Hello, and welcome back to another quality reflection post. Today I’ll be reflecting on my most recent exhibition. The last exhibition feels like it happened yesterday, but that was already 6 months ago! Now let’s talk about what I did for this exhibition, and the improvements I made since the Winter Exhibition.
The Driving Question for this project is “How do we define a community impact maker?”
This project is inspired by an apple ad, Think Different. In the ad, there were many famous people that changed the world. The crazy ones undeniably changed the way things are done. For this project, we lowered the scale and decided to focus on the impact makers in our community. “What exactly is a community changer” you may ask, well we came up with the definition of someone that thinks differently and pushes our community forward in some way. We then started to look for people that fit into our definition of a community impact maker.
Slowly, everyone found their people of choice, but I was struggling. Hmmm, people that made positive changes in the North Vancouver community, I had difficulties finding an answer to this question because I’ve immigrated here for only 5 years, and I pretty much live under a rock. Some people chose the founder of Capilano suspension bridge, a bakery shop owner, and an indigenous teacher. However, as my people of choice are decreasing, I still had no clue who I’m interested in. So Mrs.Willemse gave me a hint, “Does no one know about the inventor of the Newtsuit? I’m pretty sure he lives on the North Shore.”
I dived straight into research, the inventor of the Newtsuit, aka Phil Nuytten. Interestingly his creation was a great technological advancement in the ocean exploring the industry, and he’s arguably the most prolific inventor in Canada. Since he’s actually quite famous, I found many sources about him on the internet, including a Ted Talk he did. This made my research super easy, and soon enough I was ready to do an interview with him.
I was very excited to do an interview with him, I sent him a zoom invite through email, and I asked him some essential questions for this project.
Interview:
As you can see, he is a very talkative guy, and very passionate about diving. The information he provided was extremely valuable to me, and I’m glad that I had this chance to interview such a successful entrepreneur.
Two weeks before the exhibition, the teachers finally revealed what our final products will look like. We will be making portraits of our people. The portraits have to be representing their impact on our community and answer the DQ. As we expected, I came up with a fantastic idea and escalated it perfectly. I decided to make a recreation of the moon landing, but instead of having a person wearing a space suit in the space, it will be Phil Nuytten wearing the Newtsuit under the ocean, representing his astronomical W.
Since we were in the gym, I had to think of a way to present my portrait on a bigger scale, or else people won’t see it. So I decided to bring my monitor to school, and project my GIF on the monitor with an Apple TV I borrowed from the teachers. My station was assigned to the business group, so we and grade 11s and 12s tried our best to bring out the office vibe. Stock prices on the wall, crappy mint candy, bottles of water, and even an interactive stock game for children.
The biggest improvement I’ve made in this exhibition was presenting my product to the audiences coming to my station. Instead of saying the first things coming to my mind, I had all the important information in bullet point form. Because I came to the exhibition all prepared, I was able to give informative presentations to everyone, combining it with the portrait, it was truly an outstanding project. I wish I did this for the winter exhibition though because I had amazing products to show off, but my presentations weren’t demonstrating my full understating of my topic.
My portait presentation:
“Hi, my name is Randy and this is my person 0f choice, Phil Nuytten. He’s a very successful guy, CEO of many companies, but he’s mainly known for inventing the Newtsuit. Have you ever heard about the Newtsuit? Well, basically what it does is that it allows you to go deep under the ocean without worrying about the bends. The suit isn’t used anymore because there is a new version of it called the Exosuit, but back then the Newtsuit was a very big technological advancement. It allows you to work freely under the ocean, thanks to its creative design of having rotary arms and a jet pack in the back. The company that’s working on the atmospheric diving suit is called Nuytco, located in Lonsdale, North Vancouver. Most atmospheric diving suits in the world are designed in North Vancouver, but a lot of people are unaware of all this stuff happening. Phil Nuytten is really one of the most prolific inventors in Canada, but a lot of people don’t know about him because Phil’s work is mostly used by the navies or commercial companies. In the deep-sea community, everyone knows that North Vancouver is a hotbed for cutting-edge technology. I refer to him as the spaceman under the ocean, because his invention is just as significant as the moon landing. You might think there are no relationships between up in the space, and under the ocean, but in reality, they have a lot of commonalities, they face a lot of the problems, and use similar equipment. Any questions?”
So yeah, this is my last exhibition in grade 10. I educated people on a prolific inventor in Canada that people rarely know about. Hopefully one day I could be as impactful as Phil Nuytten.
Bye