Monthly Archives: March 2024

Imagine sailing across the world just to trade!

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Is there a way to bring you stories into real life?

Yes, there is a way! There is an app called ar MAKR. It can be a little tricky to use at times, but once you get the hang of it, your imagination can become reality!

If you want to watch my ar MAKR story, click here!

The Age of Exploration

The age of exploration was a time where the world united through global trades. Trade routes opened up, giving access to new materials and resources across the world. In this blog post, I will share my knowledge about the age of exploration, and how that lead to my AR MAKR movie about it! But first, let’s dive into some of the assignment we did leading up to that! 🌊 ⛵️

Cause and Consequence

This project was based around the causes and consequences of the age of exploration. It is very important to recognize the consequences of actions. We did some activities to help us understand causes and consequences better. One of the main cause and consequence assignments were our padlets. Pallet is a website that is used to make brainstorming boards, and idea boards. Here are my two padlets:

 

I think that making these gave me a better understanding of what motivated the Europeans to explore. There were three main motivations that caused them to explore, God, Glory, and Gold.

God, Glory, and Gold.

There were three main motivations that caused them to explore, God, Glory, and Gold.

At the time, Christianity was spreading around the globe. The Europeans wanted to convert many people to worship god. When exploration started, they thought of it as an opportunity to divide and conquer. (Convert people to Christianity).

Glory is something that I still see today. A lot of the time, people do things to gain respect from people they look up to, or back then, the king. If they discovered new land they conquered it, took over, and therefore got the glory. They would get recognized by the king 👑, and they felt the power!

Gold. Yes, they did discover actual gold, but it is also referring to wealth and money. People are very greedy, and when the thought of money and wealth entered the picture, the Europeans became even more determined to explore. They seeked wealth from investment and trade. Many of the trades were
unavailable in Europe at the time.

Story mountain and draft

Like all stories, you need to map it out before hand. First things first, I started thinking of some ideas. The story needed to demonstrate our knowledge of the age of exploration, and the causes and consequences of it. I knew that I wanted to address discrimination to the indigenous people. In the story mountain, we had to have rising action, failing action, climax, and added details.

 

When we got feedback on our story mountain, we could start writing a draft for the actual story. This did not take me that long, and after a couple days, I was ready to start illustrating my story. Click there to read my story down

Once upon a time there was a man named William. William was a worker at a trading post in Canada. Day after day, William would assist the trades happening between the European and indigenous. He worked very hard, as he was trying to earn money to provide for his family back home in England. One day, William saw a European ship coming to shore. The ship seemed to have a large abundance of metals tools and weapons. William watched as one of the men approached the indigenous man. The indigenous man held furs in his arm, and motioned to trade. The European man started to laugh, and said, “haha! This is pathetic. I can’t believe I came all this way for fur!” The indigenous man seemed confused, as he did not speak English. The man continued to insult him. William felt like he should step in to stop it. It felt wrong to watch helplessly. The next morning, the European man returned to the trading post to see if there was anything else. William watched as he approached the man, and started yelling at him! William finally made up his mind, and rushed over. He said to the man, “You should be more polite! That is not nice. If you don't like what we trade here, just leave!” Immediately he regretted it. The man snarled at him, “You have the nerve to say that to me? You should think before you speak!” He charged at William, knocking him into the cold shallow water. William got up, and ran away. Over the next two days, the tension between the indigenous and Europeans grew. William hid away, not wanting o get involved. He decided that he would leave the next day. He couldn’t bare to stand there and do nothing about the situation. As he left, he was mad at himself. He couldn’t do anything about it, but it felt wrong to just give up. William kept hearing stories from the returning explorers of discrimination, and fighting. All he thought about was how he gave up. As William went on with his life, he began to realize that he should stand up for what he feels strongly about. And in the future, he will try to be the best version of himself.

I tried to bring awareness to the Europeans starting to treat the indigenous very badly. That lead to racism, and it is a very bad consequence. The actions of people back then rub off today. In my worldview, there is ongoing discrimination and violence going on in the world. All from the actions of the past.

Drawings

I used keynote to draw my characters. For a couple of them I traced people from the internet, but for most of them, I drew them myself. Here are some of my drawings:

The drawings were the most most important aspect because they brought life and colour to my story! They portrayed emotion and feelings. I think that is an important part of storytelling.

How can we use storytelling to investigate what sparked global exploration and understand its impact?

For me, reading fictional stories can help information to stick better in my mind. Storytelling is a creative, and fun way to connect with people. I showed evidence of how the Europeans started treating the indigenous badly, and that lead to them taking land, and all sorts of things from them. I also included my cause and consequences padlet to give more depth to understanding cause and consequences of the Age of exploration.

Reflection

In conclusion, I think that this project was very interesting. I learned  lot about causes and consequences of the age of exploration, and why it is important to be able to recognize that. I loved drawing my characters and using the ar MAKR app. It is always really cool to see your drawing show up in real life!

THANK YOU FOR READING!!

 

DI PART.1

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After months of planning, building, rehearsing, writing, and hard working…….

It was finally the day we had all been waiting for…. The Destination Imagination regionals tournament! We put so much hard work into creating a unique project to present at the tournament. My group was Brooklyn, Gemma, Emilia, Daniel, and Marcus. (I wanna thank them for being very fun to work with!)

Keep reading to find out what we created, and how it went.

What is Destination Imagination?

Destination Imagination is a global academic  tournament that has multiple categories and age levels. The tournament go from regionals, to provincials, to globals! The age levels range from preschool, to university levels. It teaches  teamwork, collaboration, creativity, and much more. The categories are fine arts, scientific, technical, improv, and engineering. Along with your central challenge, there is an instant challenge. The instant challenge is confidential, so I can’t say very much about it! (I also can’t say very much about what were adding to our performance because, you know, we have competition!)

 

Our challenge:

Our challenge was the fine arts challenge. We were assigned to create a peice of reimagined art. But there is a catch! The art must be kinetic, meaning it should move. The peice of kinetic art was our leaning tower of Pisa! (Our story was based around the Leaning Tower Of Pisa).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those are some photos of the performance. You can see the Leaning tower in the background.

 

Preparation:

Something that I wish we would’ve done, is taken advantage of the prep time at the very start. I feel like you say, “Oh, we have plenty of time!” But then the day is here before you know it! There was A LOT to be done! We needed a script (Memorized), costumes, props, team choice elements, we even wrote a song and had a dance! Let’s just say, there was a lot. Near the end, we met up every free time after school, and on the weekends. I think compared to some other group’s situations at the end, we were pretty caught up. It was a lot of stress, but that is all part of it!

 

What went well…

Even though there is a lot of doubt and nerves going into it, we actually performed very well! Some things that I thought went very well was our teamwork and team spirit! We were kind to each other, and accepted each others ideas. Next was the comedy 😂 We had some really funny scenes, and the room was filled with laughter. Another thing was our costumes and our props. We had creative costumes that really added to the characters.

What we can improve on for provincials

Something that didn’t work very well was our moving peice. I dont want to give away the solution, but we are going to touch it up to ensure that it works well for provincials! We could also touch up our props so they look neater.

What I learned, and how I contributed

I learned how to work with lots of new ideas. I also learned that sometimes things dont go as planned, but they seem to work out fine in the end. Along with that was stress management. I think DI has been teaching me that stress is a good thing when it comes to group work, because it helps you to perform your best! (Not too much stress though 😂 )

I think that I contributed quite a bit to the team morale, adding positivity when things were bumpy. I also am artistic and creative, so I think that shows up in the project. Each team member has unique skills, that help us work well together!

Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for updates! Oh, and by the way, We got second place 🥈!!!

Wish us luck in provincials!!

How can you share knowledge of atoms in a fun way?

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How can we communicate our knowledge of atoms in a fun + creative way?

In this last science project, we made a video game! Well, there was lots more to learn before the making of it. Keep reading!

MATTER TRANSFORMERS

Making observations

We did a couple of assignments to practice making observations. We did an activity called black box. Basically, there was a little black box that we had to try to recreate with cotton balls, marbles, and sand. We recreated it using our senses like hearing, and touch. Another assignment we did was a lab. We had corn starch, baking soda, salt, sugar, and a mystery powder. We added water, vinegar, iodine, and fire to each, and observed what was happening.

   This is what the observation sheet looked like. (Don’t mind the messy writing 😂). I felt like this lab was really fun because we could experiment with different chemical and physical properties.

 

VIDEO GAME!

The final project was a video game! We used an app called scratch .

It is a website where you use coding to create your own games. It sounds easy, but let’s just say, the app is pretty tricky until you get the hang of it. I am not the best at coding, but i’m sure it is different for everyone.

The first step of the making of our game was to create a proposal. In mine, I included the goal of the game, how I showed my knowledge of atoms, and how to play. I did end up changing the type of game because I thought of a better idea.

I called my video game Matter Transformers. The goal of the game was to go from a solid, to a liquid, to a gas. The characters I used were and ice cube 🧊, a water droplet 💧, and water vapour 💨. In order to transform, you needed to chase around the sun ☀️ , and catch it 100 times. Once you caught it 100 times, the background changed from the arctic to underwater. Along with that, the character changes from ice to water. Once that happens, you have to get to 200 points (a.k.a water vapour. The background is the cloudy sky). In order to finish the game, you need to reach 300 points! Using the arrow controls, you chase the sun to 300 points.

I will put the link to my game right here: MATTER TRANSFORMERS

 

How can we communicate our knowledge of atoms in a fun + creative way?

I think I did a good job of communicating my knowledge of atoms in a fun and creative way because I made a video game! My video game was catchy, it had fun characters, and I feel like it was pretty fun in general. Sometimes science isn’t seen as fun, but in this project I think I turned it into a fun way to showcase my knowledge of atoms and matter. There our many ways to show knowledge, and present, but this was one of the most unique ways so far!

Overall, I enjoyed this project. I learned many new skills in the process of creating my video game. I also had lots of fun playing my own game!