Alright, so another blog post. It seems like I’ve been writing a lot of these lately, and that’s because I have. The reason for the increased number of blog posts is because, as the school year is coming to a close, there are more projects finishing, one of which is “the medium is the message”, The way this project ended is different from most of the other projects I’ve done, an exhibition.
I’ve talked about the concept of an exhibition before in my winter exhibition blog post, and if you read it, I’m sure you are well aware of how it went. if not, then you probably should, as it will provide context for this blog post. (I’ll be nice and put a link in.)
Now that you’ve read the entirety of that blog post (you did read it, right?) I can start talking about this exhibition.
Now the exhibits were different in many ways, the most obvious being the name and, as an extension of that, the date. Now, I’m not too sure whether or not the exhibition has always been on the exact same day; if so, kudos to whoever did that, but either way, I think it’s probably fair to say that the winter exhibition has always been in the winter and the spring exhibition in the spring. Now that wasn’t the only difference between the exhibitions; one of the other main differences, at least for me, was that the spring one was more… muted; I’m not entirely sure how to describe it, but it just seemed less monumental. That probably was just because I had experience with an exhibition, so I was a lot less stressed out, but who knows?
Another difference between the winter and spring exhibitions was that the spring exhibition grouped people up depending on grade rather than just clumping people into a room like the winter one, which makes sense considering that the project we did for the spring exhibition was much more of a group project than the one for the winter. Now having all of the grade 8s in one room did have disadvantages; for one, it got loud, which made it pretty hard to talk to guests; the other thing is that because of the sheer number of booths in the gym, people often didn’t visit them all; and finally, there were a lot of 8s just wandering around; why were they wandering around? Because we didn’t have set break times, on the winter exhibition everyone had a time when they could go on break; however, it was very short, only around 15 minutes. For this one, there was no break schedule, so a lot of people just walked around the gym. The thing is, having no set time to go on break made me unsure as to whether or not I could go look at the other rooms, and when I did, it was very rushed because I didn’t know how much time I had, and I ended up missing the grade 9 room entirely.
Now, while the spring exhibition had its flaws, it was far better than the winter exhibition in terms of smoothness. Remember the muted feeling I discussed before and how it probably related to being less stressed? While the winter exhibition was a rushed and disorganized event, the spring exhibition just happened. A few things that I believe contributed to this are as follows:
One: Time. While the winter exhibition had us cobble together our project from practically nothing in a week and our room in even less than that, the projects at the spring exhibition were the results of a month of learning, and while they were far from as large as the rooms of the winter exhibition, the week we had to design our tables made them look much more polished.
Two: experience. With the 8th graders knowing what to expect from an exhibition and the higher grades having a refresher on it, everyone was much more prepared for the spring exhibition, so we had a much more solid idea of what to do (and what not to do).
Three: autonomy(well, partial autonomy). As we had experience from the first exhibition and had worked on this project for far longer, the teachers stepped back a fair bit for this exhibition, leaving a lot more to the students. With the freedom this provided, we were able to work much more quickly to get our final product out into the world.
Now that you’ve read that, I can move on. I mentioned our projects briefly, but I believe it’s time to go into more depth about them, specifically mine; other people talked about their projects in their blog posts, probably.
For the winter exhibition, we were showcasing the product of the project “The medium is the message”, an advertisement. To make the advertisements, we first had to learn about what makes up an advertisement as well as advertising techniques, and then we went to Oregon to interview a business there about what to put in their advertisement. I’m being brief about this, as I’ve already talked about it in my Oregon reflection. I’ll put in a link for that here:
Making the ads was difficult for a few reasons. One, it felt stressful having such a constrained amount of time, but I did get a decent draft out of it. Another thing that was difficult was that sometimes what we were told to put in our ad by our business conflicted with what the teachers wanted in our ads. Another thing was that we weren’t really taught how to make an ad or told specifically what kind of ad to make. We did do a “design workbook,” but honestly, it wasn’t really very useful.
Anyways, here are my drafts. As you can see, it took a lot of iterations to get to the final ad, so instead of talking any more, I’ll just let you look at them:
So, you can see how throughout the different drafts my project changed, starting with pretty much nothing and then slowly evolving. One of the things i struggles the most with when getting to the final draft was my ad “looking like a poster rather than an ad”, so I had to cut a lot of information out of the ad, im still mixed on whether that helped the ad, it certainly looked nicer, but I wonder whether or not it fit with what our client wanted.
Moving on from that, there was the exhibition, i talked a fair bit about how it went, but I’ll spend a bit more time on it.
Setting up was rather problematic, because, when we were getting our tables together, someone from the Columbia river maritime museum stole one of ours, and they just kept getting more, so they got like 5 tables for only 6 people and we had to deal with 4 for 7, so that’s why it looked kind of cramped. Another thing that happened was at one point ms Willemse took a bunch of people to go on the grade 12’s tour, which really cut down on the number of people at our table, which made things slightly difficult. Anyways, either way the exhibition went fairly well, ans its over now.
Below is a photo of our groups booth for the exhibition.
Above is a photo of our groups booth for the exhibition.
And that’s my blog post.