Hello and welcome back to my blog. Today I’ll be reflecting on our second humanities project of the year, entitled Manhattan Project². I didn’t know very much about this topic beforehand, so I was excited to learn about this event.
To kick off this project, we revisited the idea of historical significance. As PLP students we were already familiar with this concept, but it was a main focus of this project so we did a writing activity to refresh the idea in our minds. We had to write a C-E-R(claim, evidence, reasoning) piece on an event or person we believe to be historically significant. I decided to challenge myself, and choose an event that I don’t know very much about. After reviewing a few options, I decided to research further into the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and write my piece on that. I wrote my first draft, then realized I needed to be more specific on what my angle was for the paragraph. I decided to focus on the economic significance of the event, leading to this paragraph.
After this piece of writing, we had to build some knowledge about the actual project topic, in the form of several lectures. After making notes on all the lectures, I felt I had a solid foundation of knowledge to begin the project.
We were assigned our group and I discovered I would be working with Mateo, Max, Ben, and Dylan. Ben and Dylan were going on a field study to New Mexico midway through the project to visit some sites and get media for our final project, which we discovered was an interactive book.
While Ben and Dylan were away, I worked with Mateo and Max on some initial plans for our book. We decided on our chapters and roles for our group
Our group was inspired by National Geographic magazines for the theme of our book. We began building our book around that theme. A good while into building our book, we conferenced with Ms. Willemse and realized that our book lacked a crucial part- a thesis. From conferencing with her, we then worked on our thesis and adjusted our book around that.
I missed out on many of the work blocks we had to construct the book for field hockey provincials, so I was working remotely for most of the important days in our project. This proved to be difficult for me, because it was difficult to communicate the group’s visions for the book over iMessage.
After completeing my chapters, I realized there was still a lot of work to be done on the book for a few different reasons. We didn’t have our interviews edited, we were still struggling with some design aspects, and some of my group member’s chapters were incomplete.
The book remained quite unfinished, even though our work blocks for it were done. I had been working on the book so much, that I needed to take a break for a few days, and work on the in-class assignments to wrap up the project.
There were three assignments to finish the project. The first was a group work reflection, the second was a speech analysis, and the third was a group text analysis.
I definitely struggled the most with the speech analysis, but the good news is I wasn’t alone. We went over it again in class and were given an opportunity to revise our writing to better meet the success criteria, and I think my second try went better.
After these assignments, the project was officially “over”. But my group still didn’t have our book totally done. I waited to complete my project reflection until the book was totally done, but I wasn’t sure what to do, as it didn’t seem like it was going to get done.
A new solution was proposed, where we make a shorter version of the book and cut the unfinished parts. This seemed like the best option, so I got to work shortening the book and filling in the gaps. Our thesis needed to be adjusted and we still needed a conclusion, so I fixed both of those. I then worked on moving our citations page to the book and creating an author page.
Once all this was done, I was thrilled to have the book finally finished. Shoutout to Fraser who helped me troubleshoot some publishing issues! Even though it was a makeshift last attempt, I think the book turned out great. You can download our book and read it on Apple Books down here:
(Click to download) ⬆️
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The competency focus of this project was Communication. This involved communicating to larger audiences through the book, but I feel like the real learning piece for me was communicating with my group members. A big lesson I learned through this project was that you can only control your own actions. No matter how badly you want someone else to get something done, they have to make that decision for themselves. In this case, some of those decisions never came so we had to take alternate measures to get the book done. As I mentioned before, I was working remotely so communication was difficult. However, considering the circumstances, most of our group managed to communicate effectively enough to put together a cohesive, understandable, book.
If I were to do this project again, I would make sure I have clear communication and expectations set for the group members on the field study. I would also make a set plan for dividing up the workload, as I feel like it wasn’t divided evenly.
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This project was definitely on the difficult side for me, but that means I also learned a lot. I learned a ton, not only about the Manhattan Project, but also creating digital books, and group-work. I definitely had fun learning about this interesting topic that I knew very little about before.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy reading it! Let me know what you think about it in the comments below ⬇️
Sincerely,
Me
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