On Thursday June 15th PLP held the second and final Blue Sky presentation of 2017, the presentation area was divided into four sections. Toddlers, Tweens, Pets, Seniors and the grade elevens debate area. The grade eights and nines where given the task of finding their own inquiry question, we where given a couple age groups to work within as we couldn’t solve any problems within the “teenager” and “parent/adult” age groups. We had a couple days to brainstorm ideas and thoughts towards what we actually wanted to solve and make, personally it was very hard for me to find a question to solve. I knew I wanted to somehow help my grandparents but I just didn’t know how, my grandparents where on a trip in Argentina and calling them was pretty hard so I was left with researching online. I was interested in making some form of organizer for an elderly person with dementia but didn’t know where to start so I looked in another direction.

Elderly people with shaky hands usually will have a problem with taking their medicine, due to they’re shaky hands they’ll spill the medicine by knocking over the bottle or they won’t be able to get the correct amount of medication and take too much or little. I wanted to create something that would help with keeping type bottle in one place and also help stabilize they elderly hands to help with the dosage problem. I then decided to start planning what my project would look like by designing my first draft, I wanted to keep the design simple and easy to use for the elder but still look clean and nice. Designing the product wasn’t to hard but going out and buying my supplies was quite the challenge, I wasn’t sure what materials to get and what would work so my three drafts are quite different. My first draft is pretty similar to the last and the second draft is my least favourite, to me it looks very ugly and unimpractical but each draft served a purpose, to get closer to the end goal and solve the problem. My final draft still doesn’t look incredible but it works very well and I am proud of what I have accomplished.

Also at blue sky we had our projects divided into groups, my group was the seniors and we had to create a theme to our area. We decided on Tim Hortons as seniors usually like eating there, we bought Tim bits and doughnuts for food that people could have after watching our projects. This was my second time doing blue sky and I can say that I am much better at public presenting and overall talking to people, about a week earlier I had my things i carry presentation and that definitely helped me a lot with presenting projects. I learned a lot about how to talk to an audience and how to make a presentation better flowing/more interesting to watch, my second time at blue sky was a lot more natural and I knew what it was going to be like. My first blue sky was very different to me as a didn’t really know what it was going to be like, I still did very well the first time but I can see how I’ve improved over the year. Blue sky is a great way to show of your problem solving skills and is a really fun way to create something that you actually want to create, I really liked showing off my hard work. This year it felt like less people came to see my presentation but the people that did come and watch stayed a lot longer and actually asked questions about my project, they seemed way more engaged and it was really nice to know that they where interested in my ideas. Next year I hope to have an even better experience with Blue sky and have and even better project, I also hope to improve my presentation skills further so that I can do even better.

We also had our Science projects displayed in the hallway near our projects, the idea of this project was that we were learning about the cell and all the parts of the cell. We wanted to display this on a poster somehow so we decided to present it like a city, all the parts of the cell act like a part in a city and this poster shows that as a project