Projecting a Project about a Project’s Projections

Hello again internet and welcome to my second blog of this weekend. I’m making up for all the time we lost while this site was down by making 3 blog posts in 1 weekend so if you still crave more after this one be on the lookout. That being said let’s get started.

The Manhattan Project. I’m sure most of us have heard that name but many that have heard it still may not know what it was. And if I’m being honest, that was me at the start of this project. So if you don’t quite know what I’m talking about then don’t worry because all will be explained.

Before we get into the project though we need to find out what the driving question is this time.  “How did the Manhattan Project’s scientific breakthroughs change the world?”. This is a big question that seems simple to answer but when you look closer, it’s quite difficult because there are so many different impacts it had that it’s hard to chose just one. Now that I’ve finished my starting spiel it’s time to get into the details, fair warning though a lot of what we did/handed in the project was just notes or a different form of notes so there may not be a lot of media.

We started out by learning the basics of the manhattan project. The Manhattan project was a secret U.S. government project near the end of WW2. The primary purpose of this project was to create the first functional nuclear bomb. The project involved 600,000 people and costed more than $2.2 billion, ($41 billion today) yet it remained top secret throughout WW2. We mostly just learned different facts about what it was and how it came to be through slideshows and videos that we watched. 

It was around here that we kind of took a pause from learning about the manhattan project, and started working on different forms of note taking. In my opinion this was kind of weird and felt really unnecessary for the project, as the idea was pretty much entirely scrapped moving forward. But regardless it did happen so I’ll tell you what we learned. We first learned about smart brevity, a new way to present information that is supposed to get people to understand it more. This is the format. A heading, and interesting and summarizing opener, and then multiple axioms, which are sub-headings that define what the next few bullet points will be about, and finally a go deeper section that tells you where you can learn more about the topic. Here is an example of one of mine.

https://symbols-double-9jo.craft.me/7ROZONNqWLTxqi

Yes I did submit that for school. No I do not regret it. Moving on.

My honest review on smart brevity style is that I think it’s probably a good formatting method that does actually work, but I don’t think the way we were made use it works. They wanted us to use it as a way to take notes, which might work for some people, but a lot of us already had our own note taking methods that we’ve perfected that we know work for ourselves and trying to force a new way on us this late into our education doesn’t work. I think this method does work for news outlets that are sharing information with readers, but for taking notes I don’t think it works. But that is just my opinion on the situation we were in.

The next note related thing the zettelkasten. This is a way of storing your notes but the way to explain how we did it is quite confusing and relies of a specific program we use in plp so I’ll just explain the universal things. According to the zettelkasten there are 3 types of notes, literature notes (the most confusing ones) are a note that focuses on one specific thing, whether it be an article that you’ve read, or a conversation you heard, fleeting notes which are small notes you wrote on the fly almost just as reminders to yourself of something like a cool idea or something you have to do later, and permanent notes which are a note about something that you want to remember for a long time. The zettelkasten seems like a good idea, but I don’t think it was explained well enough in this project, and also similarly to smart brevity, many of us already had our own way of formatting our notes that works for us. So hopefully they stop trying to teach us how to completely revamp our learning so late into our education. 

After all this we came back to our Manhattan project learning. And after a bit more research, slideshows and videos, we were finally told what the final product of this project would be. We were going to be doing, drumroll please!

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

AN ANIMATED EXPLAINER VIDEO.

Now if you’re like me you probably haven’t heard of this before but it seems pretty self-explanatory, and it is, but to further help you out I’m going to show you the video we were shown to explain. 

https://youtu.be/6h28_iry9u0?si=NBnZFF4elCrzICp5

Now we knew what we were doing, we needed to know what we were doing it about. Now I assume you’ve picked up the pieces and yes it is about the manhattan project, but more importantly why it is historically significant, and how it changed the world. Sound familiar? Maybe check out the start of this post and you’ll see why. That’s right it’s literally in the driving question. So that’s what we were doing.

Okay I’m going to rant a bit here. So after we were told this the criteria our teacher gave us was written on the board for 1 class, from what I recall we were told it had to be an explainer video, it had to be animated, it had to be about the affect the manhattan project has on the world, and it had to be 2-3 minutes long. I read these but due to my ADHD brain I happened to mostly forget them by the time next week came around. I thought it was fine because one of the benefits of PLP is everything the teachers do is left up online for us to see. Right? Wrong. For some reason the whole second half of the information page about this project is incomplete, it’s just a template that I assume is to remind the teachers what to write. I thought maybe this was okay because I could just go in and talk to my teacher, but I remembered that on the day he wrote it on the board he said that he was leaving on another grades field trip for the whole week, and when he was back (the Monday of next week) the video would be due. And so in the time that we were given to work on it during the week I had no idea what to do and just was scrambling trying to find out what any of the video criteria was. By day 2 I had given up and just started writing the script for the video, but writing the script took up the whole week. So my situation is I have 2 days before the final due date of a 3 minute animated video that I don’t have a success criteria for and haven’t started making. Does that sound stressful to you? I worked on making that video, for 8 hours straight. I was proud of myself in the end after I had completed it, but still unhappy that it had to come to this. So Monday comes and I begrudgingly drag myself into class as always to see my teacher is finally back. He asks who has finished their video and from my memory, I was the only person to put their hand up! I spent my entire day working hard and nobody else had even finished it. So I assume I’ll get extra credit for this, but no. Instead he just gives everyone an extra week to work on this. I am fuming in my chair right now but I don’t say anything due to my respectful nature. Then the next day he tells us that we were supposed to make 5 smart brevity style notes for all the research we were going to use in our video. I am very confused at this point because I already handed in my video research and it isn’t in that format at all. I assumed I wouldn’t have to worry about it, but I checked in with him regardless. He told me to reformat and gather new information for the video I had already made. So for the rest of the week I’m reverse engineering research for my video and then I hand it in. All of this was a really stressful and frustrating process but it’s finally over so I’m happy to relax and wait for my grade… And I wait… and I wait… and I wait… I am still waiting for my video grade as I’m writing this. What the heck Mr Hughes!? 

Sorry for the long paragraph but I try to express my feelings towards projects in my blog posts. Anyway now that my rant is out of the way I can show you my video. 

https://youtu.be/RHvDmO-CGZc?si=D6zkPeLh0aB4ZogK

I hope you like it because as you know it took away 1 day of my life and likely many more days due to stress.

Anyway now it’s time for the answer to the big old question. Or is it? You see I think my answer to the driving question is displayed perfectly in my video. So I’ve already answered the driving question.

Thank you for read my blog post, sorry I was a bit negative but I think this project could have been so cool and so much better if done right, but instead it just kinda felt like we weren’t always the priority and sometimes the focus wasn’t even on the manhattan project. All things considered this was a semi-decent project, which is unfortunate because it had so much potential. Anyway I’m signing off. Goodbyeeeeee 👋👋👋👋👋.