Category: Maker

Identity

matthewt on

Identity what does it mean according to the oxford dictionary it means “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.” But to me identity means computers, movies, not liking camping, hot chocolate on a cold winters day, and the boat rides I take every year in honour of my grandfather who passed away. 

The reason I decided to start my blog with a little bit about identity is one so you could know a little more about me and two because that’s the topic for this blog post. As I said In the last sentence this blog post is about identity more specifically an assignment that we did about identity one where we had to make a gif about our identity.

For our gif we had to edit a photo of ourselves with a double exposure of an image that represents our identity(in case you don’t know what a double exposure is here’s an explanation https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/make-a-trendy-double-exposure-effect-in-adobe-photoshop–cms-23774). After making our double exposure image we had to put it into keynote and turn it into a gif after adding some logos/images that represent us as an example here’s mine.

For my photo, I included the logos for Minecraft, Windows, GitHub, and osu. I also included photos of among us, brainf**k, and a box jade key switch. I picked all of these because I really think they represent who I am as a person who loves computers, coding, gaming, and keyboards. I decided to just use these few aspects of my identity because I feel like they are the most important when it comes to my personality and just who I am.

In conclusion, this activity made me really think about identity and more importantly my identity. My favourite part about this activity would be making the double exposure image because I didn’t know much about it before this assignment and it was really fun to make. Now finally the final requirement for this post was to describe our understanding of identity. My understanding of identity is something that everyone has based on their personality and interests. I came to this understanding of identity-based off on all of the writing and activities we did about identity.

DI Regionals

matthewt on

For this blog post, I’m going to be talking about one of PLP’s yearly traditions DI. What is DI? DI is a student lead challenge wherein small groups you are tasked with something like building a drone, and you have to complete that task then present your solution in the form of a story. In this blog post, I’m going just to be talking about what I think were the three most important stages of this project. Those stages are 1, 2, and 3 I picked these because I believe they helped me and will also help me show you what we did and what I learned.

For stage 1, what we did was we got our groups (mine was Fin, Ryan, Grace, Owen, Kia, and I), then we got our actual challenge mine was technical. Then finally, we started learning about what we had to do for our challenge, which, in my case, was to build an invention that solves a real-world problem. Overall I think this was a significant milestone because It helped develop our understanding of what we would have to do for this project and helped get us into the mood of problem-solving. If I were to have done this stage again, I probably would have spent more time learning about my challenge because we made a few errors in our design phase.

For stage 2, what we had to do was start generating Ideas for our story, invention, elements, etc. The ideas I generated were for our invention, which was an automatic fridge door closer, which sounds pretty interesting but really isn’t. Other than the invention, I didn’t come up with any other ideas, although I did help some people come up with ideas. Overall this was probably the most or second most important stage we had to do for this project. If I were to do this again, I probably would have spent more time and picked a different idea because the one we went with ended up being hard.

For the final stage, I’m going to be talking about stage 3 what we had to do for stage 3 was we had to start planning for what materials we were going to need. We also had to do a ton of sheets for planning what we would do if things went wrong, for example, if our invention didn’t work. Finally, we had to finalize what our deliverables were going to be (an example of a deliverable would be our invention.) Overall this wasn’t the hardest stage, but it did take a lot of work mostly because it required doing a lot of forms. If I were to do this stage again, I would spend more time on the risk management forms since we ended up having a problem with our invention that I didn’t cover in the risk management sheet.

In conclusion, even though DI can be very stressful, it’s always fun. Overall when we ended up performing lots of things went wrong, for example, our invention didn’t work, and the door of the fridge fell off, but I still think it went pretty well. One really good thing was that this isn’t our last chance to do this show. We have one more tournament to try again (the other tournament ended up being cancelled because of COVID-19, although we are still presenting just to our class.)

Winter exhibition

matthewt on

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.