Month: January 2022

Ok so there’s this thing called the Mpol at my school and dude I am soooooo nervous. But hopefully I do well. You might be thinking

”why are you tellingme this random child I found on the internet”

and that reason I don’t really know but i’m required to do this by my school soooooo here it is.

At the start of my year at high school I was pretty chill as I’d been to high school back in England ( in England you start school in grade 7) but when i got there it was very different as I am in PLP which is very different to normal school.

There was an upset in the system so I did not get any of the apps required to have at the beginning so this was a problem for the first lesson but only the first lesson.

Now I had these very important apps.

Basecamp. 

This is the home base of all info , what we are learning, why we are learning things, different projects we are doing, and a lot more.

Showbie.

Showbie is where you hand in all of your work and assignments are posted.

So now we know about the start off the year let’s move a bit further.

The first exhibition was a presentation evening where the parents visited school, walked around listening to iPad presentations from their own child and others and then offered feedback on what they did well and what they could improve on. This went quite well even though everyone was expecting to flop. I made a post about it so go check it out at My maker experience also I have a video of the presentation I showed so here it is (warning it’s cringe) it was my first one!

Now onto our first humanities. We did a whole project on advertising which was surprisingly fun.        What we had to do was make an add in our groups for our assigned business. My group got Honey doughnuts. If you don’t know what Honeys is it’s a doughnut shop in Deep Cove in North Vancouver. Here’s a link to there website. https://honeydoughnuts.com/  

Now I feel like I didn’t do great in this project because I didn’t really feel able to express my ideas as it felt like one person in my group was taking over and squashing any ideas that they didn’t have or like but I think our poster turned out pretty good. Here it is …

From this project I took away the need to express myself more and ensure that the whole group works together to complete things – its still a work in progress for some people I’m trying more to have my ideas heard. I had a similar issue with my Scimatics board game where I listened to partner and what they wanted as they were my friend even though it wasn’t what I wanted and so our game ended up being very restricted as they wanted to basically do a version of snakes and ladders and not invent our own game. I would make my own choice next time.

Ok so I’m not going to go on about all the projects we have done this last 6 months I’m now going to share some more specific elements that were highs and lows of my learning.

SCIMATICS 

So what I am most proud of is my Laser light show. (you can read more about this here https://www.blog44.ca/cadeno/2022/01/30/lllllaaaaaaaassssseeeeerrrrrssss/..) I’m most proud of the fact that I fixed my groups project when it wasn’t working properly. Our group worked well on the whole but there were a few issues with the calculations that were made and the laser did not line up properly to make a triangle. I redid the calculations while my group looked at other projects and fixed it. I was proud that I kept preserving to get a good result and make it work. Here is a picture of the fixed laser show.

The element I’m least proud of in Scimatics, as I mentioned before, is my board game. I didn’t express my ideas or thoughts so I ended up making a game that I wasn’t engaged or interested in, that was boring and had no way of being creative. We should not have based our game on an exiting game and invented a new one. I had a lot of ideas for a game that could not be used and wish we had done it differently.

Humanities 

I really enjoyed studying the book “the Outsiders”. I think kit was an intriguing story with great characters and many plots twists and turned. The element of this project that I am most proud of was the tableau performances that my group produced for the winter exhibition. I think my group worked really well and we planned and delivered clearly our scene on the evening and I did well playing Marcia.

The element I think I could improve most for this project and (others) is my blog post – I need to not just say what we did but also explain better what I learnt.

Also for humanities I enjoyed our poetry project and think I produced an engaging ebook with some clever poems. Also I think I did very well well on the test. Here is my ebook

Maker 

The thing I’m most proud of is a picture I produced during the constructive creative communication project. It captured the mood I was given and showed good editing skills as well as colour, texture and use of light. I got a rainbow for it. Here it is.

https://www.blog44.ca/cadeno/2021/12/02/make-not-take/

I think what I could have improved the most was the first keynote presentation I did. I didnt really put much effort into making it fancy or imaginative although I think I presented reasonably well.

Going forward I think I need to get better at making my ideas heard, focusing my time more, doing my homework on time.

So this project I got to use frikin lasers.

And I know what you might be thinking random person on the interweb

“wElL tHaT dOeSn’T sEeM sAfE fOr A kId To Be DoInG. yOu CoUlD bLiNd SoMeOnE.”Most of us probably know that so it will not stop us.

Anyways lets jump on right in to the rest of the blog post.

First of all we needed to make a project start mind map to plan out what questions we had and our thoughts on what they (lasers) are. We wrote examples of what we knew and how they are used. This is how mine looked.

Then we edited it at the end of the project which is now when I’m writing this post but I’ll show that to you later.

Next we did a TOOOOOON of workbooks and textbooks but I’m not gonna bore you with all that, so I’ll put some of them here but you don’t have to read them.

From this we learned about different uses for lasers but more importantly we learned about the law of reflection. If you want a super in depth understanding of it then look it up but here is a brief explanation. With pictures of course.

So the law of reflection basically is all light travels in straight lines. The light that travels towards a surface is the incident ray. When the incident ray hits the surface the normal ray is at 90 degrees. What ever angle the incident ray hits the surface in relation to the normal it’s reflective ray bounces off at exactly the same angle in relation to the normal. That is called the reflected ray. See diagram below.

Next we did the law of reflection lab where we tested our understanding of the law and proved it with an experiment. During the experiment we had a laser, paper, pencil and mirror. We placed the mirror on the paper and drew the normal line. Then we shone the laser onto the mirror and recorded the incident ray and the reflected ray. We then measured their angles in relation to the normal line to see if they matched – guess what? They did!

Then we did a TOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNN of math workbooks which taught us Pythagorean theorem. Which basically is that the sum of the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other 2 sides. A squared + B squared = C squared see diagram below. This also meant we knew about how to calculate missing lengths and  angles in triangles.

Next we used a laser simulator, to make a right angled triangle that was a Pythagorean triple and proved the law of reflection and Pythagorean theorem.

We were then able to use all this understanding to create group laser displays. We designed and made a board using mirrors that when they were set at the correct angles the laser light bounced off to create a triangle. We chose a space theme for our background here is our making process.

Finally to review the curricular competencies.

Competency 1 – I think I worked well in class and with my group and completed all tasks.

Competency 2 – I think both my simulator and law of reflection labs, as well as our final project show that I am able to understand all the steps in an experiment and follow them in a scientific way. I can draw conclusions and make precise calculations and measurements and when at first my groups laser did not work I was able to recalibrate the angles and adjust the mirrors accordingly.

Competency 3 – I think i contributed to my group well and even though there were some errors at first we were able to correct them and produce a great laser display.

Ok so lastly back to that mind map I showed you at the start with some added info! Enjoy