My Favourite MPOL

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Hey y’all welcome back. Tis the MPOL season.

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

MPOLS are all about growth, and you know what? I think I’ve grown a lot. So that’s what this post is all about.

Let’s compare: what did my work look like last year?

Last year, I wasn’t very invested in my own growth. I didn’t try my best, I didn’t care about my work, and I wasn’t ever proud of my work. Everything was a halfhearted attempt because I didn’t really care about school. An example of this is in the humanities project New Beginnings, when we made our visuals to represent an aspect of New France. I chose survival.

What does my work look like this year?

Well, I care a lot more this year. I try my best to try my best, and I work as hard as I can to hand in good quality work in a timely manner. While I don’t feel the most motivated because I’m not as surrounded by my friends in the classroom due to them being in different classes, I’ve been pushing through and I’m glad that I’ve been able to produce good work that I’m proud of. For example, I was really proud of my work in the Power of Geography, because I feel my finished product really showed my thought process throughout the project.

What do I want my work to look like in the future?

So right now, my work is something I’m proud of, and I put a concerted effort into the things I do. In the future, I want it to stay that way, but I also want to make use of my time better as well. I want to be able to get all my work done in class, and I want to be happy with my work all the time.

I’d like to especially talk about how much better at time management and organization I’ve gotten since last year. I’ve handed in almost nothing late, and I’ve given myself enough time to create work that I value and I’m happy with. I feel on top of my work, and it’s really helping me with my mindset at school.

Last year, we learned all about growth mindsets or the “PLP mindset.” This is a mindset of growth, a mindset where you’re ready to tackle the tasks you’re given, and try your best in the things you do. It’s also about looking to the future and knowing how you want to be, and making a plan for yourself to get to the point you want to be at. When we first learned about the PLP mindset, I thought it was a bunch of junk that we get told to motivate us to put more effort into our work. Or at least it was something I didn’t have and I’d just have to go on the way I was: handing in my work late, it being rushed, and not being happy with it. Somewhere between then and the start of this year, I lost that mindset and took on the PLP mindset. I come to school ready to try my best and put in a real effort. I actually care about my work and doing my best, and I really try to hand everything in on time.

Looking to the future, I’m ready to head there and see what it has to offer. I’m excited to grow as a person and a learner, and I hope I improve in the same ways that I already have. 

One thing I could really grow on is my interaction with my peers and teachers. Sometimes in class, I’m really distracting to people because I get off task. Usually, I can redirect myself and still get my work done in class, but it’s really distracting to the others. It also comes off as disrespectful to my teachers when that’s not what I’m trying to do. My goal for the rest of the year is to improve on this by always making sure I’m working on what I need to get done for the class while I’m in class.

I think that over the course of this semester, I’ve grown a lot, not only as a learner but as a person, too. And even though I’ve grown a lot, I also know that I can still continue to grow, learn, and thrive throughout the rest of the year and even farther into the future. I’m excited to see where my growth takes me.

Thank you, 

Susan

We Put a Revolution on Trial… Kinda

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How do revolutions bring down empires and change societies around the world? Well, before this project, I could’ve given you some rambling, wordy answer about Hamilton (the musical) because I had an obsession with it in Grade 7 and 8. Now that I’ve gone through this project, I can tell you all about revolutions and the full answer to the question. That’s what I’m going to do now.

What is a revolution? That’s kind of what the first activity in this project taught me. If you read my blog post about Nation X (click here to read) then you would know how I learned this. If you don’t want to read it, basically we did a simulation of a society. I was placed in the upper class, and there were a couple people placed in the top class, as members of the king’s court. There were a bunch of people placed in the two classes below me. The top class got paid $10/day, The class I was in was paid $5/day, the class below got $3/day, and the lowest class got $1/day. Basically different challenges in society had to be faced, but in facing those challenges, people were treated unequally and society fell apart, with people fighting one another and many deaths. What happened was basically a revolution. Now, how can we describe and define a revolution?

To do this, we made diagrams that reflected Crane Brinton’s anatomy of a revolution. I chose to do a hamster on a wheel, falling off and then starting over. Here’s the diagram:

After we did this, we chose which revolution we wanted to work on for the whole project. I chose the American revolution, mostly because I already knew a little bit about it from my past obsession with Hamilton that I mentioned, and I was really interested in digging deeper.

Once we chose our revolutions, we got straight to work making graphic organizers about them. Here’s mine:

As you can see, the graphic organizer basically gives you a crash course on the American revolution. The research I did to create it told me almost everything I needed to know for the whole project. 

After that, we started to work on our affidavit. We chose the evidence we would feature and our arguments. At first, I was a little bit confused with what I was arguing for, but me, Cameron L, Jupiter, and Jessie pulled through arguing for the American Revolution being effective. I applied my research from the graphic organizer into the affidavit. It turned out really good and we had a pretty good argument. In the mock trial, we were going against Charlie M, Julia, Keaton, Silas, and Magnus, Makai. They were saying that the revolution was ineffective.

Once we had finished our affidavit, we started working on a script for the mock trial. Very soon after we started working on it, Mr. Harris, the DRI (directly responsible individual) of the project, had to leave because he was having a baby! Sadly, because he was gone, we had to pivot the project. Instead of doing a mock trial in front of our parents, we started working on a video. We were still writing the scripts in collaboration with the ineffective side, but for a video of a trial as opposed to an actual mock trial in real life. After about a week, though, we pivoted again. We started working on scripts as just our side of the argument. We did it more like the show Court Cam. We were given a due date for our videos and then Ms Maxwell spliced our video with the ineffective argument’s video.

I used my class time very efficiently during this project. The only time I handed anything in late was my graphic organizer, because I was sick for a lot of the days we were working on it. I’m proud of how I used my time well. I’m not quite as proud of our finished project. I feel like it wasn’t the best that it could’ve been, and our group could’ve put more effort into it. Next time, I’ll strive to be at the point where our group is putting a full effort, or at least I am.

Thank you for reading my blog post!

Peace out,

Susan

Exhibition and Racism – What a Way to End 2022

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What does James Cameron’s fantasy world of Avatar reveal about society today? Well, up until this last project, I didn’t even know what Avatar was about. I’m going to assume that you don’t, either.

Basically, Avatar is a movie about this guy. His name is Jake Sully. Jake’s twin brother was a scientist, but he died, and since they shared DNA, they sent Jake to take over his brother’s job. Jake got sent to Pandora, a far off planet, to transfer his consciousness temporarily to the body of a different species – the Na’Vi, a race of humanoids that are blue and have tails. He gets lost and runs into Neytiri, who is the daughter of the leader of the Na’Vi. Neytiri saves his life and brings him to the clan. It’s decided that he can learn the ways of the Na’Vi. He learns all about the flow of energy and respecting the world around him – which is a completely different worldview than what the humans have. After that, the rest of the humans start fully colonizing the place: destroying their home and all the land around it in an attempt to get to unobtainium, a rare mineral buried under the home of the Na’Vi. In the end, Jake basically switches sides and fights the humans alongside the Na’Vi – but he’s still an easy target, because at the click of a button, his consciousness can be removed from the Na’Vi body and back into his human body, a much weaker form of himself. Anyways, there’s a lot of gritty details but in the end the Na’Vi win and Jake has his consciousness permanently transferred to his Na’Vi body. Oh yeah and he fell in love with Neytiri, but that’s a completely different part of the story that you can see by watching the movie.

The film was full of different themes, and it was really easy to sort of sift through them and get a deeper look into it. For this project specifically, we had to choose a theme we saw and work through it along with others looking at the same themes. The theme I chose was racism, because it’s a relevant issue in society today and it was shown very clearly in the movie. 

Our final product for this project was a documentary showcasing our theme and how it connects Avatar and the real world. We spend about 2 weeks working on this video. We conducted interviews, collected clips from Avatar, and learned about making videos. Here’s my video:

In the video, I touched on the racist terms used in Avatar that can easily connect to the real world. I also talked about micro aggressions and blatant racism, and I found recent stories to look at. I interviewed 2 people of different ages, which helps show what different kinds of people experience.

Something I didn’t talk enough about in my documentary was how the film itself could be racist. While I was researching for my video, I stumbled across an article that mentioned the people are finding it controversial. I didn’t pay much attention to it and moved past to other articles, but it kind of stayed in the back of my mind. What could that mean? If it’s bringing issues like racism into the spotlight, how can it possibly be bad? After the exhibition, the thought sort of started to snowball and now there’s this whole idea that I have.

The first idea that anyone put into my head was about the plot line. This is because they thought that it’s “just another movie where there’s a race that needs help and a white guy swoops in and saves them.” I see where the point can go, but there’s really not much other evidence to back it up, because you don’t see many other similar cases in the film and it could just be dumb luck that Jake is white. After pushing the thought to the side for later, I realized something. I didn’t see many people of colour throughout the entire movie. I saw white people, and the blue Na’Vi people, but looking back, I can remember only noticing one face that was a person of colour, and he was a background character in one of the scenes with all the people in the military. This bring another question into light: was this intentional, or just showing actual racism in the real world? Obviously, because of discrimination, it would be more of a struggle for a person of colour to get to the point that they can have a role in a big movie like Avatar, but to that extreme? Or did James Cameron sit down and say, “hey, maybe we can make racism even more of a central theme in this movie by showing less people of colour.” Because if so, it worked, and it shows that the humans in the movie, despite being 100 years ahead of us, still display a discriminatory nature. 

Looking into the cast of the movie, there are actually many people of colour. But most of the main roles played by people of colour are Na’Vi people in the movie – so they’re covered in effects and CGI so much so that skin colour does not matter to the role at all, and has no impact on the racist theme in the movie. Almost all of the main human roles are white, which makes me think that it was planned by James Cameron. However, I’ll never know unless someone asks him themself.

Anyways, that’s a lot of my thinking on the racism portrayed in the movie. Once we finished our documentaries, we started planning for the exhibition. In order to show how privilege works, and how some people get an easier starting point than others, we had two sides of the room. On the side I was placed in, there was a game where you throw a ping pong ball into a box through the holes. On our side, you were close to the box, and got more of the prize for doing it successfully. On the other side, it was dark, you were farther away, and you got less of the prize even though you had to put more effort in. The other grade 9’s on our side were Silas and Mackenzie. We set up the room to showcase the work of the grade 10’s and 8’s. It was nice because everyone in the room had chosen to dig deeper into the theme of racism.

I believe that the theme that everyone chose really says something about those people, and specifically, their worldviews. I think that because that’s true, everyone in our room worked well together and it was really nice working with a great group of people with similar views and values to mine. It was really interesting to have a look at a movie and be able to apply it to the real world. In some ways, the line between the fictional and real world blurred. Maybe it’s because the fictional world is supposed to be like this world, but in the future. I really hope that it isn’t our future, though. I hope that we can advance our views and how we treat other people so that one day, we don’t have all the crazy technology that’s in the movie but not be able to treat everyone with the proper respect they deserve.

Maybe I’m ranting a bit too much.

Susan

Nation X: The Diary

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Hey guys, welcome back to my blog. In humanities, we just started a new project. It was started with a blind launch with a simulation. We were placed into a society with different classes. Here is my character’s diary of the experiences I had:

This diary belongs to: Susan E.

If found, alert authorities, and they will know what to do with it.

October 31 (Day 1)

Today was an eventful day. The first thing that happened was me finding out that I’m in the nobility (group c.) This means I have many freedoms and many more dollars. I spent almost my whole paycheck on a lemonade to fuel my body for the day. I only had a dollar left, and I kept it safe to begin my day with the power that I have. Since I’m a part of the law enforcement, I have the ability to arrest people in the lower classes (group a and b.) I can arrest them for anything (or nothing,) and as long as the majority of group c or the king doesn’t disagree or doesn’t know, they can’t stop me. It’s not like I’m going to use that, though. Group b is thriving because they’re selling well at the shop, but group a is struggling. They make $1 per day, and the tax is $1 per day. Because my job also includes tax collecting, I chose to pay their tax for them for today. My life goal right now is to help them out and improve their quality of life. Currently, they don’t even have chairs to sit on! Today, I tried to talk to the noble King Luca about it, but he was too busy with other kingly duties. That was okay, and I decided to talk with him again tomorrow. For now, I’m getting ready to sleep. I feel content in what I’ve started today, and I’m excited to get back to work tomorrow.

November 1 (Day 2)

Today I did another good deed. I bought some food for some members of group a, and asked for donations for them from group b. Since group b has so much money, I collected donations for group a from them. I also gave the remainder of my money to group a at the end of the day, because they’re not very well off. Today also wasn’t super eventful, but the prices in the shop went up because there isn’t a lot of food to go around. There are mobility restrictions for group a, where they can only leave their territory to buy things from the shop, but it’s a bit of an issue because they don’t have enough money to buy things in the shop. So basically they’re trapped in their territory. Until we get the king to step in a bit, we’re kind of screwed. I’ve got to go off to sleep to feel refreshed for tomorrow.

November 3 (Day 4)

Yesterday, I completely slept through the day. I was just so tired. Today we found out about a disease sweeping our nation. This disease is highly contagious. We located traces of it in group a. Since no one has really been unlawful, we converted the jail into a temporary quarantine for the infected. So far, only 2 are infected. The two are Ronan and Kadin, and they’re both quarantining until we have a cure. The king is looking towards getting a cure, and decided that the uninfected members of group a will work on making a cure. Originally, I thought this was a good idea because they can make money from it. Looking back, though, it’s kind of a bad idea because group a shouldn’t have to be working long and hard hours just to help out their friends a little bit. A temporary cure got found, but just now we found out that it was a fraud and the disease has spread even more because we let the “cured” out of quarantine. I also got a gift for Kadin and Ronan to celebrate their perseverance through the disease. Other than that, nothing else really happened today. Tomorrow I will bring change and help group a get back on their feet. I’m really tired, but now I’m going to bed.

November 4 (Day 5)

Today, we got a special news bulletin about the disease. More are infected and today Kadin died. That is the least of the action, though. We found out nation Y, our neighbours, are on the rise and starting to attack our borders. The king and his court have received weapons, one of which is a very dangerous axe. I also just found out that they have had a cure for the disease for a while, but kept it from the rest of us, which killed one of the group a members in turn. I talked with the members of group a and b and we decided to assassinate the king and his court. A few minutes later my friend Owen, a fellow group c member, asked me if I wanted to kill the king and his court. I went up to them and told them I was there to kill them, while holding out my gun. I shot, but they all have very strong armour. I maimed Dylan, who was in our group but working for the king. They all told Owen to kill me to prove that he worked for them. The traitor shot me, and I collapsed, unconscious. I was almost dead, and they completely looted my body, but once they all left, I was able to crawl all the way to group a. I knew that they had medicine and I would have a higher chance of survival if I went to them. They told me that if I joined them, they would save me. I had no choice, but I thought it was a good idea anyways, so I agreed. The kind souls saved my lives. We received word from nation Y that they wanted us to join them. We were willing, but we had no way to get there without going through the king and his court, who would kill me on sight. Eventually, they came over to group a and killed my new friends, my saviours. I ran away and hid. Right now, I’m sitting in a little shack I built myself in the woods, far off from nation X, nation Y, and any other civilization. I’m on my own and I’m going to spend the rest of my days in peace, knowing that I’m safe in the woods using my survival skills.

Thank you for reading through my diary of nation X (renamed to Nation King Cool, which is a name I do not acknowledge because of the disgraced, dethroned, king)

-Susan

These Videos Aren’t All Vibrant

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Hello and welcome back to my blog! Today I’m going to be writing about my most recent maker project: Vibrant Videos! Vibrant Videos was a project that we’ve been working on for a while, about, you guessed it, some vibrant videos. We also learned about setting goals.

The essential question to this project was “how can I use my video skills to tell a story?” You’ll be able to figure out how I answered this for myself over the course of this project through the rest of this blog post.

We started out this project by reading a book about setting goals. Within this book we did a few activities about ourselves, our goals, and our dreams.

One of the first main activities we did was a form called “what inspires me?” In it, we answered questions about our likes, dislikes, favourite things, etc. Then, the next day, we learned skill #1 in video making: clips. Clips is an app for video making that we had to use for this. In clips, you can import videos, film videos, import photos, add text and stickers, and so much more. Here is the video that I made about what inspires me, using my clips skills:

I did really well on this because I told a story and included different titles. I also drew a few images to help explain what I was saying, and as an extension, I explained not just the what, but the why, as well. 

Our next moviemaking assignment was a silent film. This silent film had to portray a “goal getters” story – a story about someone reaching a goal. Some people used one from their own life, while others, like my group, used a story that was in the book. The people in my group were Julia, Evangeline, and Owen. Here is our silent film:

I think we did well on this because we were able to tell the story without even speaking! We used clips to make this video as well, and aided the silent film with some music.

After this, we took a quick swerve in a different direction with this project. Because the exhibition for our humanities project (here’s my blog post on the Power of Geography,) we made different videos to be played at the exhibition. I was in the group for the fun video, which basically showed the highlights of our trip. The people in my group were Jackson, Keenan, Jasper, Cameron B, and Julia. Here’s the video:

After the exhibition, we got back on track with the project. The next assignment was actually not a video. Instead, it was a goal ladder, which is a ladder that shows the steps you must take to get to the top (your goal) on each rung. Here’s mine on getting a standing back tuck in gymnastics:

I’ve already completed the first step, and I made sure to time each step so I wouldn’t forget about my goal. I also included some rewards for myself to motivate myself to complete the goal.

Next, we had our very last video of the project: skill #3, planning and shooting. In this skill, we needed to learn how to make a storyboard and follow it. We made this video in a group, and my fellow group members were Silas and Ronan. The video was a tutorial, and the goal was to show one of these three topics: how to set goals, how to be a “goal getter,” and how to stay on track. We chose how to set goals. Here is our video:

After all that, we moved on to our last assignment, AKA this blog post. I’m very proud of my work in this project and I hope my work in maker continues to be this good all the way through to next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.

See you next time,

Susan

Geography Can Definitely Be Powerful

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When I started this project, I didn’t really know what geography was. I mean, I had the start of an idea, but I really didn’t know what it was. The first thing I learned about geography in this project was how it can be defined by the 5 themes. These themes are place, regions, location, human-environment interaction, and movement. Over the course of this project, I learned what all of it means and how it can apply to geography. Evidence of this is shown in my multi-touch e-book, which will show up later in this post. 

I also answered a very important question. Did you think I forgot about the driving question? *Gasp* I would never!! The driving question was “How does the geography of the West shape who we are?” Over the course of this project, we worked on defining our answer to the question. My answer was the economy. At first, when I was deciding on my answer, I was like, what the heck, what does that even mean? How can the answer be the ECONOMY? I was so confused, and I had a lot of questions, but eventually, they were all answered because of all the new things I got to learn!

So, how can I apply my answer to the question? This is an important step, because I can’t really go around saying “How does the geography of the West shape us? Well, because of the economy.” At first, I was confused about that, but I managed to answer myself. Some people might be able to figure it out, but for the most part, it’s too broad. So, I’m going to provide some examples of how geography shaped the West’s economy, and how that defines who we are today, because I’ve been learning these things over the course of the project.

My first example is the Canadian Pacific Railway (the CPR.) This shows how the geography of the West shaped us and our economy because the railway was really important for getting across Canada. The geography was the reason this was needed, because if Canada was a really small country, this big railway wouldn’t be needed. The CPR assisted Canada in the ways of tourism and communications. For example, newspapers from Ontario would’ve never been able to get to BC in a short amount of time before the CPR, but after it was built, that was super easy. With the opening of Banff National Park (the first national park,) many Canadians wanted to go there, but could only get there by train. All in all, it fuelled the economy a lot, not just because you had to pay to go on it, but also because it contributed to tourism and travel.

This photo is from Cave and Basin, the kickstarter for National Parks Canada.

My second example is our resources. For us in BC, this means mainly fish and lumber. The geography of Canada gave us these resources, and because there’s so much of it, it can be sold to other people. Forestry has changed over time, though, and this is because people started to realize that we need the lumber to help our economy. Originally, there was no effort to conserve the forests. This is shown in the 1-slide Keynote presentation that I did with my group for a class activity. I did this with Luca, Callum, and Caden. Looking at the slide, modern forestry is a lot better at keeping the forests alive. I think part of the reasoning behind this is that we rely on the forests to keep our economy doing well, and so we’ve started to realize that we can’t just kill it all off, because we need it. 

It’s not the best slide when it comes to graphic design because we had limited time, but it shows the gist of it.

My learning over this project was assisted by an 8-day field school to different places in the West. Some of the places that stuck out to me the most were the Three Valley Gap Chateau, the Royal Tyrell Museum, the Banff Natural History Museum, and the Pioneer Village. Here is a slideshow of photos I took on the trip with my friends:

  • Our first meal: Costco pizza!

Here’s a slideshow of photos I took on the trip of different landscapes:

I guess these could be described as the physical and cultural assets of place. The photos with my friends are the cultural assets, because they’re sort of like the memories we made when we were there, and the landscape photos show the different bits that don’t necessarily have those kind of memories and cultural bits and pieces of our history attached to them.

Finally, here’s my book! This is my multi-touch e-book, featuring my answer to the driving question and my connections between different places and the 5 themes of geography. Read on:

That’s it! I hope to continue learning this much through to the next project, and the next, and so on. See you in the next project!

Peace out,

Susan

I Handled With Care?

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Science? What’s that? I thought we had scimatics? Well, apparently not. It’s the start of an era: Science 9 PLP! This latest project is all about the environment, how we treat it, and how we should treat it. Let’s get started.

Ecosystems? Wildlife management? Spheres of the Earth? What are those? Well, let’s start with the different keystones that I made to help answer that. 

The first keystone was a food web on Scratch, showing the food web of an ecosystem. This food web shows the transfer of energy from one living thing to another. For example, as the web shows, energy transfers from the worm to the bird, because the bird eats the worm. Here it is:

At this point in the project,we learned about the different spheres. There are 5: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere, the geosphere, and the cryosphere. The atmosphere is all gases, the hydrosphere is all water, the biosphere is all living things, the geosphere is all rocks and minerals, and finally the cryosphere is all ice. We also learned how we as humans impact the different spheres. For example, we impact the atmosphere by releasing fossil fuels into it.

This next keystone was our social media posts. These were a series of 5 fake social media posts, each featuring a different assignment we did. This assignment was basically a summary of the work we’ve done, and included important captions to help explain it. I enjoyed this assignment, because I was able to personalize it really well. Here are the “posts”:

Here are some other assignments that we did that weren’t keystones. I’m going to show my animated GIF and my ecosystem drawing.

This is my animated “GIF.” The assignment was to animate a gif, but I extended by making it longer to further demonstrate my knowledge on the topics of bioaccumulation and biomagnification (something I learned in this project!) Bioaccumulation is the buildup of pollutants (in this case, microplastics) inside of living things. In my gif, I show it building up in plankton. Biomagnification is thoroughly demonstrated in my gif: it’s when a smaller animal gets a small amount of the pollutant in it, and then a bigger animal eats a large quantity of that animal, and so on until you have a bigger animal who has a lot of the pollutant. Here’s my short animation:

IMG_3354

Overall, I think I did really well in this project. I did all my work thoughtfully and handed almost everything in on time. I’m proud of my work in this project, especially my short animation, because drawing isn’t a strong suit of mine. Thank you for reading my blog post on the my latest science project, handle with care!

TPOL

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Hey y’all, welcome back to my blog! This is the blog post for my tPOL. 

Declaration:

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I’m also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

The projects I’m going to talk about Becoming a PLP Learner, Comic Cells, New Beginnings, The Outsiders, and Laser Laws. Then I’m going to talk about my growth this year by comparing how I did in different core competencies in different projects.

Becoming a PLP Learner

Becoming a PLP learner was a big project for me. At the time, I was just starting grade 8, and barely knew what was going on. I did really well in that project, which gave me the confidence boost that I needed for the year. In this project, I especially did well in the communication competency. I was easily able to express myself through works such as my user manual and my bitmoji sticker.

Comic Cells

Comic cells impacted me a lot as a learner. In this project, I really struggled with time management. I almost always had to do most of the work at home, and I handed most of it in late. This means that there’s definitely room for me to grow as I go into grade 9. 

New Beginnings

New beginnings was a great project for me. I was interested in most of the subjects we learned about, and I learned a lot of new things. I was able to grow as a learner and focus and work hard on all the work I was assigned.

The Outsiders

The outsiders was a big project for me. It was my first full scale exhibition, and I think I did pretty well. I was able to work well as a team, and the project allowed me to grow into a better team member.

Laser Laws

In laser laws, I grew as a learner in the communication competency. I’m proud of my work in this project because I think I explained my learning well in my presentation. I also excelled in the personal and social competency, because I worked really well with my group to create a nice presentation.

Here’s some evidence of my growth this year:

Thinking

Laser Laws

Oh, to think about my thinking in laser laws. In laser laws, I demonstrated that my thinking was definitely in need of development. My group’s creation of the laser display was pretty good, but it definitely could’ve been better. If you look at my projects further on, they’ve definitely improved.

Chemistry Coding

Chemistry coding was a big think project for me. The creation of my game was a bit rough at first, but it improved over the project. Eventually, I was thinking at my fullest, creating one of the best end products to a project that I’ve created all year. And that’s on GROWTH!

Communication

Becoming a PLP Learner

Oh wow. This project was a bit rough in some spots, but at the same time I excelled in it. For example, my keynote was not very good. It was messy and hard to look at. But on the other hand, my user manual was really good! It was fun to read, and easy to understand.

Comic Cells

In this project, I totally upped my communication game. I was able to clearly express scientific ideas, as the project criteria said. This shows a lot of growth in my communication.

Personal and Social

Medium is the Message

In this project, my teamwork skills were… not there. I helped, but definitely not as much as I should’ve. I was terrible at compromising, so many decisions turned into arguments. 

Destination Imagination

My teamwork skills definitely improved when I did this project. Our team worked together pretty well to come up with a solution for the challenge. Obviously I have much more room to grow, but this project was definitely a jump up from medium is the message, at least in the personal and social competency.

All in all, I definitely have room to grow, but I’m comfortable with my learning and growth so far this year.

Comic Cells? Cells in a Comic

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Hello, welcome back to my blog! Today’s post will be about my latest Scimatics project: Comic cells! In this project, we made a comic about diseases and how they interact with cells. The driving question for this project was “How do cells and diseases interact?” Let’s get into it.

First off, let’s talk about the core competencies (yay?)

Questioning and Predicting: Demonstrate a sustained curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest

I definitely could have done better with this competency because I didn’t spend enough time in class working. I got distracted too easily and ended up having to do most of my comic at home. What I did do well in class was researching. I managed to research almost all the information in class.

Communication: Communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies

I think I did really well on this competency because my comic communicated all the information needed pretty easily. I had over 10 science vocabulary words, and I explained everything pretty well.

Evaluating: demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of evidence

I think I did pretty well on this competency, but definitely not my best. I did show how the characters/cells interacted, and I did that well. What I didn’t do was talk about the symptoms.

Next off, let’s look at the milestones.

Milestone 1: 

As always, we started off with out mind map. Here’s mine: 

Milestone 2:

After we finished the mind map, we moved on to milestone 2, creating a wanted poster. Basically we had to create a wanted poster for our disease that we were doing. Here’s mine:

Milestone 3:

Milestone 3 was a Khan Academy test. I got 100%!

Milestone 4:

For this milestone, we created a storyboard for our comic.

Milestone 5:

Milestone 5 was our comic. To make our comic, we used the app Comic Life 3. Here’s my comic, I hope you enjoy reading it:

Bob & Bab

In the end, I think I did pretty well on this project. I hope you enjoyed reading my last grade 8 scimatics post.

New Beginnings? Well, a New Blog Post at Least

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Hello, welcome back to my blog! I am here to talk about my latest project in Humanities: New Beginnings. “What’s that supposed to mean?” You might be asking. I was too. “New Beginnings” refers to the establishment of New France in 1608.

The driving question for this project was “What did the establishment of New France mean for all the people involved?” 

This year has been a wild ride. This will be my last grade 8 Humanities blog post. That’s pretty crazy. It’s almost over!

ANYWAYSSSSSS

Let’s get into the project.

For this project, one of the first things we did was watch a video. It was all about the establishment of New France. It was called “The Story of Us.”

We also did something called the Seycove Advertising Challenge. In this assignment, we made ads for Seycove and why you should come. This was to reignite our advertising skills from our past project, The Medium is the Message. This is because originally, we were planning to make an ad for New France. We ended up making something different, but you’ll see that later on.

Another thing we did was our Evidence Vocabulary sheet. For this, we had to do different things that could represent evidence and what the word means. For example, we had to do a drawing that represents evidence. In mine, the word has water dripping off. At first, it’s just small drops, but they fall into a big puddle. This represents the word because you have many small pieces of evidence that all add up into one big conclusion, just like how the water droplets all add up into one big puddle.

 

Along the way, we practices some of our photography skills that we learned back in our past project Constructing Creative Communication.

Of course, we had to throw in a simulation! This was definitely one of the highlights of this project for me. We basically reenacted the fur trade. There were four groups: the Ouendat, the Haudenosaunee, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Northwest Company. I was in the Hudson’s Bay company. In the end, the simulation got very chaotic. Hudson’s Bay had the gun, which meant that Hudson’s Bay had the power.

Last but most definitely not least, I have my final product: my visual. These are two images, comparing different perspectives on a certain thing. My subject was survival in New France. On the one side, getting food was much easier because there was a huge amount of farmland. On the other side, it’s cold, and diseases spread around like wildfire because of it.

Overall I think I performed well in this project. I’m really proud of my final visual and my evidence vocabulary sheet.

Thank you for reading this post!