actual post. I changed the appearance of my blog and added a calendar widget.

Day 6- Music

Day 7- Emoji story

Day 8- Blogging like a boss – Again this prompt wasn’t a post but more of a check-in on our summative blogging skills. We had to go through our most recent summative post and look at the aspects of a summative post that we should have included.

Day 9- holidays and festivities

Day 10- Free choice

A dive into literature; Poetry.

Welcome back to my post.

Now I don’t really like to boast,

But if your like me,

You’d like to be,

On the beautiful west coast.

Do you know what type of poem that is? It’s called a limerick. A limerick is a fairly common type of poem that you have probably heard before. Limericks are usually more humorous poems that always have five lines. They follow the pattern of AABBA, meaning that all of the A’s rhyme with each other and vice versa for the B’s. To make that even more clear, the first, second, and fifth line all rhyme, and the third and forth lines rhyme with only each other and are also shorter than the others. 

Other popular types of poetry are:

Haiku 

Free verse

Sonnet

Epic

Ode

And those are only a few!

Poetry can be used to share messages, tell stories, feel emotions, make someone laugh, and practically every other thing you can think of can be conveyed through poetry! You probably would have written some in Elementry school for Mothers or Father’s Day. 

I personally really like to read and write poetry in my free time. (correction- I actually have no free time because my horse has been oh so generous and filled all my free time for me.)

One of my favourite poetry authors is Edgar Allan Poe. My favourite poem of his is rather famous, its called The Raven.

It’s a rather dark poem, as most of Poe’s literature is, but I think that I could read it 100 times and like it all the same.

Anyhoo I think that my post should end here with a little poetry prompt for you;

I prompt you to write a poem about someone or something that you love. It can be any type of poem but I would suggest a sonnet or an ode.  

Thank you for reading.

As always, Brooke.

Het is Koningsdag

Welcome back to another Student Blogging Challenge post.

What holidays do you celebrate? Is there a holiday that your family celebrates that others may not have heard of? (Let me know in the comments!)

If you didn’t already know, I was born in Leiden, Netherlands. Ik spreek een klein beijte Nederlands. (I speak a little bit of Dutch.) And when I went back to the Netherlands in 2018, I learned about a holiday called Kings day or Koningsdag.

Koningsdag is a national holiday in the Netherlands. Celebrated on April 27th, the date marks the birth of King Willem-Alexander. Kings day celebrations include partying, wearing orange, flea markets, concerts, and more!

Here is a really short YouTube video of Kings day in Amsterdam;

Here is a poem that I wrote about Koningsdag.

It’s April twenty seventh.

It’s Kings day, there is no work.

Orange, a colour so bright.

Partying till the day becomes night.

The celebration, oh so lively!

The pubs, filled to the brim.

The canals, flooded with boats, 

With pure cheer, “long live the king!”

Here is the same poem but in Dutch:

Het is zevenentwintigste april.

Het is Koningsdag, er is geen werk.

Oranje, een kleur zo vrolijk.

Feesten tot de dag wordt nacht.

De viering, oh zo levendig!

De kroeg, gevuld naar de rand.

De grachten, overstroomd met boten.

Met pure blijheid, “lang leven het Koning!”

Well I hope that you learned something new and thank you for reading my post!

As always, Brooke.

How is it going?

Hello all 👋🏼

It is time for another summative blog post.

The project that we just finished it was called “how it started, how its going”, The title coming from a meme that boomed in early 2020. As you may have guessed, the meme was all about showing how something started versus the present. Here’s an example:

source

Before we go any further I should probably tell you what this project is. In this project we made a “how it started, how it’s going” meme with a painting from the Renaissance or medieval times being the “how it started” and a “how it’s going” of present day. We needed to do a bunch of research on the important historical events and worldview of the mediaeval and Renaissance times comparing to western worldview. The final Memes went into a virtual museum for all the world to see.

 

At the beginning of the launch,everyone had to make their own introductory meme comparing thebeginning of September 2020 to the present. Here was mine:

 

We also learned about establishing historical significance and what makes a great museum. We visited several virtual museums and took notes on what made them a good museum and what common similarities they had. We also looked at art from the medieval and Renaissance and took notes of what we noticed. All of that information was compiled into a MindNode so that we could easily refer to it.

Next we learned about worldview. Worldview (noun): a collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or group; the lens through which the world is viewed by an individual or group; the overall perspective from which the world is interpreted. You may have heard the term “western worldview” referring to the views and norms of western society. We learned that there are seven main aspects of worldview, society, knowledge, time, economy, values, geography, and beliefs. We did work on identifying worldview and how worldview is represented. Milestone 2 of this project was a collage about our personal worldview. We established historical significance of certain events in our lives and connected those events to our worldview. The collage was supposed to follow a story line that had an exposition, rising action, climax, falling actions, and a resolution, those steps are also known as a story mountain. In this milestone, I think that I showed how I can respond to text and construct critical and creative connections between myself, the text, and the world around me and be able to support my ideas with credible evidence. Here is the collage that I made along with a short explanation.

There is also a book of all of the collages that we made as a class. It is our companion book for the museum.

As I already mentioned, the end product of this project was an art meme in a virtual museum. If you have ever been to an art gallery or museum, you may have noticed that the art is usually accompanied by an artists statement about the piece. Therefore, to accompany our art we had to also have an artists statement. Our artists statement was an argument about what lessons from history we could apply to our worldview. Everyone was put into one of seven different groups, each group was representing a different aspect of worldview, and your argument and art were supposed to tie into that aspect of worldview. We previously did a lot of building knowledge on medieval and Renaissance times so that we could identify historically significant events that shaped our worldview in certain ways. I was part of the beliefs worldview group and here is my Argument.

Hopefully you have been curious about what the actual art was going to look like. The first step in making the meme was to find the portrait that would be used for the “how it started” side. Our main source for the art was Google arts and culture. I ended up choosing “Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi” by Raffaello Sanzio created in 1518. Then we took that art and made it our own by adding our face onto it. Everyone also edited and added things on the painting to show a specific statement about their worldview aspect. In all of this editing you had to use your technology creatively and be an empowered learner. I used an app called Procreate to edit my art with some help from another app called PicsArt.

My art was trying to show how beliefs help people make decisions. It would be great if in the comments you could tell be what your first impressions were about the statement of my piece.

Now  I haven’t really talked about the driving question to this project. It was “What can we learn from the past, and why does that matter to us today?” And I think that my Argument and History test answer that best. And if i had to summarize both of those long answers in one sentence it would be; “It is important to remember what happened in the past because we don’t want history to repeat itself.”

Here is the link to the final museum and I hope you enjoy!

As always, Brooke.