This is a book that I made using pictures I drew in Maker recently. I learned about a lot of cool tools in Sketches Pro. I learned about symmetry lines, different brushes, the fill tool, layers, and the airbrush tool. I also learned about colours, shapes, and lines. I think the picture look great and I put them all here for you to see!

In PLP, we just had our first exhibition of the year, and my first exhibition ever!

The grade 8s had to make a box/artifact representing our chosen theme statement from the movie “Avatar”. The theme statement I chose was based on the ‘conflict between humans and nature’ and was “Too much unchecked development can upset the balance of the natural world.

To represent my theme statement, I wanted to show the balance of the natural world. On one half of my box, I painted a forest and used real foliage to make the trees. The Mother Tree from Avatar is sticking up over the top. The other half of my box is a giant bulldozer. I put a balance scale on top of my box. On the scale, there used to be two trees, one on either side, and it would have been perfectly balanced. But, a bulldozer came and knocked one of the trees over, and off of the scale, unbalancing the whole thing. This shows how too much unchecked development can upset the balance of the natural world.

Overall, I thought the exhibition went smoothly. Building the box was fun, and it helped me reflect on the importance of the themes in the movie. I was proud of the work I did and enjoyed showing it off to my friends and family. It was also nice to see what some of my peers did for this project.

I found the presentation kind of difficult, but I think I can keep working to improve my presenting skills. It was quite hard to stand for the entire setup process and presentation (Almost 5 hours straight) and giving my legs a bit of a break would have been much appreciated.

How might I use the still image to create and communicate through technology?

I can use a picture to show an emotion or tell a story. A picture can add impact to important points and make things more interesting and engaging. 

The 3 skills that I found most important are 

• the timer – It allows me to take a include myself in a picture.
• the lighting – It allows me to adjust the mood and/or emotion in a picture.  
• being able to move part of an image onto another. – It lefts me tell a story and make a more interesting and engaging image. 

Here are some photos I took using some of these skills.

Who am I as a PLP learner?

Today in Maker, we are making our first blog post to answer this question. To do so, I’m going to describe some work that we have done in Maker so far this year. It’s only been two months, but we’ve done a lot.  So let’s dive in!

The first project I’m going to write about is the ‘I am’ WordPack that we made. We wrote down a list of thing that can finish the statement ‘I am’ and then we put it into WordPack (An app that makes a shape out of a list of words). For this project, I had to really think hard about who I am.  I found that my identity is related to my family, the sports I play, my hobbies, and more.

For our next project, we made a user manual for ourselves. It is structured and formatted like a product user guide. I wrote a lot of information about myself. We had to write under titles including Product guide, Getting started, Accessibility, Settings, Warnings Troubleshooting, and Tips to maintain optimal performance. 

Meanwhile, we’ve done many projects in our Big Life Journal. Some of those include our Dreamboard, our Bucket list and our YouTube channel.  These projects show who I want to be or what I want to do in the future. I wouldn’t have thought so much about my future without these projects. Some thing that I put on my dreamboard is that I want to learn to play the piano, I want to get into university, and I want to do robotics. 

Last but not least, I’m going to write about the Laptop Memoji that we did. For this project, we had to make a Memoji to resemble ourselves and use the Memoji with a laptop. We then added ‘stickers’ onto the laptop that are meaningful to us. The stickers that I put on my laptop show different things about me. Pie is my favourite dessert, I play the electric bass guitar, I play hockey.

Welcome to my first blog post.

In Maker today, Thursday October 20th, 2022 the grade 8’s learnt about our blog posts! From now on, you can expect frequent new posts about PLP.  In Humanities, we are on the home stretch on our ‘From the Outside(rs) looking in project.