Greetings fellow penguins! I believe this will be three posts this week. Can you tell we just finished some projects? Anyways, this was our latest Personal Growth Plan (PGP) project where we had a look at how other’s career journeys can shape our own.

From the start of the project we knew we were going to achieve this goal by shadowing a professional for a day and then interviewing them, although just getting an interview was fine as well, and then turning the audio we captured into an entire podcast episode! It did seem rather daunting at first, but I managed to make it work and I’m very proud of the end result.

We started by sending out emails to potential “mentors”, the people who we would be shadowing, so we did some work on how to send a good email before sending those out. My dad helped me connect with Ahren Britton, an engineer at AlgaFilm Technologies, and then I contacted him about what the day would be like. We then worked on some interview questions to ask after doing some research on the person/place in question. Here were my initial interview questions:

Interview Questions

We also did a bit more of a deep dive into the the career we were going to be exploring, and we showed our learning by making an easy-to-read overview on the topic in turn also expanding our knowledge on the subject as well as that of the reader. Here is what I created about engineering, with a focus on bioengineering:

Engineering Smart Brevity

Bioengineering Smart Brevity

Then it was time for the actual shadow day, It was really fun and I learnt a lot about engineering, and also AlgaFilm’s work.

Some of Algafilm’s Algae

More details are in my podcast episode, which was finished after some music creation and a whole lot of editing. The episode is still being published on Spotify, so for now, here is the audio file:

I hope you enjoyed that, there was a lot of work put into it, but let me know in the comments if you had any comments or there was something you think could be better, and I’ll take it into account for my next podcast project.

This experience definitely reinforced my interest in engineering but also got me thinking about I would want in a long term job, such as variety of work and level of personal control over the product of my work. Going forward I know I want and need to work on a personal system to manage my professional communications in order to stay organized and on top of my work.

Overall though I was very happy with my end products from this project and my learning and I was pleased at how real-world this projects was, which I definitely appreciate, especially after just being hired for my first job. Thanks for reading!

Hello and welcome to the Penguin Hideout!

Its come time time of year for mPOLs, our midyear presentation of learning. This year I was asked too reflect on progress made towards my “mission”, which was a kind of “where do you see yourself at graduation” type situation set at the start of the school year. Mine was “I am a student who can be engaged in my work, self-regulate, communicate, and collaborate. This helps me achieve my vision by reinforcing my good habits and helping me break worse ones. I also helps me enjoy my projects, which in turn makes me do much better work, as well as feeling proud of my own work and learning from it.”

Now that was all fine and dandy but now that we are actually a good part of the way through the school year, the teachers want to make sure we are actually making progress on our goals that we set for ourselves which I figure is fair. No point having a goal if you forget about and don’t work towards it. So now I’ve got to do just that.

So lets break this down. I said that I wanted to:

• Be Engaged in my Work
• Self-Regulate
• Communicate & Collaborate
• Learn from my work

Well that all sounds good, but how am I actually progressing these skills?

Engaged in Work:

I think my best example of this so far this year our WWII project where I created a sophisticated essay to go into our class zine. I really enjoyed this project, and I found the content interesting which definitely helped me focus and be engaged on my final product.

The War That Shaped Canada

Self-Regulation:

This is definitely a skill I’m still working on although I’m not to bad at it. I mainly get distracted when I’m overwhelmed with work and it feels like to much to handle or start. Better managing my time and working more efficiently will clear up some time so that these projects aren’t overwhelming. I need to do some more research and potentially creation of some methods that will me allow me to do this.

That being said I think I did this very well in our latest PGP project. I was able to focus on my work and just things done, and as a result, I had less work to do later and didn’t get bogged down with work, which would in turn make it harder for me to focus in the future.

(Blog Post Being Made)

Communicate & Collaborate:

I think a great example of where my collaboration and communication skills are at right now was our latest humanities project, where we read and analyzed Romeo & Juliet and then created a modern parody of the play. Throughout the project I maintained constant communication with the DRI and other main people working on the creation and presentation of the parody, and I was very happy with myself after I created a combined script for all the acts and a formatting guide, as the previous format had caused some chaos; I was just happy it all worked out in the end but I was proud of myself mor making something that ended up being very useful even though It was not part of my role.

Here is what I created

(Blog Post still being created)

Learn from work:

In terms of learning from my work and learning skills applicable in real life, I think the project that was designed to just done that has done so. Marketing me was one of our PGP projects were we essentially learned how to be professional and create a bit of a brand identity for ourselves. Not only do I find this really fun and have been using it for a lot of things, but I also now have a job interview scheduled, and i had sent the resume we made in class, so I think I definitely learned a lot of stuff from this project.

The name’s Streeter; James Streeter

Now moving forward, I’m thinking about how I can extend in my work and make some truly impressive things. I’ve feel already seen a large jump in the quality of my work this year, especially with my PGP podcast, which got praise from my interviewee that made me very happy. Continuing to refine my presentation and making real-world connections are what I believe will bring my projects to the next level

Building my collaboration skills with others though communication and practice will also be instrumental in my future success. It’s a skill I’m always trying to work on, but always find difficult as I prefer to work by myself, but Destination Imagination and our Romeo & Juliet project have definitely improved my ability to collaborate with others, and work towards a common goal.

Thanks for reading, come again sometime!

Hello everyone!

Welcome to yet another blog post, for this this one our focus is our time working on and preforming in destination imagination (D.I.) 2025, It actually was a really good experience this year and I’m exited to share my journey throughout D.I. this year.

We began working on our challenge what in my opinion was far to late into the year, with only a little over a month into the first contest, but hey, that’s just the way things happened this year. I was very happy with my group this year, I had a strong team of dedicated people who wanted to do really well this year, so I was pretty confidence going into our design process. We then created a group messages chat to collaborate on which ended up working very well.

We were assigned to the engineering challenge, which only two of us were interested in, for the others it was their last choice (but they still did a great job). We started by deciding on a general team conduct to follow and then moved to identifying everyone’s personal strengths. We quickly realized it would be best to split into an engineering team and a story & props team; I was on the engineering team.

A test course we made to see if our transporter worked

I don’t want to reveal to much about our solution the the challenge yet (which was to bring weights across a cord on some sort of transporter), because I have been told not too, as there are still some regional tournaments going on, one we need to make sure no one uses our ideas. We had a good design process though and went though many rounds of ideation and iteration before we landed on something that we were happy with as an end product. It’s certainly not perfect and it did break a little later on but we have thought of some ways to improve it for the provincial tournament in a month-or-so’s time.

Some basic ideation sketches that we may or may not have used.

While we worked on that our story team was hard at work creating a parody of the greatest showman for us to preform. They did a great job with the story, script and props and I think the D.I. appraisers were very impressed. I’ve learnt a lot about what good team collaboration, collaboration, and communication looks like, and I’m really thankful to my team for that. I also devolved my brainstorming process and learned a little bit about mechanical engineering principles in order to build our transporter.

On the day of the tournament, our team agreed to meet early to get in a whole bunch of extra script run-throughs and practice performances. It was exhausting doing ~8 run-throughs in a row, but it all paid off after we had a really good performance. We then had our instant improv challenge which went well as our grouped worked well together towards a solution. After all that, our hard work was rewarded with winning our category, which felt awesome, even though I was rather confident we would win.

Our team after finishing our performance. I’m the one on the far left looking flustered, as I had just been running around trying to make sure everything was in the right place so we could finish our performance on time.

For the provincial tournament, we did some brainstorming and made a list of things to fix/change that we are beginning to implement now, but I still don’t want to say what it is so we don’t break the rules. Hope you guys found this interesting, and look for the part two in a month or so!