Hey everybody and welcome back to another, you guessed it, exhibition post! That’s right it’s that time of year again when everyone’s homes are full of building materials, camera rolls are full of photos, and well, blog 44 is full of student portfolio posts about it. This year for my grade, and the grade 8’s, we created blue sky projects. Now if you’re unfamiliar with the concept of what a blue sky project is, here is my blog post from last year. But I will go into a small explanation here if you just want to learn about this year. Blue sky comes from ” blue sky time” at Apple. Apple employees would get around an hour or so to work on something they were excited about and wanted to make. Translated into PLP exhibit terms it means, we find a problem and we make a solution to it. The solution can be an app, a giant structure, a product, or anything you can imagine. This year I chose to solve the problem of donut icing melting off the donut and sticking to the packaging. Below is my L.A.U.N.C.H. portfolio, the display I had on exhibition night to help show people my learning process. Now the videos don’t play so just below the images will be the videos I put in the portfolio.

So, if you read through that you now should have a pretty good idea of what I made. If not that’s alright because I’m just about to talk about it. My solution to this really horrific problem was the Sweet Treat Tower, AKA a tube that could hold donuts in place. I first came up with the idea after looking at Tiffin Bento boxes. I liked the idea of a tray per donut and then they could all be carried together, but if I would’ve styled it like a tiffin bento it would’ve been very hard to get the donut out of the tray as you can only gain from above. I then thought about if I were to make a carrier that the trays could slide into. But after going shopping for resources that seemed a little hard to make. So we ended on the successful idea. Have a tube with half trays inside of it so the donuts can slide in no problem. Now at this point I’d pretty much finalized the solution except there was one thing I had to figure out. If this tube were to go upside down how could I stop the donuts from hitting the lid and smearing. Enter the pokers. The job of the pokers was to give extra stability to the donuts on the trays so if it was to get flipped or jostled around, it would be fine.

This whole product worked really well and I’m very proud of what I was able to make. What didn’t go so well is how many of the “test subjects” my brother ate. Now I admit I ate some too, I mean who can resist, but I only ate them AFTER I had tested the product. I would come home with a pack of 6 Tim Hortons donuts and by the time I was ready to test the product out with them, there would be only around 3. People always say “my dog ate my homework” but in this project my real problem was my brother.

Another big part of this project is the actual night of. I was in a group fo six people and our area of display was the trophy case hallway. If you haven’t been to Seycove I’ll show pictures below. Kaia, Rhiann, Anders, Taylor, Amelia, and I all worked together to make our area “The International PLP Trade-Show”. We all had lanyards with our  product and “country” on them. We made a sign for the entrance, a mural to cover the trophy case, a food truck art piece for the food, and aisle signs at each table. I was very proud of the transformation we made as after all, we had the shortest amount of time to do it.

Throughout the whole project everyone had a L.A.U.N.C.H. journal to guide them along the process of learning. So if you want to see all the different excersises and drafts I did to make this product be my guest. My L.A.U.N.C.H. journal is just below here.

Overall I really enjoyed this project and I feel like I got a lot out from it. I did lots of formatting in all my different documents, I learned how to configure plastic as much as I could, I got very creative with my materials (all random things from Dollarama), and I learned about eco-friendly plastics. Although my project wasn’t solving the world smelt troubling problem, it was something fun and neat I could create and I had many compliments about it.

After my pitch at least 5 people told me they wanted to buy one, someone told me I should go into marketing, and some said I should make these as a future business. Now obviously none of those are what’s on my mind right now as I plan on finishing school and doing something she with my life. However, it’s pretty cool to think that I made a brand new product with my own idea and people would want to buy it from me. That’s all from grade 9 Izzy, see you next year!