Ahoy! Avast, me hearties!!

Welcome back to my blog! We have finished our 2nd last humanities project of grade 8, and it’s time for me to reflect on my experience and learnings throughout the project. This project was called “Argh, Matey”, and the central topic of this project was European exploration. We were told that the final product for this project was going to be an augmented reality video with drawings that you drew. Does that make any sense to you? You’re probably wondering how on earth those two subjects come together in the end. Let’s break it down. Follow along!

We knew that somewhere in our final product we were going to have to incorporate something about European exploration. But what exactly? To organize all the important facts and details of European exploration, we were introduced to the web of causes and consequences. Every event, decision, development etc., has causes and consequences. Causes are what makes the event happen and consequences are the result of the event. Consequences can be immediate or long term, positive or negative. As Mr. Hughes taught us about the causes and consequences of European exploration, we filled in our graphic organizer. Here is my complete web of causes and consequences:

I thought it was really interesting to learn about all the different factors that motivated and enabled Europeans to travel across oceans on massive boats. Prince Henry the Navigator helped usher “the age of exploration”. He created somewhat of a University where he brought together mapmakers, ship builders and navigators to Portugal. The Portuguese deigned a ship that had huge triangular sails called a Caravel. Travelling by boat wasn’t new, but this boat was a jump in shipbuilding and technology in the 1500’s, because it used the wind as driving force, instead of lots of people having to paddle.

After about half an hour of listening to Mr.Hughes, I become tired of taking notes. Although taking notes for a long time isn’t always fun,  I think it really helped me remember the facts, since I had to type all the important information. This has been a good sample of what it is like having to take notes, a skill that I’ll have to use in future projects and years. 

 At the very beginning of the project we looked at the story spine. We watched a video explaining the Pixar story spine. The story spine is a method that gives you the framework so that you can write a well structured story base. That’s why Pixar and Disney movies always seem like they follow a classic formula. It’s because they do. It goes like this:

So after learning the story spine, we practiced completing the story spine, after watching a Pixar animated short film called Kitbull. You can watch it here. Not one’s group interpretation of the story was the exact same, but they all had similar elements and pieces. This goes to show that everyone interprets the story different from the other people, although we all watched the same short film. 

We then applied this knowledge into making our first pirate story draft. We fooled the story spine structure when writing our stories. You can read my first story below!

I quite liked my first story, but I soon had to make a completely new one, using European history underlying causes and immediate causes. Funny enough, my first story included gold and glory, which are two of the three main underlying causes of European exploration.

I wrote and revised many stories, and restarted as the teachers told us more things we had to include in our stories. Let’s just say to complete my final European exploration story, I had to go to 2 tutorial times in the morning before school. I really liked my story, but you see, I gave so much detail like a  true novel author would, that my story could have been transformed into a kids chapter book. If you haven’t caught on, my story was way too long, because it had to be 2-3 minutes when you read it out loud. When I read my story aloud it was about 7 minutes! I had to remove parts of my story to make it about half the size as it was right now. This process was difficult because these parts and details added to the story; building the character, giving your character a backstory, and explaining the motivations for his actions. I managed to shorten my story from 1, 700 words to 800 words. It was still a bit on the longer side for 2-3 minutes when reading it aloud, but it would have to do, because if I shortened it anymore, I’d be taking away vital parts of my story.

My story was more of a European exploration story than one of pirates, but to be honest, we learnt more about European exploration than of pirates, even when it was supposedly a “ Pirate Project”. I do include pirates, but they are not central to the story. I finally got my story approved on the day of our field trip to Cates park. On the same days that I was rushing to write and shorten my story, I also had to draw my own illustrations for my story, so that I was ready to film my augmented reality video on the day of our field trip to Cates park. The drawings were going to be the in the scenery of the video, and you would show your illustrations and read or recite your story out loud at the same time. Does that make more sense? Here’s a video of my illustrations that I drew for my video.

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I was stressed the day of our field trip to Cate’s park, because I wasn’t even finished drawing all the illustrations for my video. To make maters worse, I had foods in the morning that day, and my group was still cleaning up our station into lunch time, so all my PLP friends had left for Cates park already. I could’ve took the bus, but I decided to walk and I walked all by myself 😔. I don’t mind walking but the walk felt way longer than it actually was because I wasn’t talking to anyone. I didn’t even really know which way was the fastest to get to Cate’s park. I took the 🌲🌊 scenic route. Anyway… I made it there fine, and I wasn’t too late or anything. I arrived just in time for the Pirate packs! I won’t even get started on my critique of the hamburger and fries ( it tasted like it had been prepped an hour ago, and that it had been cooling and moistening since, because that was probably the case). The iced tea and cookie were yummy though.

I didn’t even get to filming my video that day. I drew some more drawings and then played around with AR Makr, the app we were using to film our augmented reality video. First you had to scan the area you wanted to put your illustrations, and then you had to place them one by one. One problem I encountered when filming was that my drawings all flipped when I watched the video in my camera roll. This was weird, but fine for most of the illustrations, except for those with writing in them, like the maps of Spain, and the world. I did a lot of problem solving. Sometimes your objects shifted or disappeared, which was also very frustrating. What should’ve to taken 20 minutes or so, ended up taking a lot more time because of the huge amount of drawings that I had to fit in the relatively small AR field. 

You can watch my finished augmented reality video below.

That was the final product for this project. I hope you enjoyed it! It took a while and I still think it could’ve been better, but we are moving on into our next Humanities project. This project was verry stressful near the end, but I’ve learnt some valuable lessons because of it. Although when I applied for PLP I knew it was part of the learning process to revise and edit, this project is where I truly felt I applied these skills again and again to improve my work until it was good enough and met the project criteria. I also felt that I wasn’t very organized because of this short final product timeline. In the future I hope to be more organized when I have multiple things due at the same time, by spending less time focusing on getting things perfect. If I were to give the teachers feedback on this project, because we learn from feedback, I’d say to give the students the final “ready to film checklist” earlier in the project, because it sometimes felt as though you were introducing new criteria for our stories or how many drawings we had to make, etc every class. 

Overall, I learnt so much new information about this period of time and important events leading up to and after the “ Age of Exploration”.  I am equipped with new trivia knowledge and history facts, thanks to Mr. Hughes and my own research!

That’s it for now! Thank you so much for taking the time to read this post. I’ll be back soon for a Scimatics blog post!

Questions? Comments? I’d love to hear what you think of this post or my final AR video in the comments below.