We recently started destination imagination (D.I). Our group name Cataclysmic Catapults.
We did many things well, some of the best parts of our overall soloution I would say, the story and the background. The story was clear and easy to follow while also being creative. We also had art as one of our team choice elements and used our skills for the background of our performance.
Me and Monica worked on the background and the team choice elements while Nate and Adam worked on the machine and Ronan and Callum did the script. We split the work evenly among the group to ensure all the work got done in time and that we all had a role to play.
There were many things that we needed to improve on, first of all we need to improve on how our machine launches, it was fairly unsuccessful only launching a couple of centimetres when we predicted it would go almost a few feet. The machine also was to big and therefore none of the points counted towards our final score.
I learned a lot from this experience that I could benefit from when we present in the provincials. I learned a lot about how to system works and how I will have to nagavigte from room to room. I also learned that teamwork is extremely important and that we needed to communicate more because we split up the work.
Overall we scored 4th place which was disappointingbut it gave us a chance to learn what we needed to improve on. Hopefully in the provincials we’ll do better and be able to impress the judges.
There are 2 projects that I am so proud of this year. My Alberta book and my Avatar video. The reason I’m proud of these projects is because even when I had difficulties I was able to create a product that I was proud of.
Alberta Book
This project I finished very efficiently and didn’t procrastinate so I was able to get a lot of time for editing. This is a habit that I strive to have because I procrastinate a lot. This project made me see how much easier and less stressful it is to complete your work over a long period of time instead of doing all the work right before this due.
Avatar video
This video needed a lot of new skills that I had never used. I had to find someone to interview and I had to make a detailed video which I had never done before. Even though I had many struggles I was able to make a video that I was super proud of and got to show at the exhibition.
What I am least proud of this year?
I would say I’m least proud of my frankenstuffie project because I didn’t execute my story or video very well in my opinion. I struggled a lot because I had to write a story and I struggle with writing. So I had to spend a lot of time trying to make a detailed story and then on top of that make a video. Even though I struggled with the story I think that my trailer actually turned out good.
I also wish that I had done something more exciting for the spring exhibition, I made a infographic even though I had the opportunity to make anything I wanted to. I wish I had made a model or done some form of art.
What is the most interesting thing I learned this year?
I learned how to interview people for information to make documentaries. I find this skill very useful for the future and interesting.
What skills do you feel you most improved on?
I feel that my communication skills have significantly improved since last year and over the last term. I am now able to communicate with groups to plan and achieve projects. I also feel as if I have gotten better at giving my ideas to groups and always find a way to help,
What skills do I want to develop?
I want to learn how to ask for help when I need it. I struggle to communicate with my teachers when I don’t understand something or need help with assignments. I think that this skill is an extremely important skill that I will need for the rest of my life because you will never always understand something on the first try. So knowing when and how to ask for help is a skill that I strive to get. To do this I will start by emailing my teachers when I need help and progress from that till I’m confident enough to ask question by raising my hand in class.
I also want to become better at writing. Over the last couple projects I have really struggled with expressing my ideas in words. Even though I have made significant strides in my ability to write I still really struggle with it and I hope that over the next few years of PLP I am able to learn how to write long and detailed paragraphs with ease. I need to expand my vocabulary and write more advanced paragraphs/posts. To achieve this goal I am going to read for 30 minutes a day and keep a journal where I write about anything. This will help me expand my vocabulary, my spelling and my overall writing skills.
What did I most enjoy about this year?
My favourite part of this year was either sewing the frankenstuffies or winter exhibition.
My frankenstuffie
The winter exhibition
The reason I enjoyed the winter exhibition is because we got a lot of control over what we did. We got to design most of the rooms in the exhibition and we got lots of control. I also liked the theme Avatar because throughout all the rooms if felt very consistent.
Why am I ready for grade 10?
I feel that 8 am ready for grade 10 because my abilities to learn have improved so much in this last year. I have made significant strides in my communication skills with my peers and I have been able to competently understand how to critique my projects.
Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”
This year I have continued to grow my skills so much especially my communication skills. I still have many goals for the rest of the year that hopefully I can accomplish. I want to be able to finish projects to my fullest on time and not get distracted in class at home. I also want to write down my ideas and be able to edit my work to a point were I can be proud of what I hand in.
I need to work on my time management skills because I struggle with getting work done on time. I wait till the last minute to get stuff done and I always end up rushing to get my project done. To work on this I want to make a schedule of what I should work on each day to finish my projects on time. This will mean I have a smaller work load each day instead of giving myself one day to finish all my work. Hopefully this will help me make better quality work and have less stress about future assignments.
Here’s and example of what a schedule would look like for a blog post.
I have always struggled with writing, spelling and grammar. Over time I have slowly become better and PLP has definitely helped me progress even farther. If you read over my old blog posts you can definitely see the progress in my writing skills. If you compare this Mpol to my last Mpol, my writing has significantly improved. I now have better grammar skills and have become less repetitive in my blog and essay writing. I have gotten better at writing paragraphs that flow and are easier to read. I mainly need to expand my vocabulary and write more advanced paragraphs/posts. I’ll practice this by writing in a journal everyday to practice my writing skills, by writing everyday it’ll become easier and more natural to write for school. I will also get my parents to edit over my writing to find any grammar or spelling mistakes that I make. This will ensure that I can express my knowledge through my writing because almost every job requires writing.
We have done many fun projects this year but some of my favourites were the First Film in Maker, The Power Of Geography in Humanities and Life as we Know It in Science. These are projects that I feel like I have done exceptional at and I enjoyed showing my results to my teachers and peers.
First Film (interview)- I felt I did very well in this project because I had lots of difficulties that I was able to overcome and even when I didn’t fully know what I was doing I was able to get work done and create a video I was proud of. I wish I had left more time for the editing and B-roll because I needed to make the interview/video more entertaining to watch. This all goes down to my time management skills that I need to work on.
Power of geography- I felt that I created a solid book and I was able to clearly understand how geography has effected our daily lives. I also was very proud of how I did on the graphic design of my book, it was very neat and could easily be read. I also didn’t leave the book to the last minute as I do with lots of my projects. I did a lot of work over a couple days and then I spent lots of the extra time that I had to perfect my writing and design.
Life as we know it- I really enjoyed this project because I got to do lots of design and art instead of writing, plus we didn’t have to do a blog post on it. For the first keystone we had to create a comic that represented different kinds of asexual reproduction. The comics I drew were very neat and understandable. I was very proud of the comics because I am definitel not the best at drawing but I feel like I was able to create some nice art which is a skill I would like to get better at. I also feel like I was able to comprehend the information that was given to me in an extending way.
There are a set if skills in school that we are always trying to improve at. I wrote about all the skills that I feel I have improved on since last year.
Communication and Collaboration – This year I feel that I have done much better at communication. I am now able to share ideas and help my group in group projects using my voice. Im not exactly sure why I got so much better at speaking but I definitely still need to work on it so hopefully this year Ill be able to grow on my progress. This also fits in with the collaboration competency. To collaborate you also have to be able to communicate with the people around you. So as I grow with my communication I grow with my collaboration.
Critical Thinking and reflecting- I feel that I have improved on my reflecting skills. I am now able to go back on a project and think about what I learned and how I could grow from it. Instead of accepting failure and moving on my goal is to think about how I could of done better and apply that to my next projects.
Personal awareness and responsibility- I feel that I am very aware of my own responsibilities and I’m able to complete them. I do need to work on being aware of my strengths and weakness because I struggle with projects like these where I have to be aware of what I’m good at and what I need to work on. But the more I write and talk about my strengths and weaknesses the better I become at identify them.
Creative thinking- I’m very good at coming up with creative ideas when I’m doing graphic designing and artsy stuff. But I need to work on my skill of coming up with creative ideas for projects, specifically group projects and being able to complete those ideas in the timeline given for the project.
As I work more on these skills I develop habits. These habits sometimes are good and sometimes bad. My goal is to break my bad habits (like having a fixed mindset in my writing ability) and to create good habits (like not getting down when I fail and trying to improve).
A habit I want to learn is when I come home from school I complete all the work I have to do before I play games of watch Tv. To help me spread out my task load I want to make a to do list for each bigger assignment to help me complete my work to the best of my ability but also not have a huge work load in one day. I also want to use the To Do app more so I don’t forget to do important assignments. Some good habits that I have already formed are being able to focus and get a lot of work done when I’m in a quiet environment. I’m able get lots of quality work done when I’m motivated and I’m able to block out distractions when I’m working, but for this habit to actually be useful I need to get better at giving myself time to work.
My main goal for this year is staying focused on my work and giving myself lots of time and a quiet environment to work on my projects. My plan to accomplish this is to create a playlist of calm/studying music that I can listen to when I work and to set up my desk so I can do homework there instead of sitting on my couch. Hopefully this will give me the right environment to complete my best work.
As you know through the past couple weeks we have been honing our videography skills, we have learned how to edit videos and how to use shots and angles to enhance our videos. For 2 weeks we did a skill sprint were we learnt lots of new skills like using augmented reality and stop motion.
Skill #1 Jump Cuts
Jump cuts are smooth transitions in videos that make the video more entertaining for the viewers. Lots of content creators like Zach King use these to make interesting videos.
The premise of our video was a huge giant flicking a human. We used a lose up angle to make the hand look huge compared to the human.
Skill #2 Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality combines real world and computer generated content. It’s used in many famous movies like Avatar and Back to the Future
It was near Christmas so we made spinning snow globes in AR. This skill sprint helped me learn how to make objects 3D in Ar Mark (the app we used) and how to make objects move.
Skill 3 Green Screen
Green screens are used to change the setting of a video or clip. This skill is used from simple school projects to multi-million dollar movies.
In my video me and my partner were lost walking through a frozen forest.
This project taught me how to use green screen effects in Capcut and IMovie, this is useful if I ever need to change the background of a photo of video.
Skill 4 Memoji
This project we used Memojis to make a story. My story was about a shark who woke up thinking it was a school day but it was actually the weekend.
This sprint helped me learn how to send images and Memojis to Ar Makr.
Skill 5 Stop Motion
This was the biggest project of them all. We had to find a viral video (My group choose the snowball scene from Harry Potter) and make a stop motion of it. Lots of people used lego but my group chose to use paper cutouts.
I enjoyed finding out about lots of cool features in the stop motion app we used and I would definitely try stop motion again.
Thanks for reading my blog and I hop you have a great day.
Hi and welcome to my blog. We recently had our winter exhibition. The topic of the exhibition was Avatar and the grade 8’s, 9’s and 10’s all made projects relating back to the themes of Avatar.
The Grade 8’s – They presented their pandora boxes
The Grade 9’s – We presented our interview videos
The Grade 10’s – They presented their monuments
The driving question of the project was…
“What does James Cameron’s fantasy world of Avatar reveal about society today?”
The movie Avatar was centred around themes like imperialism, racism, militarism, corporate greed and religion. In our society we struggle with lots of these problems, even in our own community. Lots of big businesses make decisions that allow them to make more money without taking social responsibility, like in Avatar the RDA corporation was mining unobtanium (a fictional ore, that was worth millions of dollars) but instead of respecting the environment and Nav’i while mining it they used there military force to destroy the nature on Pandora and take the unobtanium with force. It also showed how the humans treated the Nav’i differently because they lived and look different to the humans. In the movie the Nav’i were called blue monkeys and savages.This nods to real life occurrences like how in the past Canada had residential schools and how some people are treated differently based on there culture.
In my video I wanted to talk about how systemic racism effects peoples daily lives and jobs and how we can help raise awareness about racism. So I contacted the B.C. Black History Awareness Association and I was able to get an interview with Silvia Mangue.
She talked about lots of interesting topics like D’Arcy island.`
D’Arcy Island: D’Arcy island was a leper colony from 1891 to 1924. The lepers were put into isolation, forgotten and left there to die. Every 3 months a supply ship wold come with food and coffins. The people left on D’Arcy island received no medical care even though the early stages of leper are easily treated and not highly contagious. In 1906, the feds passed the “Leprosy Act” and turned the leper colony into a medical facility.
The Exhibition
Our group had one of the biggest rooms to decorate and transform, the topic of our room is the human room. In this room we described how the humans lives were compared to the Nav’i in Avatar. We covered the room in bed sheets and we had a game station (for entertainment for the guests). In this game station we played a game where you had to try to bounce a ball into different holes. If you were successful you got a Carmel, the Nav’i room which was next to ours had the same game but more difficult to represent how life was harder for the Nav’i people compared to the humans lives.
Here’s a picture of me and my friend giving our cupcakes at the exhibition.
Here’s an website you can visit to learn more about the history of D’Arcy island.
We just learned how to become professional videographers and how to understand or goals and dreams. During this project we made 3 videos, one explain what inspires up, one showing someone completing a goal and the last one we made a tutorial video on how to stay on track to complete your goals.
Video #1 (What Inspires me?)
This video we focused on thinking like a movie maker. We focused on using filters, titles and stickers to tell a visual story and adding musical soundtracks to enhance mood.
Video #2 (Silent Video)
In this video we focused on using different angles to describe the scene and plot of our video. Some angles we used were…
Worm’s eye- A view from a very low angle, a view of an object from below. This angle can be used to make an object seem tall and strong.
Bird’s Eye- A bird’s eye view is an high elevated angle creating a perspective as if the viewer were a bird in flight looking down. This can be used to show a location in a story/movie.
Close Up- A photograph or video taken at a close range. This can be used to create a detailed view of an object or scene.
We created a video about a boy who wants to become amazing at karate, so he joins a class and practices every week until he is a black belt. This shows how you can complete your goals if you put in practice and work, no matter how difficult it seems at the time.
Video #3 (Tutorial Video)
In this video we created a tutorial about how to stay on track to complete you homework goals (completing homework on time). In this video we talk about using different methods like goal ladders, rewards and schedules to help motivate you to complete your homework.
In this project we also wrote a goal tracker. This goal tracker was made to help us plan our future and current goals. I’m most proud of my goal ladder.
My goal was to Get a Job and I split this into 10 easier steps.
Find places to apply to in or around the cove by Nov. 10th.
Make sure I can work around my schedule.
Make a resume by Nov. 13th.
Send emails/applications to apply by Nov. 18th.
Complete and submit 4 applications.
Find advice on interviewing.
Practice interviewing with family.
Plan interview with companies.
Go to interviews.
Hopefully, get a job.
I wanted to accomplish this goal by October, next year so I set time dates to make sure I accomplished it by next year.
I really enjoyed collaborating with other people to make these videos and I got to learn a lot about myself through these assignments. I hope you enjoyed reading this and have a great day!!! 😁☺️
Hiii!!!!! We just finished our grade 8 summer exhibition. In this exhibition we didn’t focus on a specific project to show we tried to show our progress of learning. There were 3 different rooms for grade 8. The first room showed the process of learning, going from launch to critique and reflection. The second room showed learning out of the classroom like Loon Lake. And the last room (which was my room) was the technology room where we talked about the importance of apps and technology for our learning.
My presentation
Me and Jessie worked together on our section of the exhibition. In our room we had about 20 people and each person or pair had to show some part of there learning. Me and Jessie talked about our project called construing creative communication. In this project we learned how to construct pictures and photos to show emotion, perspective and worldview. We made out presentation interesting and interactive by adding buttons about different things we learned so the audience could choose what they wanted to hear about.
How we use technology to advance our learning
The main reason that I think technology helps our learning is because we have access to lots of useful tools like google, pages, keynote and lots of other useful apps. Also something that the Ipad has that really helps me is autocorrect because I usually have a lot of trouble with spelling and autocorrect helps a lot.
Collaboration and Communication
These are 2 of the main competencies that I wanted to work on this year and this project really helped me with both. We had to communicate with our groups to figure ideas and plans to set up our room and make it a fun interactive experience for our audience, we also had to collaborate with our groups a lot get our whole room set up especially because we had the biggest room to decorate.
What I learned from this experience
The exhibition was very fun and it was a great experience. I got to collaborate with a group to complete a big goal which I usually am bad at so it was good practice and I got to share some of my learning with my parents. I also learned how to be interactive with an audience because I made my keynote interactive to keep an audiences attention.
You can visit Jessie’s blog here to see her perspective on the exhibition.
It’s finally the end of my first year in grade 8 and I have learned so much over this year. I have definitely improved and enjoy this year so much and I’m excited to tell you about what I have learned
“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”
Writing
I have learned a lot about how to improve my writing, at the beginning of the year I had so much trouble writing and spelling but over this year I have definitely improved. I always had very good ideas but I never could figure out how to put them down on paper. A project that really helped me improve my writing was the renaissance project. For this project we had to make a triptych about the renaissance but we also had to write a paragraph. The paragraph we wrote had to be about what we thought was the most significant invention or piece of art. I choose to write about the printing press. The reason I say this project helped me with my writing is because we learned about how to construct complex sentences and paragraphs.
Core competencies
Communication: Communication was something that I I have struggled with a lot this year. I’ve never really been good at communicating but there were definitely some projects that really helped me get to know my classmates better with in the end helped me communicate. One of these things was Loon Lake. At Loon Lake we got to do lots of activities to help get to knwo our classmates better which was fun.
Collaborating: Over the year we have done lots of projects were we had to work with groups to meet an end goal. DI was definitely won of the biggest collaboration projects we did. We had to communicate with our team constantly to come up with its creative solutions and figure out how we were going to present our solution.
Creative thinking: I have definitely improved on my creative thinking over the course of grade 8. I am now able to come up with creative ideas to improve my projects unlike I was at the start of the year.
Critical and reflective thinking: I am definitely improving on being able to reflect on my learning and use feedback to make my work better. This is one of the main things PLP helps me learn.
Favourite projects
I had 3 favourite projects this year. The first one was definitely medium is the message. the reason I choose this as my favourite project is because one day I want to start my own business, and I also want to go into the field or design/advertisement. So being able to pratice interviewing a client and creating and advertisement was fun and useful. My second favourite project was the ultimate design challenge in scimatics, I really enjoyed this project because it involved designing and as I said before I want to work in the design/advertisement field so this was definitely a project of my interest.
Why I think I’m ready for grade 9
I think Im ready for Grade 9 because Ive made so much progress with my learning this year and Im excited to learn even more next year.
Goals for Grade 9
My main goal for grade 9 is to get better at my communication and collaboration, Ive definitely made progress on communication this year is I hope I can make as much progress in grade 9. Another goal that I have for grade 9 is to get better at my writing/spelling, over time I’ll definitely get better but I just hope that next year I can practice by writing lots of paragraphs.
Thanks for reading about my reflection and I hope you have a great day!
A couple months ago I wrote a post about something called DI (Designation Imagination). We have finally finished this project and presented it at the DI convention last weekend. We were put into groups of 6 or 7 so you can check out one of my teammates blogs here, to see there take on the experience.
Recap
As written in my other DI blog post our challenge was to overcome 3 different hazards (that we built ourselves) with 2 devices we built. One of the devices could use electric and the other one couldn’t. We also had to create a story to go along with our devices that was creative and worked along our robots completing the hazards.
Main challenge:
Our main challenge definitely did not go as well as I would have wanted but we still worked well as a team. Out of the 3 hazards we only were able to overcome 1 (the tunnel) but we still had a good story plot and we also showed out team choice elements well. You can watch a videos of our performance here.
For the team choice elements we choose to do art and the costumes. To show how our everyone on our team enjoys doing art we all drew/painted on the ramp we created to show our artistic abilities. For the costumes (which I made) I bought 4 white shirts and soaked them in tee water to give them a dirty colour then I put rips and blood to make the shirts look more zombie like.
Hazards
There were 3 different hazards we built a tunnel, a ramp and uneven terrain, I built the tunnel and the ramp. For the tunnel I made a wooden frame, like a table and then I staple a piece of tarp over it. For the ramp I also made a smaller wooden frame the I took 3 pieces of cardboard 1 for the top two for the ramp, then I duct taped the edges so it was foldable. Lastly for the even terrain we hade made a wood frame and put a piece of tarp under it, to make a kind of bag. Then we filled this bag with gravel.
Story
Our story was basically about a group of kids who our doing an online class on zoom. In this class they were leaning how to make a stuffy into a friend/pet. But the zoom call glitches and the kids accidentally but sea salt instead of regular salt which turns the stuffys into monsters. The kids decided that to lure the monsters away there going to build robots that the monsters will get distracted by. After this doesn’t work Kennan (on of the kids) runs super fast so the monsters chase him and not the others. in the end the kids learn that if they put maple leaves on the stuffys heads they turn back into zombies. The story went fairly well, it was something we did better in the performance. The judges said we had good creativity with our story but we could have made it clearer to understand.
What I learned
During this huge DI project I learned a lot about how to work as a team and how to communicate better. Im definitely not the best t communication and Ive had trouble with it in the past but during this project I was able to talk and share lots of good ideas to help my team progress. In the end Im very proud of how our team came together and was able to show what we did. Ive also learned that next time we do DI our team should definitely meet up more and start building way earlier.
Thanks for reading about my DI experience, hope you have a great day or evening :D.
Hi! This blog post is about a project we’ve been working on for a couple of months called DI. DI stands for a program called Destination Imagination. In Destination Imagination we get put into a group of 6 or 7 students and given a challenge we’re we have to find a solution and present it.
Our challenge
In this year of DI I got assigned to the technical challenge. In this challenge your goal is to build 2 robots (one using electricity and one using a different form of power) to overcome 3 hazards that you design and build. You also have to create and present a story about why the robots you built are going over these hazards and present the story during the presentation.
Instant challenges
The other section of DI is the instant challenges. An instant challenge is a random challenge (that you don’t know beforehand) that you usually have 2-3 minutes to complete the challenge that they give you. The reason they put this in DI is to see you how well you work as a team to come up with a solution and how creative your ideas are.
Planning skills
DI takes a lot of work so Ive learned a lot about planning skills. Like for example making timelines to know when you want done by a certain date, to stay on schedule. Especially when this is such a big project in a little amount of time. Another good skill is being able to spread out the roles so all the work isn’t down to one person while everyone else is doing nothing.
What I enjoy about DI
I really enjoy that DI has given us the opportunity to strength our teamwork and building skills. Most projects in school are just written assignments where you aren’t in control. I like how DI is a very hands on project and you get to control your solution. You can make anything you want to solve the problem.
