So last week PLP 10 went on a field trip to the BC Tech Summit, it was held downtown in the convention centre and was there for two days. We went for the second day which was more for the “kids”. We mainly walked around the convention centre talking to young entrepreneurs about their start up company’s or how they are involved in the community. Walking into this experience I didn’t really know why we were going but I’m really glad we got the chance to go. I had a great time walking around the building either playing the games the entrepreneurs had set up or just talking to them about their company, my favourite company that I had found was called frontrvnners. They are a start up clothing company in vancouver, they make and design all their clothes in Vancouver. This really interested me as they had actually got famous rappers like Nav to wear their clothing and advertise them. I’m really into clothing and I had a great talk with their workers. They weren’t just focused on making clothing they also landed deals with artists and photographers that are well known to help build their company. 

We we then went into a main hall and sat down to listen to the main entrepreneurs talk, there were lost of motivational speakers talking about their life stories. My favourite guy who came on stage was probably Brent Bushnell, he introduced his company the Two Bit Circus. Two Bit Circus focuses on virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. What really interested me was that his company has already been making really cool music videos online, the video they made is very impressive and overall he seemed like a really nice genuine guy. After watching a couple more presentations. Another presentation that stood out to me was David Katz, he’s the CEO of Plastic Bank. He started off his presentation with very deep and thoughtful ideas “the last thing the world needs to do is clean the ocean, because we need to first turn off the tap”. I wasn’t exactly sure if I liked his company and the idea of it as he takes ocean plastic and sells it but he poctects a lot of money off of it instead of it being non profit.  He seemed nice and live sin our community of deep cove but I just wasn’t sure on his company.

 

This is whole experience was very interesting and fun, I hope in the future years of PLP we go to more events like this because I actually learned more about my city and the whole industry of companies and how they work. I also got a lot of free cool merchandise and met really cool people. I had a great time at the BC Tech Summit and would actually like to go again, I learned a lot from listen g to all the motivational speakers. Looking back I can just remember all the great experiences I had at the Tech Summit.

 

Since we finished our unit on WWl we had been discussing the idea of doing a WWll unit, this blog post will go over the whole experience of creating the final project of this unit.

This unit was very different than all the others this year, there were so many different components. Usually we’ll have a book review and then a podcast or video at the end of the unit showing off what we learned. This unit we both of those and even more, we started off this unit were we left off in the WWl unit. We learned about the after effects of WWl and how it impacted the world leading into WWll. We did lots of research at the begging of the unit so we knew just what WWll was all about. At the same time we had to read a book revolving around different perspectives in WWll, I was in the group for Code Name Verity, after finishing the book we had to create book reviews. You can read mine here.

The main assignment for this project was to make a website, within this website there would be  different pages holding the different countries that were involved in WWll. Each country would be a group of students, the pages within each country would show that countries perspective of the war and other facts about the country. I was in the German group with Sam, Sofia, and Adam.

Unfortunately I was very sick at the beginning of this project before spring break, so when I got back to school I had just been introduced to the project while everyone else had already been working on it. While we researched about are countries we had to take note of which exact websites we were using as we would be citing our sources later in the website.

In class we had to learn exactly how to cite websites, videos, and books properly so that we could use the information we learned from them in our website. Learning how to cite wasn’t fun or interesting to me at all but it’s very very important to know. Later on in this project we would be presenting our website to a World War enthusiast who knows lots about WWll, so while making this website we were very careful and always double checked our notes. We still had a couple more variables to do within this project, One of those variables would be a podcast. The podcast would revolve around a WWll veteran Helmut Lemke coming into our class and telling us his story. We had written some questions that we had given him and he answered them to the best of his ability. After the interview we had to choose a section of the audio recording and turn it into a podcast, you can listen to mine below. This experience really helped me with the Germany page as he gave us his perspective of the war, it really helped me write and put myself in the perspective of a World War Two German. 

We edited our website through a application called weebly, it didn’t work very well on the iPads as it would glitch out and delete our progress. When we tried using it on the computers it worked very nicely and it was very easy to make our website. The app is very smooth and easy to follow for any type of person. We then had to format our page so that it looked the same as everyone’s page. We broke up our text with a good amount with images, and created sections and heading under each section. We revised out page several times so that it looked as good as possible, and so it was also easy to follow.

You can view our website here

We then had to present our website as a class to Ms Kathleen Barter, our teacher Ms Maxwells old English teacher. We all introduced ourself and then went to the front of the class in our groups. My group did well but as we were first up we didn’t really know how it was going to work. It was a great experience as we worked on our presentation skills. This unit was probably in my eyes one of the biggest units we’ve ever had, within this one project we had so many mini assignments. I gained so much knowledge throughout this whole unit and gained upon so many skills. This project was very fun and I can’t wait to see what the last unit of the year will be about.