Recently I went on a trip to the Rockies, with PLP, although you probably already knew that if you read my Maker blog post,¹
Now, this post may be a bit odd, as, the project we are working on in maker has had a lot of overlap with this one, so if I end up repeating myself, just bear with me.

Now that I’ve got all of that over with, we can get on with the rest of this blog post.

The trip was around a week long, with us going as far out as Wilcox pass. While we were on the trip, there were a variety of things we were working on, for one, there were the videos for Maker², but those are, well, for maker.

Now, because I don’t want to write another maker post, and because I’m sure you don’t want to read another one either, I’m going to try and stay clear of anything maker related, unless its necessary³.

Now that I’ve got all of that over with, we can get on with the rest of this blog post.⁴

There were a few things we did in humanities, both on and off the trip, so, lets start with the stuff before.

The driving question of this project is “How has the geography of the West shaped who we are?”, so the first thing we ended up learning about was what geography actually is, which pretty much all the other bits of the project revolved around. First, before anything else,⁵ we learned *ahem*:

THE 5 THEMES OF GEOGRAPHY

Which are, well 5 themes, that help us Humans (or students) better understand the geography of a place, which is something we would be doing a lot on the trip, I’ll spare you the detailed description of the themes, as those are in my book. I hopefully can still tell you what each one is called, so let’s do that; 1. Location, 2. Place, 3. Human environment interaction, 4. Movement, 5. Regions. We spent a day or two learning these themes, and then, were told what we had to make, A Comic Life, explaing the 5 themes, which, again, is in my book, which can be found near the bottom of this post.⁶

Now, as the first trip was going to leave around a bit over a week after the start of the project⁷ We also had to cover the “West” part of the Driving Question, So, At the same time as we were learning about the 5 themes, we were also learning about a few different things about the west, for one, we learned what “The west” refers to, ⁸⁹we also looked at the locations we would be stopping, and researched their historical significance, and interest. Finally, we learned about the construction of the railroad, and how it was important to the development of “The west”, as we know it today.
Now, as was artfully foreshadowed, both here and in my maker post, one of the videos for maker, had something that could be counted humanities work, and that’s what im doing. That thing was the planning for the Investigative Video, for the video, we had to develop a thesis, as well as interview questions we would ask to try and support our thesis. I started this process by just writing down a few things I could make my thesis about, then I refined them a bit, and came up with some questions I liked based off of the ideas, then I thought of general locations¹⁰ I could interview people at, and then I finally made my thesis, and then changed the questions a bit based on my thesis, somewhere during that process, I decided I wanted to interview locals, which made it harder to find people to interview, as the places we went, didn’t have a huge population, and were mostly tourists, things worked out In the end though, and I got a few good interviews.
Oh yeah, and here’s my thesis:

The west is a geographically diverse and naturally beautiful place, which attracts people to live and work there so they can experience it for themselves

Maker: Story finding in the Rockies.

Anyways, now that we’ve gotten the confusing maker overlap out of the way, we can talk about the stuff we did while trip 1 was gone, there’s only really one main thing we did, other than some more work on our theses and our trip intentions, ¹¹ and that thing was…

LEARNING ABOUT THE HISTORY OF BC AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE RAILWAY WITH EVENTS SPANNING A GOOD HUNDRED YEARS OR SO

Yeah, It doesn’t have the same pizzaz if its too long, Anyways, that is what we did, we did this over 2 or so days, motivated by a upcoming “quiz” which we wouldn’t learn the nature of until right before, that possibly may have caused small amounts of stress. Some interesting tidbits worth mentioning are below:

Now, let’s talk about the actual trip, trip 2. The one I was on. It happened after trip 1.

The trip was around a week long, with us going as far as Wilcox pass. We went to all sorts of places, and went on many hikes, which were wonderful, and while we were there, we worked on quite a few things, for one, there were the maker videos, there was also the 5 themes comic life, but, most importantly, the Multi Touch Book, for the book, we had to fill out pages with information about locations we visited, and how they relate to the driving question, as the places often had lots of information, and we often had limited time, I used a system where I took notes for a day with possible video clips, good photos, and information about places, and then worked on the book using that information.
Anyways, I think that’s enough explanation of the book, so, here it is:

Anyways, I think that’s a nice place to end this blog post, assuming you read the book that is.