Category: Big Projects

In my class we had been working on a project of the end of the year that was part of our final mark for the end of the year. Everybody in the class had to do it. Some did it with another partner but most of the class did it on there own. I did mine on my own. The main idea for the project was to find a small problem in the world and then find a small solution for it. It wasn’t quite that simple though. You had to narrow it down to a certain age group my age group was seniors. My idea originated from my grandmother who has dementia. She like her hats, and she kept buying hats that were very similar to hats she already had. We told her that she had a hat like that but she had no idea that she had all of these hats. I then came up with this.

It was basically a cone with clips on it. It held the hats up and it spun because it was suspended by a chain from the ceiling. That was the earliest prototype. I also made a larger one that spun on the ground and another tat could sit on a desk that was about the same size as this one.

None of them took to long to build as the design was fairl simple and all it took was sanding, sawing, painting, and attaching. That’s not the part that mattered, the part that matttered is that it did what i wanted it to, which was putting all of the hats on a display. By putting the hats on display like that it makes it easier for someone to know what hats they have because tehy see them everyday when they walk by it. My theory is that it brought all of the hats at the back of the pile to the front with the rest of the hats. We then had a exhibition on June 15th. I was mixed with to other Grade 9’s and a handful of grade 8’s. We had to put together a theme for our area so we said Tim Hortons because seniors like Tim Hortons. It took a while before we got to that idea because where else do seniors go, some people said old folks home, which would have been depressing. So we had to come up with new idea and thats how we got Tim Hortons. We served donuts as the food because what else would you get at Tim Hortons.  The exhibition went well and everybody was happy that they didn’t have to deal with the stress from the project anymore.

I was certainly happy I wasn’t stressed, eh.

 

The last unit that I did in school for humanities was mainly on geography, but it had a slight twist. The end project was to create a video too show who is in control the humans or the environment. We had to pick a part of Canadian geography to reasearch and then make the video on that area. Although the video was on that area it was not exactly normal, we had to make a Frankenstuffie. A frankenstuffie is a stuffie that has been modified by either replacing parts of it or adding parts to the stuffie. Personally, I am horrible at stitching anything. My stitching job wasn’t necessarily well done, I did my best and that’s all that matters. With my stuffie I had to spray paint it first, becuase the stuffie I got was a flamingo and, well flamingos don’t really live in the St.Lawerence Lowlands so to speak.

It was originally a pink flamingo but I painted it red and called it a cardinal. I then of course had to turn it into a Frankenstuffie. First I tore the thing open then I ripped all the fluff out, and the sqweeker(It’s a dog toy). I then sewed that back up, and added a eye to it’s chest but I used it more as something that looks kinda like an air filter. It turned out well for me considering it didn’t fall apart once I disconnected the needle from the string.

I probably made a mistake showing you a closeup because now you can see how ugly my sewing job was. During this project we read a book, most people have probably seen the movie staring Matt Damon, called “The Martian”, we read the book of it. The book was very good and is a little bit different from the movie as usual the book goes into more detail. It is probably my favourite book that I was ever told I have to read it for school work, and do mini book reports through the unit.

The second picture is not what I did but that’s just me 😉.  We learned about geography in humanities and ecology in science, we had to make a video including both topics. In science we doing tons and tons of notes, and then doing quizzes every once in a while between each set of notes. The ecology part was learning about organisms and habitats and things like that it wasn’t really to complicated, but it was a lot to take in. The geography was all focused on Canada, we learned about different regions like the Canadian Shield, fun fact the Canadian Shield covers half of Canada. This unit was also a lot to take in because of all the different regions in Canada, mostly becuase it is the second largest country in the world behind Russia.

Before we could get started on the video, we had to write a whole story, mine is over 2,240 words, some people wrote more then that. At first I thought that we had to make a video for each episode that we wrote, you might ask how many episodes there are, there are 8. That would take so long, I was so relieved to find out I only had to do one video on as many episodes as I felt nesscary. I decided that the most important part of my story was episodes 6,7,8. That part of the story was all of the climax to the ending. This is the Book.

At first the whole unit seemed really overwhelming and I wasn’t sure where to start, but once I got the ball rolling everything seemed to click, sure there were a couple times where it was a time crunch. That is basically everything that happened in this unit here is my video, eh.

 

In class we did a big project on Fantasy. We even ended up going on a field trip to florida. It was a really cool project where we focused on how Disney emerges everybody who goes there into an imaginary world. To make us fully understand we went on the rides there, but we focused on one ride per person. I got expedition everest, it is one of the scarier rides in all of Disney World, and probably the most in the Animal Kingdom. The ride creates a real adrenaline rush for anybody who likes fast rides and big drops. The ride even has a point where you go backwards. If you want to learn more about our trip heres my blog post on field schools.

Lots of Field Schools, Eh

We focused on what Disney did to emerse everybody into what seemed like another dimension, the main question was what draws us to imaginary worlds. We had to write essays about it which was a little bit painful, the essay focused on alice in wonderland. That was the book that we read throughout this unit then we ended up watching the older alice in wonderland movie. This is a blog post I did on that.

Alice in Wonderland, Eh

Anyways while we were there we had to interview people and ask there opinions on what they thought brings everybody to an imaginary world when they go on one of the rides. We had to take pictures of everything that would could be useful and we had to write down notes about everything we figured out from being there or from doing reasearch on the internet.  I got to interviews and loads of information on the ride. I don’t want to tell you every detail becuase that is explained on the video I made.

Well before we could actually make the video we had to story boards, which aren’t that hard if you what you’re doing but if you don’t know what to do your are going to be there for a while. After we did that we went to florida and got everything we needed for the story boards. After that we put it all together to make a video on everything we learned, but wait a second you not done you have to do 2 more drafts of it to make it just right. I will now show you my third draft video eh.

 

As you know we started a project called  Destination Imagination. It is one big tournemant that we started a while back, in class. If you want more of a background on it go to my regionals post.

Regionals, Eh

Provincials had a lot more people then regionals of course, and everybody was much more competitive, after being able to fix everything that could have been better when they did it in regionals.

We first had to do a opening ceremony which is shown above. My group wasn’t in it because we were getting ready to present because our presentation was 20mins after so we were double checking everything and making sure everything was working. Before we knew it we were being asked questions about what we were doing and how we were going to do it. Before we even got there we changed decent amount of things such as adding dry ice. It didn’t really work, but after everything was over it was fun to play with. I was not at regionals, and one of our group members wasn’t at provincials so I took his role. I did alright even though I accidentally unplugged the speakers at one point.  The actuall mechanism that moved our stage(the main task) was broken so we just made it so it used the mechanism partially but I had to pull the thing instead of weights dropping. Other then that everything went pretty well.

Our Presentation We didn’t really speak loud enough either.

We then had to deal with an Instant Challenge. We didn’t really do that well but we did enough so that we weren’t embarrassed. At the end of the day we had a closing ceremony. We won in regionals, and we also won in provincials. My friend and I were the only people in our group there so we had to wear like 2 or 3 medals each, and each carry a trophy. My school did really well at DI we have so many trophys now, eh.

In school my teachers decided to make us do a project tournament thing called Destination Imagination or DI. The whole basis for D.I. is that you are given something to do with a certain set of rules. In my groups case, we had a technical challenge, so we had to create a “stage” that would move one of our group members from one place to another while incorporating a story into it. Our story was a farmer finds a time machine and travels to the future and meets his future self and finds out that all of the farms had been turned into factory’s and that there was a massive war going on. After that happened he went back in time and stayed as a farmer. This tournament has 3 stages regionals, provincials and globals. Recently my group went to regionals and we came in first in that project, but there is also something called and Instant Challenge or IC. IC’s are challenges that you are told nothing about until they happen, and you are given are a certain amount of time to complete the task. It is mostly just improvisation and team work. We also came in first for the instant challenge as well. Which made us move on to provincials. I dont really know much about what happened regionals because I was in Whistler while it happened. I will be able to go to provincials but one of the other group members will not be there so I will fill in for him and take his part in the play. Guess I’ll be talking about provincials in a month, eh

 This is so true, eh.

In science class we get to do a super hero project in a group, you may be wondering how we are learning anything. How this is actually related to school work is that we had to choose an element from the periodic table. Our team originally chose bismuth but, we ended up changing our element to phosphorus, I think it was mainly because bismuth had an atomic number of 83 and we didnt want to make a model of an atom that big, thats kind of ironic because atoms are really small. Our group is a bit behind but we can still catch up everybody is doing there part I believe. We also had to make a periodic table for part of the project.

We also got to have a team name and a team badge. Our team name comes from one of my group members dogs, Team Pip.

So in class for math we were learning about square footage, and values of houses depending on square footage. Anyways at the end of the unit we got into a group and got to design our dreamhouse. I was in a group with 3 other people are house was around 1800 square feet and it has an awesome roof, with a tennis court, basketball court and a pool with a waterfall. The house is 2 stories tall, and has just about everything you need.

Now the best part. We got to make the dreamhouse so we could represent it on a projector and our group chose minecraft to build it. It was an awesome house. At the end in the last couple minutes we added stuff that would just make it cool. I went and made a little shack just in the backyard put a bed and a massive TV in it, now here’s the awesome part I made a tunnel system with gold and diamond filled throughout it going endlessly under ground, which boosted the price from $275,000 to $275,000,000,000 yah it was a a lot of gold and diamond. If your confused why I started that, it’s because there werent enough bedrooms for all of us.

Now that’s pretty true EH!

 

Yah, so I’m almost done my project that I have been doing with a couple other people, we are just trying to finish are first draft of the project which is a big metaphor machine that explains the Xinhai revolution, but it also has to be a Rube Goldberg Machine, which is a machine that makes the simplist action as complex as possible, Im sure if you saw one you would know what I was talking about. So here is a video of one.

https://youtu.be/ieQSiDnOhzY

That one is insanely elaborate and ares isn’t quite that amazing but were hoping that it will be cool like that one.

 

Anyways, we’ve been working on multiple different things such as the actual machine, the parts, painting and having to do the storyboard. The story board took quite awhile and everyone had to pitch to finish it. With actual machine weve been spray painting just about everything. One of our group members got really good at this thing called 3D pen which is basically a fat pen that you insert these coloured plastic solid strings basically and it warms the plastic up so that it bends and you can draw and stuff with it, if your confused here is a time lapse of him doing it.

 

Another thing we did was this giant timeline about the Xinhai revolution and that took forever here is a little bit of only tons of stuff we did on it.

(Videos are not loading Ill fix it ASAP)

Here’s how it turned out.

 

Currently we are rushing to finish it and moving as fast as we can to finish this project putting everything together as fast as possible.

Gooodbye and have a good day eh!