Did you ever think you would be spray painting cardboard glued together for a school project? I didn’t, but it happened anyways, here is that story.

It all started with a revolution. Literally. This exhibition we were putting on was not going to be easy, so we needed to learn a lot in both maker and humanities, and it started in humanities.

We began learning about revolutions and how ideas drive change (driving question):

We learnt about Crane Briton’s theory of a revolution and its four stages:

I honestly found this stuff really cool, how Crane had found a pattern in all of the chaos of a revolution, he even wrote a book about it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Revolution#:~:text=The%20Anatomy%20of%20Revolution%20is,French%2C%20and%20the%20Russian%20revolutions.

To show what we learned about the working of a revolution, we created a diagram to show all of the different stages of a revolution, here is the one I made:

I made it in the style of a recipe, and it is all hand drawn (except the text), and I am really happy with how it turned out. After that we had to chose a revolution to focus on, we were able to pick our top three, then the teachers would put us into a group; I ended up in the French Revolution, which I was happy about.

After we had done a lot of research on our revolution, we were tasked with creating an infographic to show to others to teach them about our revolution.e this went through multiple iteration as we refined, redesigned, and had our projects seen through peer’s eyes. I hope you learn something from this infographic, like I did from making it.

Version 1

  Version 2

It goes over the stages of the revolution, and also a brief timeline.

After this, we started a novel study on the book animal farm:

https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Animal_Farm/yDQJ6y2LSX8C?hl=en

…which is an allegory for the Russian revolution, and we held many book chats talking about the book and I think we learnt a lot from it, I enjoyed most of the book as a book as well.

Then we learnt about metaphors; our final medium for showing our learning. We did some basic learning about what they meant and how to use them, and then we watched some videos and brainstormed about Rube Goldberg machines. I used to watch a lot of videos about similar contraptions, but before we started creating one for our winter exhibition, I had no idea how hard it was. 

In the first week of building, we were all assigned roles, I was the engineer, and it was my job to make sure that everybody machines worked with well… physics. You wouldn’t have believed how often they didn’t. I was mainly helping others with their section for that week.

The next week, I had to work on my part, as it was the first section of the machine, and needed to be complicated as soon as possible, so I got to work, but just like with our boxes from last year’s winter exhibition, I learnt that “building” isn’t as simple as that. You can envision something all you like, but you can’t plan for sitting in corners for hours at a time, with 49 other kids talking, just trying to get these two pieces of cardboard together, but one broke, and the other looks weird, so you cut some new ones, but they are too big, so you trim them, but then you are out of hot glue, and when you find more and finish the job it looks awful, so you borrow the spray paint, and go outside and paint it, it dries, and you add it to your machine… and it doesn’t work. That’s what it feels like.

Once some things were starting to work, we had to try and connect them, except we didn’t have access to the space where it was going to be which made things difficult, and then we found out that we also had to make a documentary. Yay?

Trying to sort everything out with the machine, and making a documentary made things a lot harder, especially as I was the editor of the video. My section of the machine was a metaphor for the meeting of the estates-general, where all of the three estates of France (clergy, nobility, and the commoners) had a meeting about how to get France out of debt.

Once my group members had sent me all of the clips and the storyboard (which I admit I didn’t follow very well) though our group chat, and we had watched some short documentaries in class and learnt about them, I started putting them all together, while trying to balance everything else too, which was difficult, but this is what I came up with:

It isn’t my finest work for sure, but I think it came out alright.

Then after we were done building everything, making everything, setting up, getting food, and decorating our area (which took a long time), we were (kinda) ready for the exhibition!

The exhibition didn’t go to well unfortunately, things fell and group members didn’t come back from breaks and morale and energy were low. But like all things I learnt from it. I have a petter idea of preparation, and I have some Ideas for going into the next exhibition at the end of the year. But I am still proud of what we did, and what we made.

But back to the driving question of how do ideas drive change? I thought about this for a while and eventually came to my conclusion of: ideas drive change because an idea can be many things, but overall I think it is an opinion on a situation, and those opinions and thoughts are what people sometimes want things to be, and then they take action to try and make those things real.

Thanks for reading.

Hello everyone, and welcome again, to an exploration through filmmaking!

We kickstarted our learning by watching some mentor texts, then learning about what makes a good film including a lot of story structure stuff and the parts of a thriller. Then, we brainstormed on how to make a good thriller

After that, we had to create a plan and a storyboard, here is what part of our storyboard looked like:

After that we had to actually create the thing we had planned, and let me tell you, that was not easy. At all. But after a lot of filming, swordplay lessons, and some good bloopers, here was our final product:

I hope that you enjoyed learning how we made this, and that you tune in again!

Is it fun getting milk crates thrown at your face? I wouldn’t know, unless…

Hello all, it’s been since I’ve posted, but here we go!

So recently my grade 9 class took a trip to loon lake, which came as a surprise so soon after the Alberta field school, but we were told that it was a learning opportunity and they really wanted us to go, but we were all quite hesitant going into the week.

However we were pleasantly surprised when we actually had fun! Some of my favourite things that we did were the low ropes course, trust falls, and box stacking.

The low ropes course was pretty easy, but instead of being strapped in, the things catching you if you fell were your classmates, which really made me feel like part of a team, and beating the time to get all of our members across a rope swing was also really fun.

The trust falls started small with us just swaying and being pushed into position, to falling all the way over and being caught, to then falling of a chair. On a table. Yeah, you heard me right, it was crazy, and I was happy that I fell when I said I would unlike some others.

The box stacking was perhaps my favourite thing on the trip, because it was really fun mainly. We had a large supple of milk crates, and one person strapped who would be climbing them, and then all of us could help. Kaia was the one climbing, Nate was throwing boxes up, and I and a few others were holding the tower together, and dodging the missed crates as they came back down, we also beat the old record of 17, by getting 18 boxes stacked.

We also learnt a lot about how humans work, and emotional intelligence along with many other things, but our driving question was how do the choices we make set our future path? We learned a lot about time management and other things along those lines to help us with those choices to ultimately lead a better life. Overall, it was really fun. And tiring.

Hi everyone, I recently went into my dad’s office for take your kid to work day, and I learned about how the company works, and what they do, if you want know that too, click here:

It was really interesting seeing how the company worked, and I talked to some of the engineers about how they got into engineering, and what they do at the company because I am interested in engineering.

We had to make a video about our experience there too, here was mine:

The reason I didn’t focus on my dad is all the work he does can’t really be shared online.

Thanks for reading.

Why did I end up in a trench with my iPad trying to record a 14 year guy running in a forest? Well…

Hello everyone, I wasn’t expecting to be doing this again, but it was a short project about film! Again! And again! And again. And again…

But what did we do this time, what did we learn? We were learning about how to re-create a film, how to plan efficiently, and how to accept work of feedback.

Well, we had to run a remake, but what does this mean? We had to re-create an original text, this video:

But how did we make this? We began by scouting our location (we were with a group) we decided where our shots would be then made a storyboard:

Then we filmed, edited, and did some sound design which took a while to create our final product. But the we watched everybody video in class and gave feedback, then we remade our remake. Our feedback was mainly about sound and some other small errors so that was improved. Here was the second iteration:

Hope you liked it. I learnt a lot from this project even though in was so short, but it was fun as well.

Thanks for reading!

One day, something interesting happened. That interesting thing was a school project. I will tell you about it. All you need to do is read, what are you waiting for?

Hello everyone, I’m here with one of the first blog posts in a while, because it was summer! But it isn’t now. Boo.

Welcome back, thanks for reading, and without further ado, my blog post!

So, starting this year off in typical PLP fashion, we had maybe two weeks of school before we were no longer at it, and by that I mean another field school! This one was really fun, and also exhausting, because we went to the Rocky Mountains! Now you may be wondering a few things:

• A) which Rocky Mountains?
• B) what did you do?
• C) what did you learn?

Well curious reader, what amazing questions, you have asked them so well, that I have no choice but to answer them, so I indeed shall.

• A) we went to the Canadian Rocky Mountains. The ones below. They were awesome.

B) we created a Multi-Touch book to show what we learned about the places that we went, and our driving question: “how does the geography of the west shape who we are?” It also shows off the videos that we created for maker, if you want to learn more about that, click the button above. I hope you like the book!

(copy) How has the Geography of the West shaped who we are

Click to read this book, made with Book Creator

read.bookcreator.com

Cool, hope you enjoyed having a look at what we did during the project.

C) what did we learn?

We learnt about how the Rocky’s were formed, and loads about snow management on the highways and loads of other facts. But facts only get you so far, what skills did we learn, what tools that we can use again for other projects? Well, we learned how to gather data and present it in a meaningful way, how to adapt when traveling, and how to create a showcase of what we learned. We also learned many things while on the trip, and of course we learnt about how the geography of the west shape3s us. The CPR railway connected Canada and brought it together by transporting ideas, things, and people all over what is Canada today.

Thanks for reading!

Have you ever wondered what plutonium tastes like? I know I have, but unfortunately, we don’t get to play with plutonium until Monday, so why not read what I did at school instead.

Hello everyone! I’m back with one of the first blog posts for a while, cause summer exists. Starting off this year, we jumped right into the action with our field study to alberta!

That was really fun and I enjoyed it but, wow, it was exhausting. The sights were amazing, everything was really, but unfortunately we never really got any time to explore because… well, y’a know, school trip and stuff. So instead of sleeping in, then doing like one or two things, then going to sleep, we were waking up at 7 latest, then driving at least 5 hours a day, and visiting 3 or more places, then getting to back to our hostels at 11, then trying to get to sleep.

and of course we had to do work too. If you want to see what I did in humanities, click here:

https://www.blog44.ca/jamesst/?p=269&preview=true

But maker, what did we do in maker? I don’t know, I wasn’t paying attention… kidding of course, we learnt about how to ask questions, analyze data, tell a story, and create interesting videos.

Our driving question was “how might I use the moving image to tell a story?”

First, we learnt about what makes a good story, how to create a hook, story structure, filming on location, and how do a meaningful interview. After we learnt of that stuff that was really useful in making our videos, we had to plan them. Why do we have to plan things, create a solid plan in order to make a good meaningful video, when we could wing it and make something horrible! So annoying.

So after all the planning, I suppose it was fair that we had to film the videos as well. The first video I worked on was our home video, “what inspires me?” We had to create a 1-2 minute video about whew do what we do, everyday, what we enjoy away from school that keeps us going. Then of course we had to edit the video. Ug. I wanted to use daVinci resolve, but I haven’t learnt it yet, so I was boring and used iMovie, so, here was my video!

Our next video to complete was a group project. A comedic silent video in the three valley gap heritage ghost town. It was fun working with my group but also kinda’ hard. It was fun but hard for everyone to co-ordinate at sometimes, but overall it went well and I am happy with how the video turned out:

Next was the hardest one, the investigative video. Not only did we have to think on purpose, outrageous, but we also had to talk to real humans! We’re PLP kids, we don’t do that, and even worse, real random humans. I mean that took it to a whole other level! we had to deal with, bum, bum, bummmmm! Social anxiety. Seriously, talking to people was really hard, just working up to it took up to half an hour at some locations. I only got two interviews but they were still really useful. So after all of that and some editing, here was my video!

We also did a TikTok style video, which my friend edited and I helped film.

So yeah, I learnt a lot in this project, and I did really enjoy it too. I hope you enjoyed reading!

Edit: The plutonium was tasty 🙂

*exhales. “So what do I have to do, one last time.” “Just relax and answer the questions, tell us about yourself.” “Ok… yeah, ok.” *inhales.

“My name is James Streeter and I’m a 8th grade PLP student at Seycove secondary. This year, it’s been kinda crazy. In grade 7, the whole idea of high school was crazy. I knew I was in for a tough year when we had to do summer learning, before we even really knew our teachers; having to do a revision for a drawing to capitalize a word, on a drawing, made me realize what I had signed up for when I joined PLP.”

”So, why did I join PLP? Other than some clear benefits like the formats of the projects, and getting to work with iPads, the iPad I’m using to write this, I just wanted something different, something that just wasn’t main steam. Now that I’m going into 9th grade, I feel like made the right choice.”

“So then we went into our first projects. If you want to see more about those you can go to my mPOL blog post here:”

“Then after all that I went to semester two. Dun dun dunnnnnnnnn! At this point, I had learned a lot already, and the quality of my projects was definitely improving. Then we got into new projects. Those were very hard. I feel like I preformed well, but it was hard. In the first semester most of my work looked good, and you could tell I put effort into it, but it was still a little sloppy. This semester, I feel like this has been fixed. I am happy with with the quality of my work.”

“As for said projects, we’ve done quite a few now including… drumroll please” pata-pata-pata-pata-patoom!

“Ok, first, a humanities project, the Renaissance. For that project, we had to create a triptych depicting inventions through the ages. Here was the final product:”

If you want to learn more, click here:

“From this I learned about the way things have adapted over the years, and how things today are different from older times. Those same new inventions from Europe and Asia change how we see the world, and how the world is today.”

“Then we had “blue-eyed brutes and other tall tales” – a project about the vikings, and early exploration. We learned about how the vikings lived, and explored, then we created a travelogue:”

and here was the project:

Then, a science project; small but mighty.

This project taught us about germs and many other microscopic things, it really made me realize how crazy the odds are that we exist. I also took away from this that we are also small but mighty. But we are also literally had a 1/8,000,000,000 that we would

be… y’know, us.  I also learned how to break down work into controllable pieces.

Here was the final product; a public heath poster:”

“Then, it was colonization. This was a fun project, but definitely one of the harder ones. We learned how the first European explorers interacted with the First Nations and how the first settlements affected life today. We also learned about trade routes, past and present, and some parts about slavery. To show what we learned, we analyzed a drawing then re-interpreted it from the other sides perspective to make sure both sides were shown:”

“Then, we created a video about colonization:”

This project taught me that many things have more factors than it first seems, and a lot of stuff in history was messed up. I also learned how to look at something from multiple points of view.

And the project:

“Then, another science project, mind over matter, all about… well… matter. We learned how different types matter work and I learned to not overdo it after spending way too long on this game! (Making it)”

And here’s the blog post:

“And this is the last one! Advertising! This was a really fun project, but probably the hardest as it included the Oregon field study. This project gave me a whole new meaning to the word “revision” and I also learned a lot of other great skills on the field study, and in this project. We interviewed a business in Oregon after learning a bit about advertising. Then after all that we created our advertisements, and revised them a bunch, here was my final version:”

And, once again, the blog post:

“That was all the projects, but we were still not done because we also had exhibition.

Ah yes, exhibition. I learned so much in such a short time fame, it was kind crazy. Here’s the post:

“Here are the main things I learned from this exhibition. First, teamwork. The extent to which everyone on my team helped and did their work is very different from some simpler thing near the start of the school year. We all worked really well together. And almost nothing was forgotten for exhibition day. The booth also just looked really good as seen in the photo below, everything was clearly on another level than winter exhibition, and winter exhibition was decent.

I also learned how good my work can be after this whole year of learning, I’m excited to see what level it’s at after next year. I am also happy to see that I took on a leadership role for this exhibition; it wasn’t the big role, the D.R.I., but it was still important, I think jumping for opportunities like that is what will get me through the rest of high school, and ready for what comes after.”

“And now you are caught up. So why do I think I’m ready to go to grade 9? Well I’ve already presented you with most of the evidence in the form of these mini project reflections, showing you the vast group of skills I’ve learned. But I will present you with a few final points. Tomorrow. It’s 9:36PM now and I have school tomorrow.”

“I’m back with the final part of this post. The project I struggled with most this semester was probably advertising, mainly because of the week without the iPad and then catchup, but also because we were expected to create really high quality work. Also having to create a lot for the exhibition in two days ways hard. 

I think I’ve had some decent habits throughout this school year, I don’t use the calendar too much, but I use Things for everything. Next year, I’d like to take more notes, it was really useful in one project when we learned to take them, and then no one ever asked us to take them again, and no student ever did.

My worst work this year was probably some early humanities stuff, the work was alright, as in my medieval keynote, but with the amount of time put in, it just wasn’t worth it.”

“So I think the way I can improve next year is being more organized, especially with my notes. This will help me be ready for everything that comes in the next year.”

”And that’s it.”

Ever feel like your school projects are too boring? ‘Course you do, everyone does, well over at Seycove inc. we’ve got the perfect solution for you! PLP, the program with amazing things that are superior to other schools. So sign up today at Seycove.ca to cement your amazing future!

That is an ad, sure it’s one that I made for a semi-fiction thing, unfortunately, there is no Seycove inc., and one made hastily for for this blog post, but it’s still an ad.

But what makes an ad, and why is it important? Is it. At all?

Yeah, it is; that’s why we did a project on it, and a rather cool one too. So I’m going to tell you about it.

So for most of these project blog posts I stick to a format y’know? But for this project it’s ‘gonna be a little different because we had our first field school!

Oregon was a little, no, a lot bonkers, if you want to see the whole thing go to this post:

But yeah, the different part is that I’ll be throwing around some Oregon references. So lets get started.

Keystone 1:

For this keystone, we learned about what advertising is, and the effect it has on us and our lives, to show what we learned, I had to answer a survey and so did my mum. I also had to write a paragraph.

Advertising Survey

Keystone 2:

For this keystone we learned about some different types of ads and some techniques advertisers use. To show that we understood, we created this analysis chart where we broke down six ads.

Persuasion in Advertising Chart

This was hard because my iPad had broken in Oregon, so I had to do this on pen and paper.

Keystone 3: After going to Oregon and interviewing our business, they told us what they wanted to see in an ad, as well as lots of other useful stuff, y’a know, I’m just going just show you:

LAUNCH Portfolio

As seen in the L.A.U.N.C.H. Portfolio, I made many versions of my ad, but in case you didn’t see, here is my final version:

Then we got to show it of at the exhibition with the rest of my group!

Ug…

I’m tired, and why is that?

SPRING EXHIBITION 2023!

Welcome to another, amazing, flabbergasting, stupendous blog post from yours truly. 

My first spring exhibition was an interesting experience. Overall, I enjoyed it, but there were certain parts that should probably be classified as torture. lets go with what I liked first.

I really enjoyed talking to people, especially those who asked my really good thought-provoking question, answering those questions and telling those who listened about our adventure in Oregon was so enjoyable, I could do that all day, and it was great practice for public speaking. Another thing I enjoyed was showcasing my work to the public; showing them the process my work went through, the thought behind it, and the learning that was required was actually quite entertaining; especially for my maze (the maze where you navigated it using a robot and a Xbox controller). I also had fun setting up the booth with my group, the way it all came together so well, and so fast, was really cool to experience. Also, setting up the mats that lined the floor was kinda surreal just ‘cause of the amount of surface area we covered.

Now for the stuff I didn’t like. I didn’t like the 12 hour school day! Like, how are we expected to function that long! If you agree join me in this song:

“Twelve hours of school to go, 

Twelve hours of school!

Wait one out,

Then pass out,

Eleven hours of school to go!

Ect…”

Then the standing; Ms. Madsen will complain if she sees this, but standing for two hours is just not fun, obviously we did it, but just no. Annoying people were present to; and that wasn’t fun. There was this one kid who just came up to my game, beat it in record time, moved some of my code they I then had to repair it, then, they closed the app with my code and walked away. Just why! Then putting away the mats was a nightmare.

Overall, I can’t say it was the best thing ever, but I learned a lot, and took many good things out of it! Thanks for reading, as always.