Have you ever tried to start a new habit? Or to stop a bad one? Did you succeed? The answer to that last question is most likely “no”. If so, don’t worry. It’s very hard to change your habits.

This year, instead of science, the PLP 10’s have a different class. That class is called PGP (Personal Growth Plan), but it’s basically a careers and self growth course. Anyway, we just finished our first ever PGP project. It was about habits, intentions, and success. 

One of the main focuses of this project was the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. In the book, Clear writes about personal experiences and uses examples ranging from the British Cycling team, to military analysts, to Coca Cola sales, aiming to help teach the reader how to change their habits. The book is spit into 4 sections. One for each of the four laws of behaviour change that Clear talked about in the book (Make it obvious, Make it attractive, Make it easy, Make it satisfying). The book definitely helped me think of some ideas on changing my own habits, and I’ll certainly use some of the strategies I read about. 

The first major assignment in this project was a Pop-Art image with symbols that represent me, and an intention statement. My intention statement was “My learning intentions for this year are to write down ideas even if they’re not the best, to work on my time management, and to balance my time doing enjoyable things with my time doing work.” On my Pop-Art that you can see below, the clock represents time management and I chose that because I frequently lose track of time, and don’t use time when I have it. The scale represents balancing my time by keeping each side equal. The paper and pencil represent writing down ideas and that’s important because I often find myself wasting time trying to come up with the perfect idea, and lose track of other good ideas.

The second and final major assignment in this project was to make an artifact relating to Atomic Habits. It could be anything! Some people made cakes, made album covers, and even redid their entire bedroom. I made a lock box challenge. It’s similar to an escape room, where you have a bunch of clues, and have to figure out the combination of numbers, letters, or shapes to unlock the door, but instead of trying to get out of a room, you’re trying to open a box with a reward on the inside. I chose to use four locks, each with a four digit number code. The clues all relate to key points throughout Atomic Habits and unlocking the locks represents working on good habits, and making bad habits more difficult, invisible, and unattractive. Click on the box below to see the clues I made, and try to solve them for yourself! (Some of the clues require a copy of Atomic Habits to answer) 

The driving question of this project was “How can small changes in my habits shape my success this year, and beyond?” A small change that I could make to shape my success would be to put a notification on my phone when I am on a game or YouTube for 1 hour. That would help me to not lose track of time, and I would have more time to do homework. I could make a cue and response system where my cue is the notification, and my response is to turn off my phone and start working. I think that would really help me, and I’m going to implement that into my daily life. 

Did you know that Dr. Frederick Banting, the inventor of insulin, sold the patent for only $1? 

Welcome back to my first blog post of the new school year! It’s still hard to believe I’m in grade 10! Our first project this year, was about why the world needs more Canada. We investigated the identity of Canada through discussions on current events, diversity, and Canadian literature.

We started this project by looking at the local news to learn about what’s going on in and around Canada. I chose to do some more research on the theft of the portrait of Winston Churchill from the Fairmont Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, that I heard of while watching The National. I presented the information that I found to a small group of my classmates, and we discussed details like how it took 8 months for people to even realize that it was stolen, and the fact that it was sold at an auction in Europe. It was very interesting to see how a missing piece of art can be such a big deal for so many people. 

Another step that we took during this project was to analyze Canadian literature. We read some short stories including Tupelo, Totem, The Jade Peony, Meditations on a lake, and bread, to look at story elements like plot, setting, point of view, characters, conflict, theme, mood, and diction. I found this a bit challenging because the stories had hidden meanings within them. For example, Tupelo isn’t just a story about a crocodile under a bed. It’s a story about immigration, and acceptance. 

By this point, we’ve finished the lead up learning and work, and we’re almost ready to start working on the final product of this project which is… Drumroll please… Making a podcast episode! Everyone chose a unique, individual topic to do their podcast on, and I chose diabetes care since it’s a topic that I have a lot of experience on, since I, myself have type 1 diabetes. But before we could actually make the podcast episodes, we had to do some research to figure out what to say, and then write a multi paragraph composition (Essay) about it. It took a while for me to write my multi paragraph composition, but it wasn’t too hard. I included information about aspects like Canada’s universal healthcare, Canada’s global impact on diabetics and diabetes care, and especially Dr. Frederick Banting’s generosity. Dr. Banting was a Canadian medical scientist who discovered insulin. He could’ve made a lot of money off of the discovery, but instead he decided to sell the patent for only 1$. He said he thought it would be unethical for someone to profit on a discovery that could save lives. 

Before recording, editing, and finalizing the podcast, we had 1 more step. That was to make to intro music and cover art for the podcast. We looked at the cover arts and listened to the intro music of a few popular podcasts, and learnt how to use Garage Band to make our intro music. Everyone made their own cover art and intro music (Some people made more than one), and we had a class vote to decide which one we’d use. You can listen to my final podcast episode on Spotify here, and listen to everyone else’s here. 

My answer to the driving question of this project, “Why does the World need more Canada?” is that the world needs more Canada because Canadians believe in health over wealth, and are working towards a better world. I enjoyed working on this project because it helped me to get more of an understanding about what’s going on in the world around us, close and far. Another reason I liked this project is because I got to choose my topic, and that helped me relate to my work, and it motivated me and helped me persevere. I think that helped make my work better as well. 

Thank you for reading to the end of this blog post. Hopefully you enjoyed it! And keep an eye out, because I’ll have another post out soon!

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

I want to start by talking about how I made my work unique to me so far this year. A good example for this is in my “What Inspires Me?” video from the Story Finding in the Rockies project. I made this video unique to me not just with what I’m saying, but how I’m saying it. I decided to make it into a parody of one of my favourite songs, “Wake Me Up” by Avicii. I really like music, so I though this would be a great way to incorporate my interests with my work. 

What Inspires Quin | Wake Me Up Parody

Another example of where I made my work unique this year is in the Sparks Fly Project in science. We were learning about circuits, and, since I already knew a lot about circuits, I wanted to challenge myself. When we had some time in class to practice making circuits, I made a working Menorah with the right candles lighting up for each night of Hanukah out of LED lights and wires.

There are multiple times that I’ve felt frustrated with PLP work this year, but DI was definitely the most frustrating. I think one of the main reasons it was frustrating for me was the unfortunate timing. When we started working on our solutions, maker was just about to end, and it was very hard to find time outside of school hours that all of our group members could make it to. My group ended up only having one, maybe two meetups per week, and I don’t think we had our entire group in one place until the day before regionals. 

Now, I want to talk about a project where I learnt a lot about myself, and how I work. In the Rise of The Frankenstuffies project, I realized how much I struggle to make storyboards. I don’t think the usual format of a storyboard works very well for me. I find that they really don’t help me make a video/movie/film out of a text, and they just waste time when I have to draw every scene (Even just a very rough stick person and background). Also, for me, time stamping scenes is hard and unhelpful, because I can’t guess how long something will take very well, and if I guess too low, it throws everything off. For the current WWI Con project, I think the storyboard was very useful for making a graphic novel because it helped me make sure I had enough panels, and where and what size each panel will be. 

However, during the Frankenstuffie project, I found a way for me to make storyboards that are helpful to me. If I just write a brief description of each shot on separate keynote slides, I can easily look for what I need to do there. When I finish each shot, I put the clip over top of the keynote slide, effectively crossing it off the list. Now that I have that figured out, I will be able to make videos much easier in the future.

This year, I think I have improved in success behaviours such as time management, enthusiasm, and resilience. 

In the past, I haven’t been very good at managing my time and avoiding distractions. But, since I’m going to be away next week, these last couple weeks have been very busy for me. With the spring exhibition later today, this tPOL, a band concert on Tuesday, and work for my other classes that I need to get done before I leave, I’ve had to push through, and I’ve gotten everything done in a way that I’m happy with. I think, especially near the end of this year, I’ve gotten much better at time management, but I’ll still continue work on my time management skills. 

In my mPOL, I discussed how I wanted to relate to my humanities work more, and challenge myself in it. In the current WWI Con project, I challenged myself to learn how to use AI image generators, and I made my images using that. It took a lot of work to learn how to use AI, and how to get consistent characters. I found AI very engaging, and it made this project quite fun to work on.   

I think I’ve become more resilient this year in many ways. The most evident time that I became more resilient this year was during the Name of Nationalism project. In the past, I’d often get overwhelmed by large volumes of material. This year, I’ve worked on keeping calm, and it’s led to much better results. For me, resilience is crucial to finish assignments on time, so I think this will also help me reduce the amount of assignments that I hand in late. 

Thank you for reading my tPOL. 

How many Bosnians does it take to start WWI? The answer? Seven. Five to do nothing, one to have bad aim, and one to kill Franz Ferdinand. 

We just finished another project in PLP, and this one was about nationalism before World War One. We started by choosing what country’s nationalism we’d be focusing on, and I chose Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before this project, I barely knew anything about Bosnia and Herzegovina. I knew that it exists, but I had no idea how big it is, where it is, or even how to pronounce Herzegovina (Hur-suh-gov-een-ah).

The final goal of this project was to create an informative YouTube video on our case studies. This was a fairly short project with not very many steps until the final video. One of the things we did before making the video was watch other YouTube videos about nationalism from creators like Heimler’s History, and Crash Course. We watched these videos not for their content, but to learn about how to format our videos and make them interesting to the viewer. 

Okay, it’s time to start working our videos. I started by writing some questions that I wanted to answer about Bosnian nationalism.  I knew that Bosnia and Herzegovina only became a country in 1992, so one of my questions was “What was the area of present day Bosnia called before WWI?”, and another was “How did Bosnia and Herzegovina gain independence?”.  After a quick google search, I concluded that Bosnia and Herzegovina were provinces in Austria Hungary before WWI, and were a part of Yugoslavia between the end of WWI and 1992. Some of my other questions were “Where were the region borders in Austria Hungary?” and “Why were Bosnians important during WWI?”.

Now that I have my questions, I needed to answer them. It took a lot of research but I finally had the necessary  understanding that I needed to make my video. I started by planning my video in a graphic organizer with a general idea of what I’ll say in each shot, and the visuals that will be on screen. It was time to write my script. This was the hard part. I went though multiple editions, but I didn’t really like any of them. Eventually, I settled on something I was happy with, and started filming. The filming process was very easy and, even though I tripped on my words enough to make an entire bloopers video (That you can watch here), I got it done quickly. The editing was also very easy, and using some new skills and techniques that I learnt in the Rise of the Frankenstuffies project, I also finished that pretty fast. 

So, do you think that overall, nationalism is a good or a bad thing?

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

I want to start by talking about a project where I learnt a lot about myself, and how I work. In the Rise of The Frankenstuffies project, I realized how much I struggle to make storyboards. I don’t think the usual format of a storyboard works very well for me. I find that they really don’t help me make a video/movie/film out of a text, and they just waste time when I have to draw every scene (Even just a very rough stick person and background). Also, for me, time stamping scenes is hard and unhelpful, because I can’t guess how long something will take very well, and if I guess too low, it throws everything off. 

However, during that project, I found a way for me to make storyboards that are helpful to me. If I just write a brief description of each shot on separate keynote slides, I can easily look for what I need to do there. When I finish each shot, I put the clip over top of the keynote slide, effectively crossing it off the list. Now that I have that figured out, I will be able to make videos much easier in the future.

There are multiple times that I’ve felt frustrated with PLP work this year, but DI was definitely the most frustrating. I think one of the main reasons it was frustrating for me was the unfortunate timing. When we started working on our solutions, maker was just about to end, and it was very hard to find time outside of school hours that all of our group members could make it to. Because of our limited schedule, we really didn’t make much progress until the last minute. It was also frustrating for me that multiple of my group members didn’t really care about DI. I think it would be better for next year if there are some groups that only have people that really want to do DI and are interested in making the best solutions, and to have other groups for everyone else. 

Now, I want to talk about how I made my work unique to me so far this year. A good example for this is in my “What Inspires Me?” video from the Story Finding in the Rockies project. I made this video unique to me not just with what I’m saying, but how I’m saying it. I decided to make it into a parody of one of my favourite songs, “Wake Me Up” by Avicii. I really like music, so I though this would be a great way to incorporate my interests with my work. 

What Inspires Quin | Wake Me Up Parody

Another example of where I made my work unique this year is in the Sparks Fly Project in science. We were learning about circuits, and, since I already knew a lot about circuits, I wanted to challenge myself. When we had some time in class to practice making circuits, I made a working Menorah with the right candles lighting up for each day of Hanukah out of LED lights and wires. 

For the rest of this year, I want to focus on getting my assignments done on time. I think one of the main reasons that I’ve been late on some assignments this year is that if I don’t finish it in class, I get distracted when trying to work at home. I want to work on moving away from or removing distractions so that I can get more work done on time.

I also want to challenge myself more in projects that I relate to. I think I relate more to science and Maker than I do to Humanities, so that will be challenging now that science and maker are done. 

Thank you for reading my mPOL. 

And in first place… Take McFlight! What?! How?! Our solution didn’t work at all! How did we win? 

Okay, let’s rewind a bit. Destination Imagination (Or DI) is a global educational non-profit dedicated to inspiring the next generation of innovators, leaders, and creative problem solvers. Every year, there are four different challenges to choose from: Fine Arts, Engineering, Technical, and Scientific. I chose Technical, and was put in a group with three other grade 9s and one grade 10. My group members were Maddie, Lucas, Liam, and Tom.  

This year’s technical challenge is called Pinball Heroes. Each team had to make a pinball machine with three machine modules, and an action adventure story to go with it. Unfortunately, I can’t give very much details about what my group made because we have another tournament coming up. 

I think our group really struggled with communication. We basically just had a table until the night before the tournament. I think one of the reasons that we procrastinated so much was because we couldn’t find a time outside of school hours where we could all get together and work on our pinball machine. 

On the day of the tournament, we made a bunch of last minute additions and changes, and we rehearsed our play. We went to our instant challenge, which I’m not allowed to say anything about, and then we rehearsed our play some more. It was finally time. All our work from the past few months came down to that moment. Our presentation went decently, but we had a lot of holes in our story, and only half of our machine managed to work. Luckily, we were able to improvise and we ended up winning in our category. 

This is my sister… You might be wondering why she’s so mad. Well, I ripped her stuffies to pieces! You might think that’s pretty mean, but there’s a good reason, I promise. 

We just finished another project, so it’s time to reflect upon it. This one was called Rise of the Frankenstuffies. The goal of this project was to find out how writers make their message clear and engaging to their audience. The way we did this was by making our own stories and short movies. 

But a PLP project is never that simple.

To make our stories, first we had to read a story. We read a book called Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld. It’s a very good book about a reimagining World War 1, between the Clankers and the Darwinists. The Clankers use very ahead-of-their-time machines, whereas the Darwinists use fabricated creatures. Keep that in mind as I tell you about making my story. 

The first step of writing my story was making my character. But instead of just imagining our character, we made them in real life! We cut pieces off of stuffies and sewed them together in fun and goofy ways. But there was one problem… I don’t really have any stuffies. Luckily, my sister let me have some of her old ones. I ended up using Mickey Mouse’s body and legs, Blues clues’s ears, a cat’s head, a tiger’s nose, a unicorn’s horn, and a monkey’s arms. Doesn’t that sound like the Darwinist’s fabricated creatures? Hmm, I wonder if that’s why we read Leviathan and not some other book haha. 

Okay, now that I have my character, I need to come up with a back story for him. I’ll give you a quick summary of what I came up with:

Specimen #12, 036 was estimated to have been born in November 2006. He has no known ancestors in over 2 000 years. He is being studied in a science lab, and can’t remember a time when he wasn’t. He doesn’t have a proper name, so he goes by 36 (Short for Specimen #12, 036). He forces the scientist to pay him $9 500/month to research him. 

Now that I have my main character, I can start to decide what will happen in my story. I learnt about the hero’s journey, and wrote a summary of what would happen in each section. 

I decided that instead of writing and filming my whole story, I would just do a section of it with more details. I chose to use the 5^th and 6^th sections, because they have the most action. I plotted out my story using a Transition-Action-Details template where I listed what happens in each scene, how each scene starts, and the extra details about each scene. 

It’s finally time to write the story. It would’ve been way harder to write with out having done all the planning and preparation. I think as the story went along, I started slowly adding less details but I think I did a very good job on it. 

Now that I’m done the story, I can start to make my movie. I started off my making a storyboard. In the past, I’ve often struggled with storyboards, and this one was no different. I find that they really don’t help me make a video/movie/film out of a text, and they just waste time when I have to draw every scene (Even just a very rough stick person and background). Also, for me, time stamping scenes is hard and unhelpful, because I can’t guess how long something will take very well, and if I guess too low, it throws everything off.

However, during this project, I found a way for me to make storyboards that are helpful to me. If I just write a brief description of each shot on separate keynote slides, I can easily look for what I need to do there. When I finish each shot, I put the clip over top of the keynote slide, effectively crossing it off the list. Now that I have that figured out, I will be able to make videos much easier in the future. 

Speaking of making videos… 

If was very difficult to make my movie because I was using multiple different apps, and multiple features of these apps that I’d never used before. I used PuppetPals for the first time ever, and it was very hard to put each piece from each app together. But after a lot of work, I finally finished!

Enjoy!

New year, new project, new blog post. This was a very quick project because we had to squeeze it in before the end of the first semester. Enter: Let’s get Riel. 

In this project, we learnt about the evolving portrayal of Louis Riel while improving our writing skills along the way. We started by learning about the Red river settlement and how Riel drove the Canadian surveyors away in 1869. Then, we made Frayer Layers to expand our vocabulary.

After that, we looked at some texts to see how he was portrayed. We looked at three statues of Riel which were all very unique and told very different stories. We read through some primary sources (Newspapers from the 1800s, a documentation of Riel’s speech to the jury from 1885) and we watched a Louis Riel Heritage Minute by Historica Canada. Here is a paragraph that I wrote about it: 

In this text, Louis Riel is portrayed very calmly as he reflects upon his life and the battles that he fought. He says “I battled an insane and irresponsible government” which shows how Historica Canada looked back at what Riel did and interpreted his opinions. He mentions how he fought not only for himself, but also for the people of Manitoba and the North West. In the video, it seem as though Riel has accepted his fate because of how calm he looks. It seems somewhat uncanny to me, because if I was in his shoes, knowing my upcoming death, I would be very frantic. I wonder if he was this calm when it actually happened. 

It was time for the final product! Can you guess what it is? It is drumroll please… More writing!! It is a writing project after all. This time it’s a multi paragraph response to the driving question, “How has the portrayal of Louis Riel changed over time?”. But nothing’s ever perfect on the first try, so I sent it to my teacher for feedback. 

And here’s the final copy:

You know what time of year it is! No it’s not Christmas time, silly! Well actually it is Christmas time, but that’s not what I meant (But, is it still Christmas time if this gets posted after Christmas? I don’t know🤦‍♂️). Alright, let me give that another try. 

You read the title! Our PLP 9 winter exhibition just happened and it’s time to reflect upon it! 

If you didn’t get to go, the PLP 9’s designed and created Rube Goldberg machines in which each connection  was a metaphor for each group’s revolution. My group had the Haitian revolution, which is a very unknown revolution, especially in comparison to the other ones in the room.  

Okay, but how did we get here? Our this project was actually a long time coming, as it started all the way back in October with a Nation X experiment. We were divided into four groups with differing amounts of people before learning the roles of each group. There was group A (The poor workers), group B (The business class), group C (The ‘police’), and Group D (The royal family). We played out about a week of ‘in game’ time (around 2 real life hours) where the lower classes became increasingly more unhappy with how the nation was being run, and in the end, revolted against the upper classes, and created a new nation taking over Nation X. Keep in mind this was before we knew what the project was about. We just happened to make a revolution at the start of a revolution project before we knew it was a revolution project! I actually didn’t make the connection that we’d made a revolution during that experiment until now, while I was writing this paragraph. 

From there we started to learn about revolutions. We modernized Crane Brinton’s theory of a revolution using analogies as examples to demonstrate and simplify Crane’s theory. Crane Brinton’s theory is a common cycle including the four main stages of a revolution (Incubation, moderate, crisis, recovery). I used a seed growing into a tree on mine to show how a small seed of discontent can develop into a full blown revolution. 

To help learn about revolutions, we read George Orwell’s Animal Farm which was based on the Russian revolution. In this book, the animals on a farm in the UK become displeased with their farmer, and they pretty much kick him out. I won’t spoil rest of the story if you want to read if for yourself. We had 5 book chats at intervals throughout the book where we had different prompts to liven up the discussions. An example of these prompts was to write a question about the book on a piece of paper and pass it around in a circle with everyone else writing their answer on it. This encouraged us to reflect on the book and to see other people’s opinions and thoughts about it. 

After that, we were given one revolution to become an expert on. As I mentioned earlier, mine was the Haitian revolution. The first task was to make an infographic with a lot of information about the Haitian revolution and demonstrate how it fits into Crane Brinton’s theory of a revolution. 

It’s Rube Goldberg time! Well, sorta. We have to conceptualize our machine before we can build it. We started by writing down some events from the revolution we could use as metaphors. Then, we came up with ideas for connections that we could use on our machine based off of the events. 

Another thing we had to do before actually building the machine was to plan our documentary that we showed alongside our machine at the exhibition so that we could film while building. This documentary showed the building process for our machine, as well as some other theatrical additions. 

Okay. Now can we build? Finally! We gathered our materials, most of which were old household objects and cardboard, and over the next week and a half, we put it all together. But, the building process wasn’t very smooth. I think our group was full of leaders with not enough listeners. There was a lot of miscommunication and disagreements, and unfortunately, we never got a completed successful run through.

Despite the lack of a working machine, we still presented at the exhibition. We had an entire script written, but a last minute decision was made to ditch the scripts. It was too unnatural, and it would be better just to talk than to read. At the start, I was doing a lot of umming and forgetting what some things meant, but by the end, I was pretty confident with what I was saying, and I was able to explain the metaphors in the machine and the progress of the Haitian revolution. 

We were gone again! 

That’s right! PLP 9 has already gone on two field studies this year. But this time, something was a bit different…

Unlike the other field studies I’ve been on in the past in the PLP program, the most recent one at Loon Lake wasn’t lead by the PLP teachers. The Loon Lake site is on a UBC property in the middle of a forest about an hour drive from Seycove. Upon arrival, we met up with the main three Pinnacle Pursuit [link] employees that would be leading our group throughout the week. Jonathan, or Jono for short is the CEO and founder of Pinnacle Pursuits, and was the leader of our group. 

Over the week, we did many workshops, activities, and challenges including rock climbing, archery, ropes courses, and more. We learned about leadership, trust, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, communication, and much more. Some of my favourite things we did were rock climbing (Where I got to the top of the wall in the third fastest time ever!), the ropes course, and fort building. Some things however, were harder for me, and put me out of my comfort zone. The most obvious example of this is the trust falls. We started small, with a group of people pushing me around in a circle. But eventually, we stacked a chair on top of a table and fell of of that. That was very scary for me, but, in the end, I did end up doing it. 

One of the challenges was to build a shelter using sticks that could protect my entire group from the elements. We looked at our location and decided what frame would work best. We worked great as a team, and our shelter fit more than 3 times the necessary amount of people. We divided up the necessary tasks with some people gathering materials, and others finding a location to build. Then we all came together to build it. We used good Teamwork and  communication skills and worked together to get the job done. 

At the end of the trip, (almost) all of our parents came for a closing event where we showed them some of the learning we had done over the week, and shared a “Transfer Goal”. A Transfer Goal is a goal that I set for myself based on the experiences and learning we accomplished over the week.  My Transfer Goal was to work on being comfortable with being uncomfortable. I set this as my goal because I was really uncomfortable with the trust fall, but after I did it, I felt relieved and proud that I’d gone outside of my comfort zone. I’m glad that I pushed myself to be able to see what I’m capable of achieving. 

All in all, I really enjoyed this experience. I learned a lot about emotions, communication, teamwork, my classmates, and most importantly, me! Building these skills will help no matter what career I choose. I will certainly come back to many of the worksheets we did over the week for help in the future.