*This blog post only focuses on Maker competencies and milestones. Click Here to access the Humanities blog post for this project.

Happy new year everyone! This is my first blog post in a new decade and I’m very excited to say that it is about our annual Winter Exhibiton (2020 edition!). Now most blog posts, us PLP students are required to write about our competencies, and usually we have 3-4 that we are mainly assessed on. But for this one, oh boy, there were many competencies to learn about, and some were reused. 

Milestones are checkpoints where we can show and demostrate our competencies. 6 milestones for Maker: The Presentaion and 7 milestones for Humanities: The Story, gave me plenty of times to show my growth as a learner. This blog post will include complete evidence of how I grew as a learner and where I could improve as a learner for Maker.

First we were introduced to Star Wars, and why the heck should we care about it? We wrote an opinion piece, based on our acquired knowledge in that class. We touched on the Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell (the creator of the Hero’s Journey), and George Lucas (the creator of Star Wars). You can see this opinion piece in the humanties post, links are at the top and bottom of this post. 

Next came a 2 pitch forms along with the competency “Asking Hard Questions.

This required us to identify what could go wrong or right throughout this project. And let me tell you right now, a lot could’ve gone wrong. Honestly, I admit this was hard, becuase I didn’t want to admit that I could fail, but I inevitably had to accept it, and exploit my weeknesses. 

During this process we were constantly adding to our LAUNCH journal in Explain Everything, which I will once back too. We exported whatever we had added to our journal to the teachers, and feedback was given on where I could improve my plans for creating my P.A Mic. 

As we arrived in the Navigate stage in the LAUNCH process, we were required to make a mini-video, showing a step-by-step plan that identifies key stages and resources, makng changes as needed and using the appropriate tools, materials, and technologies for production. I know, its a lot of fancy words but it essentially means showing my plan for building my artifact (that was to be shown at the Winter Exhibiton; my P.A mic.) I feel I showed this well, but looking back at it, I could’ve been a bit more organized and detailed which is something I’ve wanted to work on for Destination Imagination 2020, so we’ll see what I can do! 

My mini-video did pretty well in the eyes of Ms. Maxwell and she approved my idea and plan! 

After I was approved, this is where the actual manual labor came in. Of course I created a blueprint, but ideas did change, and you’ll see that in the next parts. The only worst part, I didn’t know how it would turn out, and usually I have a set plan in mind, but I was still bouncing around with ideas. Ideas about how to build the base, with what materials? What model can I base mine off of? Small questions like that worried me. One night I had nothing to do, so I decided to sit down with some cardboard and just see where it takes me. 

I started out thinking that base was just a prototype, and I’d build a better one later, but over time I decided to take it further and use it. I had an idea to build the tube with clay, and I was about to follow through when I found a white tube in the back of my storage room. I know, not the most ideal place to find it, but once I cleaned and painted it, it was more that satisfactory and effective than the clay. I was glad I used materials in a way that minimize waste, because after the Exhibiton I would’ve just thrown away the clay, but I can still use this tube for future projects! 

This is where I created a Prototype Revison Grid, to help me when I was reflecting.

It is featured in my H-Fail Evidence video. As you can see it highlights my strengths and weaknesses, and shows me what I need to work on. 

The H-Fail Evidence video was one of my favourites to create and watch, and I feel I did a pretty good job on showing a reflection of how I hit a dead end, and how I recollected myself and found another way by reusing an idea from before! (Hint hint, the clay!;)

As you saw, I reused my clay idea, and it worked out pretty well. 

This all goes into something called my LAUNCH Portfolio. I mentioned this earlier, but this was introduced to this last year, and we used it in keynote. We add everything that happens log the projects according to the categories. 

L- Look, Listen Learn

A- Ask a ton of Questions 

U- Understanding the process 

N- Navigate 

C- Create 

H- Highlight and Fix

This year, we were given the creative freedom to animate our LAUNCH journal in Explain Everything! If you read any blog post of mine, that mentions Explain Everything, I always mention how our class despises the app, after its notorious acts of deleting carefully constructed projects and just crashing when we are working. I’ve done some research on the app and I learnt how to use some tools to my advantage, and I think it has enhanced my videos quite a bit now. 

FINAL LAUNCH PORTFOLIO

My final LAUNCH portfolio is down below, you can track my learning process and see how I improved as a learner throughout this project. I think I showed growth by learning how to use Explain Everything to my advantage, and keeping a postive mindset about it, which is something new for me when using Explain Everything. I think I showed growth by reusing the clay for a different purpose, it was definitely something I didn’t expect from myself and I’m proud to say that I’ve expanded creatively throughout this project. I think I could work on having priorities, being orginized and detailed with my project but I think it all came together into something I am proud of. 

Go check out my Humanties: The Story blog post, the other side of this project by clicking here! 

~Malaika