Month: February 2020

Leave a comment Posted on Humanities

An Average Post About the Dark Ages

Hi! Welcome to the newest edition to my blog. A post about the Middle Ages! Today I will be referring to our “This Changes Everything” project. This project was all about the Middle Ages. We learned about the plague, the crusades and other parts of medieval life. My persona favourite part of this project was when we created our own character for our “medieval life simulation” during this, we created our own character based on the role in society we were given. Is as a monk of the church, this meant, I could read and write but I had almost the same rights as a serf (the lowest point of society at the time). Anyway I’ll mention that all later. So, into the post!

 

Milestone 1: Before I start to talk about this milestone I think that this project needs some more explanation. When this project was started, we were told that we needed to read a book. This book, being, “The Book of the Lion”. This is a book based around the crusades that occurred in the Middle Ages. The book was historical fiction depicting the life of a man that was nearly executed but instead used as a crusader due to his physical ability. Anyway, now you know about the book so this should be less confusing. In the first milestone we were to create a document showing our strategies and plans for reading the book a steady amount per day. This was a minor milestone but it still had an effect on the way most people read the book.

Milestone 2: This was the milestone that I mentioned during the introduction. This wa my favourite milestone even though I didn’t do as good of a job as I would have liked. I enjoyed this milestone because it allowed for a lot of creativity because you create the personality, background, and feelings of your own character from the Middle Ages.

This was the letter describing my character and his life.

Milestone 3: Milestone 3 was different from the rest of the milestones in this project because it happened over the course of 3 weeks. Each week we had a different role assigned to us. Each role had a different assignment. The first week I was an “artist” and  drew a picture of something that I thought was important. The other two ones were connector and summarizer.

This was my piece of art it is the main character’s horse named Winterstar. (I’m not that good at art)

Milestone 4: In this milestone we were partnered up with a random classmate and worked on researching change and continuity in the Middle Ages. I was paired up with Amy Sheardown (check out her blog HERE) and we got to work on our research document. For our change and continuity our main emphasis were on women’s rights and education (women’s rights=change education=continuity).

 

Milestone 5: Present. One word. We created a presentation for our class that explained the continuity and change on the subjects that we had chosen in class. As I said in the section about milestone 4, we chose women’s and education. Everyone had great presentations and we showed what we had learned up to that point. I have a video of the presentation too! But you don’t get to see that…….

 

Curricular competency time!!

Comprehend: this curricular competency is about the strategies you use to learn, read, and just comprehend anything really. I think that I used a lot of strategies that I probably haven’t even noticed because I read a lot and have for a long time, but a strategy that I know I used were to summarize each chapter in a note at the end to help myself understand it better if I needed to come back to that chapter.

Identifying continuity and change: this curricular competency is based of of your ability to make connections from what you read to your life as it is and I think that I am pretty good at this because of the time that I have spent reading and enjoying books that have a main character or plot that I can personally relate to.

 

Thanks for reading this far into my blog post!

Until next time!

-Keenan

Leave a comment Posted on Uncategorized

An average post about things that matter

Matter is everywhere, that means that everything matters, right? Well, yes, but only to an extent. Anyway, let’s get back to the blog post. This post is all about our latest project in scimatics class! This project consisted of atomic models, scientific theories, and the creation of our very own game (or matter simulator). Anyway, let’s get right into it. In this post I will be walking you through (and reflecting) on the scimatics project that goes by the name “Chemistry Coding”.

 

Milestone 1: Just as all of our scimatics projects start, we made a mind map asking questions about our topics and stating what we already know. Mine had questions about the states of matter and plasma.

(unfortunately I cannot show a picture of this because the file has corrupted)

Milestone 2: This milestone was a challenge to determine the density of 3 unnamed gemstones. Later, we found out that they were all the same gemstone…… the tools we had to identify the gemstones with were a scale, a graduated cylinder, and 3 gemstones. Our task was to identify the 3 gemstones by calculating the density of the gemstones using the tools we were given then using google to find gemstones with densities similar to that of the ones we had (None of us guessed the correct gemstone based only on density).

This is my experiment sheet (our teachers name is Mr.Gross)

Milestone 3: Milestone 3 was a detailed image of an atomic model of your choice. I chose the Rutherford model. My two atoms were hydrogen and helium. Later on, I added a fluorine atom but that wasn’t a part of this milestone.

These were my atomic models! The one on the left is helium, and the one on the right is hydrogen.

Milestone 4: this milestone was where we plan out the rest of our project. In this one, I brainstormed all of the ideas that were eventually coded into my game. One of the ideas I came up with was to make “power-ups” of sorts that make the atoms move faster or slower.

Milestone 5: milestone five was the game itself! You can play it HERE. When I was making this I tried to create as many fun components as possible. Some of these we secret buttons that add some fun things if people find them. If you play the game, try pressing the L key. I hope you enjoy my game!

 

Now, for the curricular competencies.

Questioning and predicting: This competency is about wanting to learn. I think that when I did this project I really tried to enjoy (and succeeded) learning to code and learning the scientific models and theories.

Scientific Communication: This competency is more focused on the product, that meaning that it was about showing what you have learned in a effective and productive manner. I personally think that my product shows this well and proves that the learning that went into it is there.

Reasoning and Analyzing: This competency is focused on the skills used to create your project. It is also focused on how realistic your product was, and personally, I think that I did well on making it as real as possible while keeping it simple and fun.

You can find my game here if you missed it earlier!

I hope you enjoyed reading this post!