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As part of our project, we were assigned groups and asked to create a political party and a press release. So without further ado, I introduce to you the Future Party of Canada.

So what makes our party unique? Our party is unique because we unlike most other parties in Canada we focus on the long-term future. Going along with our strong focus on the future we strongly believe that the only way we can move forward to a better future is by taking actions to stay under the 2-degree coalition.

Why should you vote for us? The FPC would make a good vote because we have not only the current voter in mind but future generations of voters as well. We plan on doing this by using our time in the office not only to fix current issues but to set Canada up for the future with things such as an oil fund to reinvest into renewable energy.

To continue with the theme of this project continuity and change I decided to look into the history of programming languages. I decided to talk about programming languages since they started to pick up pace in the ’50s.

The first-ever “programming language” was created well before its time by Ada Lovelace. The reason I say it was well before its time is that it predated the computer. The first-ever “real” programming language was called Plankalkül. Plankalkül allowed for the creation of procedures that would store chunks of code that could be used to perform routine actions. Although there were programming languages like Plankalkül it wasn’t until 1959 when the first programming language that is still used today was created called FORTRAN.

Now that I have covered some early programming languages let’s look at some more recent ones. The first modern programming language we are going to be looking at is python which was created in 1991 and is still being used by companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Spotify. The last language we are going to be looking at is Java which is object oriented and was invented in 1995 and can be used for all types of things.

So how have programming languages changed and stayed the same? I feel that just looking at some example code from the different languages can give you a good understanding.

Java

Python

FORTRON

 

When looking at the code from each language you can see lots of similarities and differences with structure and functions. The first big difference is the indentation with most modern languages requiring indentation whereas in FORTRON indentation is not required. You can also see lots of similarities in functions with all sharing the if-else function. Along with the if-else functions they all have a form of the print function.

In conclusion, I was surprised to see how much in common older programming languages had with more recent ones and am looking forward to looking more into languages such as FORTRAN.

How have Disneyland rides changed since the opening of the park? well, that’s a tough question to answer since there were 13 opening day attractions. Because of that in this post, I’m just going to be focusing on one Toads Wild Ride.

Unless you are well versed in Disneyland rides you may be wondering what is Toads Wild ride? According to my research, it’s a creepy ride based on the movie The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.
So how has it changed over the years? Unlike many other classic Disneyland rides, they didn’t change it due to racism. Most changes were just to modernize the ride like changing the exterior from a tent style to look like a castle. Along with the exterior changes, they also updated the interior to be more modern. Other than that there weren’t any other big changes. Although they did change the exterior and interior the fundamentally the ride is the same with the same story and vibe.

In conclusion, Disneyland rides are a good example of continuity and change since they tend to evolve with the times but will also show what people have and most likely will always enjoy.

As for all first weeks of a new project, we started this week with a brief introduction to our new project. Following the introduction, we did a need-to-know chart. With this new project since we had so much to do we got straight into our first big assignment. For this assignment, we had to interview the deep cove heritage society in a group of two or three. But before we were able to conduct the interview we had to contact our assigned interviewee. This came with a few challenges since my partner and I were both online this week. The biggest of those challenges was communication since we didn’t have any face-to-face communication. Luckily we were able to use facetime and iMessage to communicate which allowed us to complete the assignment without a ton of issues. Around the same time as we were contacting our interviewee, we also had to do a practice interview with our partners. This milestone went by pretty easily since I feel we followed the requirements pretty well. Overall I feel this was a very productive week and even though I ran into some issues I feel I was able to overcome them.

Hi, welcome back to my blog. This week I’m going to be talking about our most recent project about Shakespeare. For this project, we had to answer the driving question “how might we make Romeo and Juliet appealing to a modern audience.” To solve this driving question, we decided to put on our own Romeo and Juliet radio play.

Before we were able to start the production of our radio play we had to learn more about Romeo and Juliet. To do that we read the script for Romeo and Juliet along with that we also watched two of the movies (no not Gnomeo and Juliet). My favourite part of the research was probably watching the movies more specifically the 1996 Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet movie. What I think I liked about the 1996 movie so much was probably how creative they were when adapting the movie ex: they call guns swords.

After we did all of our research it was time to start actually making the story for our radio show. For this, we had a battle of storeys. how this worked was it started as everyone for themself then people slowly combined storeys till it was two groups left for the big battle. sadly, in the end, we didn’t go with either of the storeys we just decided to add commentary over the base story.

After deciding on our story we had to apply for a role. For my role, I decided to apply to be on the story team since I have always enjoyed script stuff. Around a day after I applied, I got the role. In the script team, there were 7 people which came with some pros and cons. the best thing about having 7 people in the group was definitely being able to split up the writing evenly. Another pro was probably how much easier it was to do peer critique. Now for what didn’t work too well, I felt like there was some miscommunication between the group. That affected some jokes and plotlines.

In the end, the performance went very well, I personally thought it was pretty funny. Although I wasn’t actually in the play I did get to do a few read-throughs which was pretty fun.

in conclusion in the end everything worked out. my favourite thing that I learned was just writing as a team which I thought was very fun. also just a minor thing during this project I made two new podcast episodes so you can listen to those here

Hi, for this weekly check-in I’m going to be discussing how scripts can change from draft to production. The reason this week I’m going to be focusing on scripts is because that’s exactly what I’ve been working on in the past week let me explain. So for our Romeo and Juliet project, we have to put on a radio play version of Romeo and Juliet. Scripts fit into that because for the play we have to write our own script for the play.

Now for the main part of this blog post. to talk about draft vs production I’m going to use the movie Big Time Adolescence. The reason I’m using Big Time Adolescence as an example is because it’s a movie that I’ve seen and read an earlier draft of the script for. (if you are interested in reading the script you can find it here)

(Possibly mild spoilers)

The biggest difference between the movie and script draft was definitely the ending. Other than that it was mostly minor things so for this post I’m going to focus on the ending.

So how is the ending different? well, to explain that you need to know a few things. First of all the ending involves punishment for a crime. second of all the ending involves the effects the punishment has on a friendship. Now that I have that explained let’s start with the ending from the script. In the script, the punishment was very lax for the crime that had been committed which in my opinion led to the crime being sort of glorified. Along with the crime not much happened with the friendship. now for the movie, there was a much harsher punishment which I think definitely helped it not glorifying the crime. along with the harsher punishment the friendship was also much more affected in the movie.

The reason I think this is an interesting example is just to show how much your idea can be changed from draft to the final product.

In conclusion, I find it interesting how certain details of a movie can be changed from script to final product. Be that from producer interference or rating reasons.

 

Hi for this weekly check-in since we have been studying Shakespeare and talking about what makes his plays classics I decided For this check-in I’m going to talk about what makes the Social Network a classic.

The social network is a 2010 biopic about Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook. It also focuses on the drama and lawsuits that came from that.

Ok now that I’ve given a rough explanation of what the movie is about let’s get into what makes it a classic. The first thing we have to do to figure out why the social network is a classic we need to define what a classic is. After doing some research here’s my list of things that make a movie a classic. The first is it must stick with you past your immediate viewing. Secondly, the movie must be respected and liked by most critics. Finally, it has to influence subsequent films.

For the first of the three I would say at least for me it just has so many iconic scenes and lines that I think of all of the time. This is thanks to Aaron Sorkin who wrote the screenplay being amazing at realistic dialogue. Along with Sorkins great dialogue director David Fincher brings the dialogue to screen in scenes that flow and just feel amazing to watch. Another thing that helps to make this movie memorable is the story because I feel like it’s something that at least I always think about when I hear about Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook. Finally, I feel like this scene is a great example of everything I just talked about.

For the second I would say that without a doubt The Social Network was critically acclaimed scoring a 95 on Metacritic and a 96 on Rotten Tomatoes. Along with its great scores, it also owns three Oscars for writing, editing, and score.

Finally, even though I haven’t seen many movies that were inspired by The Social Network it did lead to an increase in startups and cs majors. Because of that, I would assume that those people will always remember the reason they pursued that career.

Based on those reasons I would say that the social network is a classic and a movie that will be remembered.

Hi, how’s it going? For this blog post, I’m going to be talking about our most recent project In Their Own Words. For this project we focused on WW2 trying to solve the driving question which was “How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WWII?”

To assist with our podcasts and to help us answer the driving question we had to find an interviewee. For me, I ended up contacting my mom’s friend’s dad who was a WW2 veteran and was a London blitz survivor who had to be evacuated to Canada. The hardest part about contacting my interviewee was probably emailing back and forth since I have always been bad at formatting and writing emails. What I learned from this part of this project was more about how to write and format an email despite that I do still have lots of work to do on my emailing skills.

After finding an interviewee I had to decide on the story I was going to tell and then research more about that story. For my story, I decided to focus on Peter who was my interviewee his experience with the London blitz and having to evacuate to Canada. For my research, I mostly focused on the blitz doing a small amount of general WW2 research. From this part of the project, I learned more about MLA citations because they were a big part of our research and I’m not the best at them.

For this part of the podcast, the competencies were, analyze cause and consequence, using evidence and resources, and global collaborator. For the first competency analyze cause and consequence I felt like I met that through my research on why the Germans decided to bomb London and how that affected the people in London specifically children. For the second competency using evidence and resources, I feel like I met it because the whole point of research is so you have evidence to back up your claims and I did successfully research the topic. For the final competency global collaborator, I feel like I met it because I was able to use my iPad to look at resources from all around the world.

The final thing before I could edit and release my podcast was I had to actually record my interview. The biggest problem I had trying to do my interview was definitely miscommunication. I say that because the first time I was supposed to do my interview because of miscommunication I ended up missing it luckily though I was able to reschedule. Another issue I had was I had issues with Skype. Despite all of the issues in the end I ended up with a great interview that I really enjoyed doing. What I learned from this part of the project was that despite how prepared you think you are you can always be more prepared.

Finally for the editing and release of my podcast. I would have to say this was definitely the hardest part of the podcasting process since not only did the audio from me asking questions not record but also my audio recording as a non-standard file type. To fix the problem of my questions not being recorded I had to go back and re-record them all which was really frustrating. The file type problem was slightly easier I just had to put through a converter then I was fine. After solving all those problems I got to pretty boring editing it was mostly just cutting out pauses and putting different clips together. What I learned in the editing process was that the better prepared for the editing the less time it takes. For the actual distribution of the podcast, we used a program called anchor which allows you to post on tons of different streaming services (if you would like to know more I did a whole post on podcast distribution here).

For this part of the project, the competency’s were Analyze Cause and Consequence, Responding to Text, and Global Collaborator. Since I’ve already covered Analyze Cause and Consequence and Global Collaborator I’m just going to focus on Responding to Text. For responding to text I feel like I met it because throughout my podcast and even before that I was able to connect what I was working on to myself and my experiences.

In conclusion, this was a very interesting project I loved interviewing Peter. I also like learning about WW2 since that’s a topic I have been interested in for a very long time. Finally, my answer to the driving question was looking at an event through stories allows you to experience that event through the eyes of people with potentially vastly different lives which can give you access to different perspectives on the events that took place before and after the war. Ps if you would like to listen to my podcast you can find it here.

Hi for this weekly recap I’m going to be talking about the distributions of podcasts which is something really interesting we learned this week. Before this week I just assumed that podcasters would individually upload their podcasts to individual services like Apple podcasts which is actually wrong. What happens is podcasters will use a program like the one we are using for this project (the program is called the anchor). What these programs will do is they will host your podcast making it available through a link that you can then link to the podcasting websites like Apple podcasts. Another interesting thing I learned is that things like Apple podcasts aren’t even podcast hosting programs there just an online directory that grabs the audio from your hosting program and allows people to listen to it. In conclusion, I think this was a very interesting week and other than the podcast hosting I also learned about editing podcasts and peer critique. Thanks for reading this week’s blog.

Hi, welcome to my 7th weekly recap. In this recap, I’m going to be trying something new and focusing on one aspect of something we learned this week. What I’m going to be focusing on is the short documentary we had to read and take notes on. The documentary focused on Canada’s involvement in WW2 which I thought was really interesting because you don’t hear about Canada’s involvement in WW2 that often. The documentary also talked about the increase of women in the workforce. What I think was the most interesting thing I learned in this documentary was probably that Canada supplied the planes that helped wing the war. I thought that was really interesting because not only had I not heard of the hurricane plane I had no clue that Canada even was big on making planes. Finally, I think documentaries like these are important because oftentimes people learn about WW2 through film and tv and lots of the time those shows and movies don’t show Canada and other countries helping. In conclusion, I enjoyed watching this documentary and would recommend if you have 40 minutes to spare you watch it too