Month: January 2020

MPOL blog post

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In this blog post, I’m going to be doing something pretty different. That is because this blog post is a reflection on how I have improved and how I still need to improve.

Before I start talking about how I have improved and still need to improve I am going to do a quick recap of what has happened so far. This year we have done around 8 projects so far Including one field study.

Now for the good part of the blog how I needed to improve and how I have improved. I think I have improved the most in the past term than in any term before. That is because in the past term I was given a good insight into how I needed to improve. That insight was my parent-teacher interview where we discussed how I needed to improve. Because of that, I was able to improve on issues such as focusing, being a distraction, the quality of my blog posts, ext. I think one of the best examples of improvement was my blog posts because all you have to do to see the improvements is compare two posts one new post and one old post(here’s a good example old post new post). Another big way I have improved is by focusing in class. One of the strategies I have been using to do that was putting my phone on do not disturb and putting my phone in my backpack during class I also took all of the games off of my iPad. The final big way I have improved is being a distraction this is a really good thing because I used to not only get distracted I would go to other people and would distract them too which is probably one of the worst things you can do in class (excluding illegal things). The thing that helped me in getting better at this was the help from my teachers who when I was being a distraction they would call me out on it and I think that helped me. Overall I think I have improved a lot in when it comes to focusing and my blog post quality but I still have a lot to improve on and that’s what I’m going to be talking about in the part of this blog.

So what are the big ways I need to improve? One of the things I still need to improve is my blog posts because even though I have improved when it comes to grammar and looking over my blogs I still struggle with talking about how I demonstrated the competencies. This is important because the competencies are one of the biggest reasons we do blogs. The main reason I have been struggling with this is that I have trouble figuring out how to include the competency’s in my blog. One way I can help fix this is by asking my teacher how they think I can incorporate the competency’s into my blog posts. Another thing I can do is examine some of my peer’s blog posts to see how they incorporate competency’s into their posts. Overall I don’t think it will be too hard to show how I met the competency’s it will just take some work. The next thing that I need to improve on is revision more specifically revision on blog posts I think this is important because not only is it one of the curricular competency’s that I have an emerging but it’s a way you can improve a bad mark to a good mark and it’s not even that difficult because they give us all of the information we need to revise. My plan for working on this is to spare some time on Saturdays when I’m at the library to work on revising blog posts. The final thing that I am going to talk about is time management which is probably one of the biggest issues I need to work on it is also one of the most important issues I need to work on because not having good time management can lead to late assignments and just all around not good stuff. How I can improve my time management is by setting goals for how long I want to take on each assignment and go onto my calendar and block out when I’m going to be working on what. Overall there is a lot that I need to work on but I think if I work hard it is possible.

In conclusion in the last term, I have improved a lot but I still have a lot I can improve on including some big and some small things. Now for this blog post, we were supposed to end with a question so here’s mine how can I optimize the amount of time it takes me to finish assignments so they are to the best of my ability and I have personal time left over?

Winter exhibition

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Recently, we had a huge project that was called The Story Strikes Back. Why was it called The Story Strikes Back? It was because we were studying Star Wars. Now, I know what your thinking, isn’t that the best project ever. To answer that I would say yes it was the best project ever. So what did we actually do for this project? The biggest thing we had to do was write a story about a Star Wars character of our choice and then build some sort of artifact  that relates to the story. 

The first thing we did for this project was to learn more about Star Wars and storytelling. We did this by reading short stories and examining them to figure out how to write our own. We also researched Star Wars so we could understand it more. In addition to reading the short story we also watched the Star Wars movies, although that was not mandatory.

The next step was to get assigned groups and planets. My group was Noah, Holly, Fin, Owen, Thomas, and Grace. Our planet was Tatooine. After getting our groups, it was time to start writing our story. The first thing we had to do before actually starting to write was to pick a character. We ended up picking a character named Teemto. The good thing about Teemto is that he had limited back story and that to our advantage.

Now, it was time to start writing our story. Our group divided the story into the 7 core parts of the story structure and each of us picked one part to do. For example, grace did the climax. My biggest challenge when writing my part of the story was making sure that I was using the right tense. I kept switching from past tense and present tense, but I was able to overcome that challenge. One of the big things that helped me overcome that challenge was that made multiple drafts. 

at the same time as we were writing our story, we had to make some sort of item that related to what we were writing about. My original idea was the make a scale model of a land speeder that actually hovered. But after doing research, I realized that it would be a lot more difficult and expensive than I had thought. So I decided to make a working credit chip which is a form of digital currency in Star Wars. This was easier to make because we actually have digital currencies like bitcoin. In the end, what I did was I formatted a USB so it would work as a crypto currency wallet. I also designed a case for it so it would look more like the actual credit chip. Finally I created my own crypto currency called the Imperial Credit using a website called wallet builders.

Finally, on the night of the exhibition, my group had a lot to do. That was because our designated part of the school was the hallway and we weren’t able to start getting ready until around 3:30. Somehow we were able to get our area looking good in a short amount of time and I would credit that to our good teamwork. Overall the night was fun and went by fast. I would have to say the highlight of the night was probably Hoths “snow”. And by snow, I mean cotton candy.

In conclusion, this was one of the best projects I have done in PLP. My highlight was being able to go see the new Star Wars as a class. Overall I think I did well and met the competencies. If you would like to read the entire story here are the links to each person in my groups posts where you will find their partstory part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 , part 6, part 7.

 

We had to make tiktoks👌

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Have you ever wondered what it would be like if your teacher assigned you the task of making TikTok’s because that’s exactly what our teacher did? Before you start thinking what kind of teacher would give kids an assignment like that I would like to say that there’s more to the assignment than just memes. The reason we are studying memes is because they fit with Darwin’s theory of evolution. How do they fit into Darwin’s theory of evolution? Just like how animals evolve from natural selection so do memes. For example, memes get more popular people to copy them but when they copy them they put their own spin on them. So over time as people copy memes they can change into completely different memes. Now that you know why we made TikToks here they are 

Take your kid to work day

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For take your kid to work day we were given an assignment that assignment was to make a video documenting your day/ interviewing people. On take your kid to work day I ended up going to my mom’s office which I was happy about because it’s enjoyable there.

The first thing I had to do was plan my shots, who I was going to interview, and what questions I was going to ask them. This part wasn’t too hard since I had already been thinking about what questions I wanted to ask. The thing that was harder was figuring out who to interview and that mostly consisted of asking my mom who she thinks would be open to getting interviewed. The final thing was getting a list of what shots I wanted but just like questions I had been thinking about what shots, I wanted for a while so this only took like 7 minutes.

all of my planning done and it was time to actually go to my mom’s office and film. Once I got to my mom’s office I didn’t instantly start filming the first thing I had to do was double-check who I was interviewing. Once I had double-checked who I was interviewing I set up my stuff and did my interviews. After doing my interviews I went out and had lunch with the other kids who were there to take your kid to the workday. After that, I played some VR and went home.

Editing was hard because I had around an hour of footage and was only allowed to have a two-minute video but I made it work.  My biggest struggle when editing was probably the audio because for one of the interviews I had recorded the audio through an external microphone so I had to line up the audio with the video and that took a while.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed take your kid to work day and I think that this was a fun project to do. If I had to pick a highlight it would probably be talking to the Development team or playing VR.

Science blog post

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I’m going to be talking about our recent project where we had to research and then make a video explaining ionic and covalent bonds as well as show how electron arrangement of atoms impacts their chemical nature.

For this project, we had to meet some guidelines called curricular competencies. The first of those was communicating and it was described as “Formulate physical or mental theoretical models to describe a phenomenon”  I followed this competency because I demonstrated during my video and my Bohr model drawings that I could explain through speech and drawings phenomenon like covalent bonding.

The next competency we had to follow was processing and analyzing and it was described as “Construct, analyze and interpret models and/or diagrams.” I meet this competency pretty well although I still have space to improve. The reason I meet this is that one of the things that I think I did pretty well in this project was the Bohr models. Why are the Bohr models so important? Bohr models are so important because they were a huge part of what we had to do for this project. They were such a huge part of our project because everything we had to animate started with a Bohr model.

The Final competency we had to follow was Questioning and predicting and it was described as “Demonstrate a sustainable intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest.”  I demonstrated this competency because all throughout the project I demonstrated interest and curiosity about compounds and chemistry overall. I even did outside of school research into certain things I had heard in class that I wanted to learn more about. For example, I did more research into elements.

In conclusion, I demonstrated all of the competency and had a very fun time doing this project.