History is typically a topic dreaded by most students far and wide, but in PLP, things are a bit more interesting. Instead of doing a project all about the “fascinating” lives of farmers in the Dark Ages, we got to learn about burning witches and futuristic electric bombs! Now I may have gotten a little ahead of myself there, but if you want to now the full story about the unit that “changed everything”, read on!

Our Unit

In PLP, most units we work on revolve around some sort of inquiry question, and the main one we focused on this time was how do advancements and change create tension throughout history? In order to figure that out, we decided to look at time periods in history where great change has occurred, and where better to start than the Middle Ages? One of the main changes that occurred during these times was the collapse of the feudal system (the government system at the time). To learn what this was, we did a number of assignments (such as guided notes), but one that stood out was our 3 f’s of feudalism presentation. This was one of our first official keynote-based assignments, and got a group to present why one of the 3 f’s of feudalism (fief, faith, and fealty) was important to society at the time. Here is the keynote my group created:

When the feudalism system collapsed, a period known as the Renaissance began, which was a time of art, discovery, and exploration (see humanism). This was also the time period where my class started our Renaissance Notes at, which are basically a collection on all the small assignments we have done (guided notes, paragraphs, video questions, etc.). As you may already know, the Renaissance was home to many famous revolutionaries, such as Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippo Brunelleschi, and many more. One person in particular that we looked a bit more into was Martian Luther, a person who protested against the ways of the Roman Catholic Church and ended up changing the way it functioned for ever. We watched a video about him and wrote a paragraph, which are in my Renaissance Notes.

After all of this, we had a good amount of info about time periods and revolutionary people within them, so now it was time to put our knowledge to the test and create our own blog posts on an individual we found particularly revolutionary and inspirational. I chose to do Abraham Lincoln because I feel his acts towards racial equality had one of the biggest affects on America in human history. I also feel that his humble beginnings and personality made him inspirational, and the changes he created and caused major tension.

If you want to read my blog post on the matter, click here: 🎩

Our Notebooks

After learning about the major time periods in human history and the changes that occurred within them, it was time to take what we learned and create something great. This was when we started working on our first of the two big projects of this unit; the notebook. The notebook was a project in which we were split into groups for based on a topic of interest (e.i transportation, communication). Our job was to display and explain how our topic has evolved through four different time periods (Middle Ages, Renaissance, Technical Revolution, and Modern), and the tension it has created. I chose to be in the defence group, along with Melanie, Tamara, and Sofia.

The first thing we did to create our notebooks was assign everyone a time period to work on. We then decided how many items we would do for each page, and what they would be. Once we had that all sorted out, we were ready to start researching, but before we could do that, our teachers decided to show us this website (if you can find anything wrong with it, comment below). This taught us to be careful to make sure the sources we use are valid so we don’t state any false of over exaggerated information. After about a week and a half, my group all had our pages done, but there was a small problem. Because we didn’t decide on a template and theme for our book before hand, each page ended up looking like it’s own separate thing. To fix this, we decided on rules that each page had to follow (backgrounds, image boxes, text spacing, etc.) and looked at each others pages and critiqued them. We also got critique from the teachers and our classmates which helped us a lot. Throughout the course of two more drafts, our book changed a lot, and became better after each day until we found it was ready to hand in. Here is the final draft of our notebook:

Here is some critique we revived on our drafts:

Our Sales Pitches

The second major project we are doing in this unit is our sales pitches. After our notebooks were completed, we started preparing presentations in which we would present an idea for a new invention that would greatly benefit our field of interest to a “company” that would want to buy it. Here’s what my group came up with: An e.m.p like missile that sends out electric signals instead of currents that plants bugs in enemy systems. This is revolutionary because it does not permanent damage and because it sends our signals instead of electric waves, it can’t harm anything except for electronics. Once we had our ideas, our teachers showed us a show called The Pitch, which highlighted some of the key factors in a successful sales pitch. It showed how it is key to use ethos, pathos, and logos, along with how crucial little details can be. After this, wrote our scripts and started moving on to the visual aspects of it. Here is a picture of our invention:

 

Here is our Sales Pitch Keynote

In order to demonstrate what our invention would do/look like, we created a keynote and a model of it to show with our presentation. We also added in a special affect of the lights in the presentation room turning off when our invention was “activated”, which revived good feedback from our audience. It was also liked how since we chose the U.S Army/government to pitch our invention to, we decided to dress up one of the audience members as a certain leader of said country (wig and all). Some constructive feedback we got after our first presentation was to explain a bit more about the mechanics of our invention and explain some more of the differences between it and a normal e.m.p. Coming up soon will be our final presentation of our sales pitches, and I’m quite excited to share everything that we have improved for our third and final draft!

Here is some critique we received for this draft: