We did math! It’s math class, after all. This unit was focussed on algebra. Algebra: When the alphabet gets incorporated into math to make it more confusing.

Also, are you enjoying the title? I’m proud of it.

(Whoops, that an old meme)

Anyways, back to algebra. We were given the task of created an algebra game using algebra tiles. For anyone who has ever used algebra tiles, you know that this was a pain. And the logistics of making a game is so hard, surprisingly.

Fair warning, before this begins, I have found a series of science gifs and memes to use. You have been warned

So, in case you can’t tell, we did a chemistry unit! This involves a lot of things that I didn’t know a lot about. I know the basics of the periodic table, and what an atom is, but not much else beyond that. Though, I really enjoyed this unit. Though I can’t name specifically what I liked, it was really fun to do.

We learned a lot during this unit, so let me break it down. For starters, we studied the periodic table, along with Bohr diagrams, Lewis structures, and how to do an experiment.

Bohr Diagram

A Bohr diagram is an easy way to show off what the atom of an element looks like. Since we did a lot of work, I’ll show you one of my drawings:

Lets use the Be (Berilluim) as an example. You see how there’s a tiny 4 beside it? That’s how many electrons are in the atom. The rings around the atom are called ‘valence shells’. The closest valence shell can only hold 2 electrons, and the next one after than can hold eight, and then the rest can also only hold eight. So, the Berilluim diagram shows two electrons on the innermost valence shell, and two more in the outer, because there are four electrons.

Lewis Structure

Onto Lewis diagrams. The diagram below shows Four hydrogens bonding with carbon

I feel like that’s fairly simple to understand. The hydrogen and the carbon are sharing electrons, so they’ve bonded.

Lab Procedure

This has a bit more to do with our project, that I’ll explain further down. So, you need to start off a lab with a driving question. Let me use an example we did in class: is there Hydrogen in our breath?

Next, you created a solid hypothesis: Yes, there is Hydrogen in our breath. Obviously there is, but we’re doing an experiment to prove that.

Then, you need your materials. The materials we used were a straw, a beaker, some water, and some bromothymol blue, which turns yellow if it detects acid. Acidic things are acidic due to hydrogen, so the Bromothymol Blue should turn yellow if there’s hydrogen in our breath.

Create a procedure that’s simple and productive. What we did for this was put some of the B.B. (I abbreviated it, so sue me) in water, and then blew air through the straw into the solution.

Then there was the conclusion. We concluded that there was, in fact, hydrogen in our breath because the solution turned yellow, as it does when mixed with hydrogen.

Very attractive.

The Project

To finish off the unit, we had to do a project. We had two choice: created an animated video to show how atoms bond, or create a lab procedure. My group (Hannah and Willa) chose the latter. Let me show you our lab procedure:

Hypothesis for Project:
We think that there will be different levels of acid in each substance.

Materials Needed:

– Bromothymol Blue
– Dirt
– Banana
– Coca Cola
– Pineapple
– Bath bomb
– Beaker
– Water

Theories of acid levels (highest to lowest)
– Pineapple
– Coke
– Bath bomb
– Banana
– Dirt

Actual Ph levels:
-Coke
-Pineapple
-Banana
-Dirt
-Bath Bomb

Cabbage Juice Explanation:

When the cabbage juice reacted with the base (bath bomb), OH particles attached onto the chemicals in the cabbage juice, which caused it to turn a green colour, indicating that it was a base.

When the cabbage juice reacted to any of the acids (pineapple, banana, coke), it gave hydrogen to the anthocyanin, which caused it to turn more and more red depending on how low the pH was.

The anthocyanin in the cabbage juice is what reacts with the H+ and the OH in different products, which in turn causes them to change colour depended on how high or low the pH in each product is. If the pH is below 7, it turns red or pink. If the pH is exactly 7, it will not react, because it’s neutral. If the pH is above 7, it will turn green or yellow.

This is the anthocyanin without having reacted with anything

This is the anthocyanin after having reacted with a base. As you can see, an OH particle has attached on, causing it to turn green.

This is the anthocyanin with acid. It have more hydrogens, causing it to turn pink.

Chemical formulas for acids:

Pineapple: Ethyl butyrate
C6H12O2

Cola: Coca Cola
C30H32N8O10

Banana: Isoamyl acetate
C7H14O2

Chemical formula for base:

Bath bomb: Sodium bicarbonate
NaHCO3

Chemical formula for neutral:

Dirt:
There’s nothing in it to make it acidic or basic

Indicator:

Red Cabbage: Anthocyanin
C15H11O+

Conclusion:

As you can see, all of the acids have some amount of Hydrogen in them. The cola has 32 hydrogens, which shows that it’s the most acidic, and the pineapple has the least, with 12. The sodium bicarbonate in the bath bomb made it basic. The dirt, having nothing in it to make it acidic or basic, was neutral.

Now, this is all fine and dandy, but what was the actual product? Well, I’m glad you asked. (Yes, I understand that I asked for you, but just go with it)

We created a video of our experiment, which turned out really cool:

So, to conclude this unit, we made two mind maps. One was at the start, about what we knew, and then another at the end, to compare what we learned:

Thats all for this post

Read Ya Later

Sincerely, Me

It’s your friendly neighbourhood blogger! Back with another unit end post, and some low quality puns. We did an entire unit on disruption, and how it’s changed the world, mainly through technology.

Let me give you a quick run down on (my thoughts on) disruption: It’s not good, or bad. Disruption is something that helps us move forward, but it can also make us move backwards. For example, the civil right movement with Martin Luther King Jr was big disruption that helped us move forward and talk about racial issues. A bad disruption, however, could be a hypothetical president who’s made out of bad vibes and Cheeto dust.

And what better way to talk about technological disruption than to go to Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley is where places like Facebook and Twitter started. For our trip, we went to San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco.

Want to read more about the trip?

I really benefitted from this trip, because I got to see the real world examples of disruption, like IMB and the Castro.

So, Claire and I were partnered up to take advantage of the field school and do a project on disruption. We got to do a video on the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, and how the habitats are similar to the ones they get in the wild, as well as if the Safari Park would be safer than their actual habitats in the wild.

We got to interview a real nice working at the Safari Park, and heard some amazing stories of animals surviving. And then it came time to make the video.

So, naturally, we made a podcast.

Okay, hear me out. We took a lot of videos, got some good interviews, and even got footage of inside the elephant enclosure:

It was all around a cool experience and a fun day at the safari park. But we felt like our podcast skills were stronger. So, using our fancy new mics, we recorded our voices. We talked about the habitats, how similar they are to the wild, and told a few stories about species surviving better in places like the safari park. One of the stories that we touch on in the podcast is about the California condors. Those used to be an endangered species until the rescue program at the Safari Park came in. Now, they’re thriving. Though, they are quite intimidating.

So, Claire and I made a podcast. It was really fun, and I learned a lot about disruption through the eyes of wild animals and wildlife programs. I’d definitely do a project on this topic again in a heartbeat.

To finish of the unit, we got to write an essay! The driving question was ‘how has technology acted as a disruption throughout history?’ I chose to focus on socialization, and took the stance that it made us less isolated:

Click Write Here (I make bad puns about writing)

This essay was really cool to research, because it’s a topic that I’m interested in. I don’t know why, but I always find the idea of social media helping society really cool. It’s such a useful platform that people can use to contact people around the world. And, as you can see, I’d say it was a good disruption in society.

All in all, I really liked this unit. We got to learn about disruption in so many different ways, from technology, to society, to nature and animals. I’m going to continue looking into articles and books about disruption, such as Little Brother, or Console Wars (talks about the history of Nintendo and Sega. Awesome book).

That’s all for this post

Read Ya Later!

Sincerely, Me

Well hello there! Let me start with the basics: there was no musical at this school, I just wanted to insert a reference into the title.

But, we went to High Tech High! High Tech High is a charter school that allows students to do projects and learn in different ways. Pretty much, it’s PLP all over the school.

We got to attend two days there, and it was really fun! We got paired up with partners, and I got paired up with a nice girl called Nova

Nova’s a grade nine student as High Tech High Media Arts. We bonded right away over Hamilton, Steven Universe, and the fact that I had brought a small thing of cereal to eat (I was hungry, don’t judge me). She had awesome friends (who I didn’t get pictures of… whoops), and we all had great conversations about being general nerds. I felt like I fit right in.

Anyways, back to the post. We got to see how the students learned, what their electives were (Nova’s was DnD. I can respect that), and how their school was different to ours.

So, we got there on the first day, and were greeted with this:

It looks like something out of a movie! I mean, I don’t know what I expected from a California high school. I’m expecting generic teen music to play as I walk down the halls.

Anyways, we got paired up, and got a tour of the campus. It’s so big! They have five different buildings, and there’s art all over the walls.

Next, we did a brainstorm of the difference between HTH and PLP. Some differences were obvious, like the fact that we’re on different sides of the border, or that HTH is way bigger. But some differences were things I didn’t expect, like the fact that they get to run their projects and choose what they do, and that some students live an hour drive away.

Next, we did math… yay. But it was actuallly really cool, because we solved The Locker Problem. During which, I didpoorly at math (what’s new). Though, a really nice guy who’s name I forgot came up to me and was like “hey, I heard you saying you thought you were bad at math. Don’t think that way, all it takes is a little bit of practice and perseverance. Everyone learns differently”. I’m really sorry I forgot this kids name, but he was helpful.

We went to a thing they do called ‘Media Monday’, where we talked about everything from controversies about race and gender, to some sports star kissing his son on the lips. ‘It was really interesting, and I hope we do something like that in class (hint hint, wink wink).

Day two came, and we started off with a debate. We did four corners, where the room is divided into four areas: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree. Then, the teacher would a read a statement. An example: Cola is better than Pepsi. And then, you’d arrange yourself into whatever corner fit your personal opinion. We did this activity surrounding Equal Education. We got into some good debates about different income households get different education, and if we could do something to help equalize the education system.

The next class was Media Arts, where we got to make mini magazines. You printed out four pictures on one page, and folded it to make a booklet. Here’s mine:

We also got to make a podcast! The issue was, HTH is very close to one of the busiest airports in America. So there may be planes in the background. My group got to talk about American vs Canadian stereotypes, which was really funny:

All in all, High Tech High was really fun! I still keep in contact with Nova, and we have great discussions on how we live in -5 degrees and she lives in 34 degrees (celsius. Fahrenheit is too confusing for this blog). I really wish we could go back, and I hope to keep in contact with Nova.

Some good things I experienced at HTH:

– Girl Scout Cookies. Seriously, if you get the chance, eat Samoas. Beautiful.

– They don’t have smarties? Well, they do, but it’s this:

Imposters. And, yes, I can call them imposters. Ours were here first

That’s all

Read ya later

Sincerely, Me

This year, as a class, we went to California! Please, as you listen to this, search up a California related song.

So, we are currently working on a unit about disruption. Disruption has, well, disrupted everything in our life, from technology, to history. It’s what makes us move forward. And what’s a better place to talk about disruption than Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley is where so many big companies started, like Apple and Google. Naturally, we had to go.

Let me do a day-by-day run through for you, to get you all up to speed.

Day One:

We got up at 3:00 am, in order to be at YVR for 4:30. Let’s just say, I needed a lot of coffee. We did a quick stop in Seattle, Robbie almost lost his wallet, and then we were off to San Diego.

We had lunch, and then headed to Torrey Pines Natural Reserve, where we went on a nice walk. Then we headed to dinner, and had some really good food. Then it was off to bed.

Day 2

We went to a safari park! It was really cool, and I wound up making a podcast there… no spoilers. We spent the whole day there, and we got to see a cheetah run at full speed!

We spent the whole day, and I lost my sunglasses 🙁

Day 3

So, next day was the USS Midway. The midway used to be a ship that they used in battle, but is now retired and became a museum. It was really big, and really awesome! We spent the whole day there as well, and still didn’t get to see everything.

Fun Fact: the amount of money it takes to feed everyone on a ship like the midway for a week could send over 40 students to college for 4 years. That’s a lot of money.

Day 4-5

We went to High Tech High! If you’d like to read more about my experiences here, I’ve written another post. Go check that out here!

Day 6

After we flew to San Jose, we got up the next morning and went to google! It was really cool, and also vaguely scary because we were technically just sneaking around the campus. We had lunch, and then headed to Apple Park

We only got to go to the visitors center, but it was still really cool!

After that, we headed to the Intel Museum, which had a history of Intel (shocker).

Day 7

This day, we went to the computer history museum. It was very interesting, as it had a whole rundown of computers. Willa and I got to play pong, and I learned about WoW (World of Warcraft). I’d definetly go there again!

After this, we went to Stanford! Not actually attending classes, because we’re all a bit young for that, but we got a tour by a guy named Chase! Very awesome, though I don’t think I’m gonna go to Stanford.

Day 8

We did a lot of transportation this day. We got in a car, then on a train, then on another train, then on a cable car. And we were in San Francisco! I actually was there over the summer, but we did different things this time.

We went to Twitter Headquarters, and took some stupid pictures

Went To Twitter!

We then headed to the Golden Gate Bridge, and it was really nice! There were sea lions in the water, and it was sunset so we got a nice view.

Day 9

Our last full day was eventful, to say the least. We got a walking tour in the morning from Wild Wes, who was from s company called Wild SF Walking Tours

The afternoon we spent at Alcatraz, which I found to be one of the best parts of the trip. I watched Escape From Alcatraz before this, so it helped put it into context.

We had a cable car adventure…. we hit a car with our cable car. Well, the car hit us by serving infront of it.

And then we headed home

But that’s not where this blog posts ends! No, I made a book! *gasp*

And that’s all I have for you!

Read you later

Sincerely, Me

It’s that time of the year again! mPOLs, SCLs, whatever you want to call them. It’s a time when I reflect on my learning, see what I did well on, what I don’t do that great on, and talk about what I’d like to improve by the end of the year.

Throughout this school year, we’ve done a lot of projects. The start of the year was a bit rough for me, as I feel like I could have put more effort into the work I was putting out there. For example, my Science Podcast. The idea for the podcast was to use the science (wow) of genetics to answer the question “If two sets of twins got married, and had children, would their children look the same?”.

It was a really great idea, but I feel like I executed it poorly. I could have maybe done more research on the topic to understand it better, and put more effort into the actual podcast to make it sound better. Overall, I think this could have really been improved if I had put more effort into it. *cue that gif from Parks and Rec*

There’s been some projects that has shown my growth as a learner, and for this I’m going to pull out an example from Humanities. If you remember from last year’s mPOL (which was called SCL back then), I talked about my goal of improving on my teamwork. I feel like this year, my teamwork has really improved. We did a podcast on homelessness, with a group that I worked really well with (Robbie, Hannah, and Isobel). Our podcast turned out really good, because we all worked equally and were a good team, in my opinion. Teamwork is a really important skill to have, and I feel like PLP has really helped me improve on that. It took a while for me to really understand the aspects of teamwork, and how I could improve on my own skills, and I hope to continue working on it in the future.

While on the topic of my growth as a learner, I’d also like to pull an example from a math project. I feel another thing that I have worked on, but still have a long way to go, is motivation. I’ve found a theme throughout my work is that if I’m not interested in a project, then I don’t bother to find a way to make myself interested. We did two projects in math this year. One of them I did quite well on, the other not so much. The different between is that one of them I found really interesting. That was the one on the golden ratio. I really like this project, because I got to research things about aesthetics, and what makes something visually appealing, and I got to draw (which is always a plus for me). The final product is something I’m very proud of:

The other project was on angles, and solar panels. This one didn’t interest me as much, so I found my motivation to make it as awesome as my golden ratio project was lacking.

It still looks nice, but I didn’t put in as much effort because I just didn’t feel motivated. So I’m hoping for the future to work on making all of my projects my best work, and find a way to make sure I am interested and engaged in whatever the topic is. It’s going to take a lot of work, but I feel like if I find a way to motivate myself into personalizing my work, it can be a lot better.

Let’s end this on a high note. What’s something that I’m really proud of this year? Well, something I’m really proud of would be my introduction video (not yet released to the public eye). When we go down to California in a few weeks, we’ll be meeting students from High Tech High. To be paired with people that would be compatible with us, we had to make a video introducing us. And something that I feel represents a lot of me would be the fact that I love music. So I wound up writing a song about myself, which included a bunch of small facts about me, as well as my interests. I was really proud of this song, not only because it was fun to make, but because it was a huge risk for me. I usually don’t really like sharing anything that I’ve written, such as songs or short stories, so putting this out there was a risk that I took that really paid off.

So I’m certain, throughout this, you’ve noticed a trend: I need to work on motivating myself and putting effort into things that I might not automatically find appealing. So I finish this presentation/post (however you’re viewing this) with a question: what are some ways that I can’t help motivate myself to do projects that I’m not instantly interested in?

That‘s all for this post, until next time

Read You Later

Sincerely, Me

Let me take you back in time, way back in time. To 2017. Okay, not super far back, but it feels like it is and it makes it sound cooler if I say it’s a long time ago. Anyways, we were told that this year, our Blue Sky project would be a bit different. We were paired with a grade twelve to help tell three different stories. This was all based off of StoryCorps (Which, by the way, is really cool. Go check it out), who’s purpose is to tell stories of people who normally wouldn’t get to tell their stories.

So, I was paired with Kirby to tell three different stories: One from our grade twelve partner, one from a family member, and one we’d record on the night of the exhibition. Getting a story from Kirby was easy, she had a really interesting one about how hurt people hurt people:

Then I had to get a story from a family member. Luckily, my mother had the perfect story, about how her biological mother just only recently came into her life after 50 years. I had a small panic as I accidentally deleted this one, so I had to re-record while I was sick (hence why I sound like I’m dying):

Then came the last one. I personally hate socializing (what a shocker), so I was not looking forward to interviewing random strangers about their jobs and hobbies was not my favourite. We had to organize a list of questions beforehand, and I had two (luckily I had a backup plan).

Then came the night of the exhibit. Willa and I (Do I really need to link her blog? You should know who she is by now) got to share a room, which wound up looking pretty cozy with fairy lights and a couch

(I thought I had pictures. I don’t)

Funnily enough, the person I got a story out of was Kirby’s sister. She used to work at Disney World (I’m envious), and she talked about that and her dream job as a kid:

I really liked this, because I love hearing the stories that aren’t very mainstream, but still mean something to someone. I hoped you enjoyed hearing these stories, and you should go check out StoryCorps (not sponsored)

Read Ya Later

Sincerely, Me

Just kidding, sorry for the disappointment. It’s your friendly neighbourhood blogger! So, first of all, HAPPY 2018!

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, time to talk Humanities. We were assigned homework over the break (luckily not that bad). We had to read the book  Little Brother which I personally really enjoyed. It’s about a teenager called Marcus, who gets blamed for a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge in San Fransisco. I’ve actually been to San Fransisco, so this was cool to read and be like “oh yeah we rented a house in Mission” or “I have seen the Bay Bridge from a moderate distance”. And the plot was also interesting, though I’m not going to give spoilers (you can probably download the book for free somewhere).

Anyways, we were just assigned a research project. Ms. Maxwell gave us a list of things mentioned in the book, some having to do with coding and cryptography, and some having nothing to do with that. For instance, the Wonderful Willa of Oz did a research project in the Scoville Scale (how spicy something is).

I got the topic of Alan Turing. They mention it in the book because the book is all about coding, which is what Alan Turing really helped advance, by creating the Turing Machine, which would later be known as a computer.

So, for those of you confused, my title spells out ‘Alan Turing’, encrypted by this enigma machine website.

They don’t mention Alan Turing much in the book, just a brief description:

“The Nazi cipher was called Enigma, and they used a little mechanical computer called an Enigma Machine to scramble and unscramble the messages they got. Every sub and boat and station needed one of these, so it was inevitable that eventually the Allies would get their hands on one.
When they did, they cracked it. That work was led by my personal all-time hero, a guy named Alan Turing, who pretty much invented computers as we know them today. Unfortunately for him, he was gay, so after the war ended, the stupid British government forced him to get shot up with hormones to “cure” his homosexuality and he killed himself.”

Excerpt From
Little Brother
Doctorow, Cory
This material may be protected by copyright.

So that’s a brief summary of what Alan Turing is known for. A movie was actually made about him, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Kiera Knightly, called The Imitation Game, Which was really good. I recommend you watch it (illegally online).

So Alan Turing was born on June 23rd, in 1912 (he would have been 106 this year). He was really smart, and started showing it at a young age. His teachers did recognize it, but didn’t really do much about it, which I guess tells you about how great the education system in 1912 was. He went to Sherborne School when he was 13, and got really into math and science. He got into Kings College, Which is now University of Cambridge, and was there from 1931-1934.

While attenting Kings, he actually proved the central limit theorum, and was elected a fellow upon his grad. He studied math and cryptology for the next two years in New Jersey (cue New Yorkers complaining), and he received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1938

In 1939 he wrote a paper “On Computanld Numbers, with an Application to the Entsheidungsproblem”. For those of you who think that last word was me horribly misspelling something, allow this think to prove you wrong. In his paper, he proposed the idea for the Universal Turing Machine, named after himself. This machine was supposed to be capable of computing anything that is computable. Pretty much Decoder-Ex-Machina.

Then World War II struck, and Turing was called to Bletchley Park (I suggest googling it, the results page has a little secret in store), where he helped code break German cyphers. He made five major advances in cryptanalysis, and he put his Turing Machine to work. Some people have estimated that because of his help to crack the Enigma code the Germans had made, Alan Turing and his team helped stopped the war two years before it would have if he hadn’t been there. His Turing Machine wasn’t small, either. If you complain about the ancient computers from the 90’s being bulky, look at this:

Once the war was over, he moved to London and began to work for the National Physical Laboratory, where he led the design work for the Automatic Computing Engine, And breaded a blueprint for store-program computers. Unfortunately, a full version of his blueprint was never built, but the concept was used by technology corporations worldwide for years. It actually influenced the design of the English Electric DEUCE, which was the first ever British commercially sold computer. Another thing he’s well known for is the Turing Test, or the Imitation Game (roll credits), which  has lead to many of discussions on Artificial Intelligence.

Lets skip forward to 1952, where things started to go downhill for Alan Turing. An ex of his, 19-year-old Arnold Murray, broke into his house. Naturally, Turing called the police, and told them that he and Murray had had sexual relationship. The government wasn’t exactly great back then, and by ‘not exactly great’ I mean they arrested him for being gay. Turing was forced to choose between either temporary probation, on the condition that he got hormonal treatment, or he’d g to jail. Turing chose hormonal treatment.

His life spiralled from there, some saying he even developed depression. He wasn’t allowed to work his job anymore, and the drugs made him impotent. Turing eventually killed himself with cyanide on June 7th, 1954. He was only pardoned for his ‘crime’ in 2013, almost 60 years after he died. They called it the Turing Law, which pardoned over 50, 000 gay men who were convicted. Oscar Wilde was among those pardoned.

Well I really hope you learned something today. This was really interesting for me to research, because it shows just how different things were for LGBTQ+ people back then, as well as he did so much to help us win WWII. I feel like Alan Turing doesn’t get as much recognition as he should.

And that’s all I have for you this blog post! Go watch the Imitation Game, it’s really good and goes into depth about what happened during WWII. And it’s got Benedict Cumberbatch, so you can’t go wrong.

Anyways, read you later!

Sincerely, Me

Alas, it’s the end of another unit, and close to the end of 2017.

For the most part, social studies has never been something I’ve been interested it. There’s the occasional history fact that catches my eye, or an assignment that I enjoy, but it’s rare that I’m as excited as I was for this unit.

Our unit this year was called Sins of the City, based off of this museum exhibit. So, we started this off my going to that exhibit. Social justice is something that’s always interested me, so this was really cool to see how it progressed throughout the ages. One part of the sumeum had the history of Canada, from when the First Nations were the only on here to about the 60’s. I think one of my favourite parts about that section was the cool car they had in the 50’s area:

I really like vintage cars.

Anyways, we then carried on into the social justice area, the Sins of the City. It covered everything, from women’s rights, to labour rights, to LGBTQ+, First Nations, immigrants, and everything in between. We had to focus on an issue in the interwar years (1919-1939).

I found a few things that interested me. Women’s rights infind very interesting, because it’s suck a broad topic that you can get lost in research for hours. LGBTQ+ rights hits home for me, as a member of the community. I found this story on the wall, that I had originally wanted to base my project around:

Another part I really liked was the graffiti stairs. They had chalk, and you could simply write whatever you wanted on it. There were some powerful messages on there, and it really showed what Vancouver valued, from sayings such as ‘love is love’, to ‘womens rights’, and more.

This picture above is just something that wound up happening. How? I honestly don’t know.

There was so much more to the exhibit, but that would take a while to write. So, moving on. When we got back, we had to pick three things we wanted to do our project on. My choices wound up being LGBTQ+ rights (wow, what a shocker), Women’s rights, and Immigration rights.

I was put in the Human Rights group, with Hannah, Isobel and Robbie

At first, we wanted to do a podcast on Women’s voting rights. Though, it just wasn’t a strong enough idea, we couldn’t think of enough. So we went deeper. Possibly women portrayed in the media? No. Women in comic books? As much as I liked that idea, we couldn’t find anything.

I guess you could say we were in a bit of a jam

But then, it dawned upon us. Well, it dawned upon Isobel, but this is a group project so we’re all gonna take credit for it. We were going to talk about Homelessness. Currently, in Marpole, there’s a homeless shelter being built across the street from an elementary school. Obviously, there’s a bit of controversy about that. And in the Great Depression, so many people were homeless. So we had found our topic, at last.

Then we had to tackle it. Here’s the project: create a 5-7 minute podcast highlighting the topic chosen (in our case, homelessness). Find a story from today, and relate it back to the interwar years. Everyone needs to talk, and there should be interviews.

And we were off. We started off with a solid script, talking about the issue in Marpole, and then about the Great Depression, and we figured out who to interview. Our plan was to split up scripted bits with us having an unscripted discussion. When he headed over to Robbie’s house to record…. our discussion was 8 minutes long. So, we changed it. We had a small scripted intro, and then it went into the discussion. Our discussion was so strong, that it covered everything we said in the scripted bits, but it was just better. So we kept it, and scrapped the script.

This turned out for the better, in my opinion, because it made our podcast stronger. There wasn’t a sheet of paper telling us what to do, it was just our opinions on the matter.

Hannah got an interview with a lady called Tannis, who works with homeless people all the time. She was really nice and helpful.

So, we handed in our first draft of the podcast. I wasn’t there when the critique was given, but I saw it in showbie. I took on the editing for draft two, tweaking things like audio and adding in more things.

Draft three was pretty much the final thing, just a few more audio adjustments and we were good!

Then, we had to send in to our interviewee, Tannis. Her email response is shown below:

And that was it…. almost. We had one more thing to do: write an essay. We did this last year, though this time it was different. We were originally going to do reading responses to books we had read in class (my group read The Bite Of The Mango, a really good book), but then the assignment changed. We were going to write a letter, to Terry Beech, our member of parliament. My essay tackled the topic that the public isn’t informed on homelessness. I proposed an ad campaign, to help raise awareness for homeless people and what they’re going through.

We wrote those essays, and then our group combined it into one letter to send:

And that was the final touch to this unit! All in all, I really enjoyed it. It was interesting to learn about homelessness, which I didn’t know much about. I hope to do more projects like this in the future!

If you’d like, here’s a small recap video of the unit, including some embarassing videos of me eating a muffin:

Read You Later

Sincerey, Me

IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE DECEMBER

So, another math post. This one is about this wonderful thing called the Golden Ratio, or the Holy Ratio (hence the Batman title).

Lets start with the basics: What is the golden ratio? Well, it’s pretty much a math term that applies to almost every form of art. The actual golden ratio is 1 : 1.68. This can apply to most forms of art:

If you’d like to read more, you can go to the Golden Ratio Website

So, we had to do a project on all of this, and the Fibonacci Spiral. This meant we had to create our own original form of art that had the golden ratio and Fibonacci Spiral somewhere in it. After doing a bit of math on ratios, that’s when we started.

My original idea was a cave, because caves are dank.

Anyways, this was what my first idea was:

Though, it needed more. I was at a loss, and I let the project drag on with no additions. And then it hit me.

I decided to add a dragon in. Because… why not, it’s a dragon. Who needs to explain that.

So, you’re probably thinking ‘but how does this show the spiral?’. Well, I’m about to blow your mind

So, as you can see, I completed this math project quite well. I’m really proud of how it turned out, especially since I can’t draw dragons for the life of me.

Well, that’s all for this blog post

Read You Later

Sincerely, Me