So we’ve been learning about the Second World War, and more specifically, about the perspectives of different countries involved in said war. In order to do this, we broke into small groups, had each group research one country, and then compiled all the information on a website. At the end of the unit we presented this website, and what we had learned about each country, to not only each other but also Kathleen Barter, a district administrator for our school district.
My group decided to look at the perspective of the Soviet Union , and in particular, Soviet Russia.
At the time of World War II, Russia was under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Stalin knew some of what Hitler was planning before the war began, and was able to prepare somewhat. Unfortunately, Russia was very poor and didn’t have a very strong army, and ended up having one of the highest number of casualties of any country in the war.
Russia fought on the side of the Allied Powers, which included countries such as France and Britain, and against the Axis Powers, which included Germany, Italy, and Japan. The German invasion of Stalingrad, a city which the Russians successfully defended, is considered one of the turning points of the war.
Besides the website, we did a couple of other things as part of this unit. One of those things was to read a book related to the war and then write a book review of said book. The other was to create a short podcast with some audio we recorded when we got the chance to talk to a man who actually was a German citizen and soldier in World War II: Helmut Lemke.
Our class with Helmut
I decided to create my podcast around a story Helmut told about stealing potatoes, which was one of my favourite stories he told, as it was extremely interesting and unique, not extremely violent or disturbing as far as war stories go, and involved my favourite food.
My first draft of this podcast included just Helmut telling the story, but I revised it to include an intro that I recorded, which explained a little bit about who Helmut was and why we were talking to him. This is my final draft:
Recently in science we’ve been working on a project centred around creating a way to get electricity from nature. My group decided to use a water wheel to turn a hand generator.
During this unit, we learned about different kinds of energy, and different ways that people harness energy to power things in their everyday life. We learned about kinetic energy, or the energy of movement; potential energy, or the ability for something to have energy usually due to gravity; and thermal energy, or heat energy, where something heats up enough to produce energy. With the example of our water wheel, as well as actual hydroelectricity plants, we were harnessing kinetic energy from the moving water. This same concept could be applied to the use kinetic energy of rainfall, or wind (a common real life example of using wind for energy being wind turbines) to power our generator with the water wheel.
We also briefly talked about some kinds of energy that we put less focus on: chemical energy, where energy is produced via a chemical reaction (for instance, our bodies getting energy from food); light energy, where energy is created by radiation; and sonic energy, which is essentially the energy created by sound waves. We also talked about fossil fuels and fission and fusion, which are some common ways that people get energy for electricity, although less environmentally friendly than something like hydroelectricity or wind turbines. As one example of a way to get energy from nature, we discussed solar panels, which convert the energy from the sun into usable energy for humans, sort of like how plants convert energy from the sun into usable energy via photosynthesis.
While our water wheel powered generator wasn’t extremely powerful or efficient, having some way of harnessing kinetic energy on a small scale (like an equivalent of people putting solar panels on their roof to harness solar energy in sunnier areas) might be a good way to make use of the amount of rain we get here and be a little more environmentally friendly. Having a better-crafted version of the OOPWAH that utilizes the concentrated flow of rainwater running from a roof or drainpipe to power an electrical generator might actually be a reasonable product for an area as rainy as this, even if it only produces a small amount of energy at a time.
At the start of this unit, we went up to Mission to visit a water-powered generator. While there, we documented some of the things we saw.
We then applied our knowledge to creating our own projects.
Now that this unit has drawn to a close, I’ve created a mindmap to show my knowledge about energy, both from prior to this unit and my new learning.
So we’ve been studying World War II in Socials, and as a part of that we’ve been reading books related to it. I read All The Light We Cannot See, a novel by Anothony Doerr. It’s a book I’d heard of before– it’s Doerr’s best known work, and judging by the amount of critical acclaim it has received, quite possibly also his best.
Anthony Doerr
Here is my review:
Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See tells the story of two characters living through World War II: a blind French girl who has to leave her hometown of Paris for the first time to live with her great uncle, and a young German boy in the process of becoming a soldier. The book tells their stories over a span of several years, and we see the characters both coming of age in their own ways. Both protagonists are compelling, sympathetic, strong characters with unique perspectives on the war.
The girl, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, is living in Paris with her father when the war begins. The book takes great pains to describe the life the two shared in the years before the war, describing everything from the model town Marie-Laure’s father made her so she could learn where things were while blind to the birthday gifts she got every year to the coffee they routinely drink in the morning. The two flee to the town of Saint-Malo to stay with Étienne, Marie-Laure’s great uncle. In their possession is a small stone called the Sea of Flames, a diamond which legend says is cursed so that the owner will live forever but misfortune will come to all their loved ones.
The boy, Werner Pfennig, is living in an orphanage with his sister Jutta prior to the war. He has an affinity for radios, having fixed up an old radio he and Jutta discovered in order to listen to broadcasts, and acting as a radio repairman for the people in the town in which he lives. Once the war begins, he becomes a cadet. The book follows his experiences training to be in the army, and the harshness of the training program that he is forced to go through. Eventually, he becomes a fully fledged soldier, and goes to fight in the war.
While both plots and characters are interesting and engaging, the book itself proves to be confusing due to how quickly it switches back and forth between the main characters’ perspectives. Additionally, it will often jump back and forth between years, making it difficult to tell what order events are happening in, as well as where and when a certain scene is taking place. Often only a few pages are spent with a character before the book suddenly switches perspectives and plot lines completely.
Regardless, once you figure out where and when the scene you’re reading about is happening, the book is enjoyable, if saddening. It draws you in with descriptions of life for both characters, especially of life for the blind Marie-Laure. The book describes her experiences becoming blind, saying the world has now become “a labyrinth bristling with hazards”, where “cars growl in the streets, leaves whisper in the sky” and “blood rustles through her inner ears”. The book allows a look into not only the realities of living during a war, but also how it can have an irreversible effect on the rest of people’s lives. All in all, once you get past the initial confusion of the style in which the book is written, it is a strong story with interesting protagonists, and definitely worth a read.
So you might remember that a while back we hosted the regional Destination Imagination tournament, in which I took part in the improvisational challenge. Last weekend, it came time for the provincial tournament.
In the gap between regionals and provincials, my team decided to give a lot of focus to learning more about our list of explorers, two of which we would have to integrate into our final improv skit. (The gist of the challenge was this: you’re given two explorers and one “cultural treasure” from a list, and you have to make a skit about the explorers recovering the treasure. The whole thing takes place in an unusual setting which you are also given at the start of the skit. Partway through the skit, you are also given a random setback to incorporate. The only prop you are allowed is a single white bedsheet) Not knowing enough about our explorers was an area where we felt that we really fell short in our first performance, so we wanted to make sure we all really knew who our explorers were.
Our full list of explorers was as follows:
Ann Bancroft , a skier who skied through both the arctic and Antarctic (not to be confused with Anne Bancroft, the actress from The Graduate)
Unfortunately, half my team was unable to be there, so despite having prepared more thouroughly for provincials than regionals, we went into our second tournament with significantly less confidence. This turned out to be reasonable, as we ended up coming in fifth place out of five.
This means that we can’t progress to the next round of DI (Globals), so this is our final round of DI for this year.
Now, DI is a good chance to do a lot of critical thinking, and it can be a good way to develop certain skills. I’ve been regularly participating in DI for a few years now, and I always find it to be a challenge, and something that requires lots of work, thinking and effort on the part of the students participating. We looked at a study showing that students who participated in DI were more engaged, better collaborators, more self confident, and more creative (among other things) than those who didn’t, and DI definitely requires you to use skills in all these areas. However, all the attributes mentioned above seem to me like things that people would already have to possess in order to be interested in DI and successfully complete a challenge, and in our case, they seem like attributes necessary to get into PLP.
From my my own experience, I would say a skill that DI helps you (or at least helped me) develop is commitment to and throughout something frustrating or difficult. For instance, the first time I did DI my group struggled to think of ideas for some of the requirements, which were much more specific than we were used to, and we had to work through arguments and a lot of fruitless brainstorming until we eventually worked out an idea.
In fact, the whole “requirements being more specific” thing brings me to another skill that DI helped me develop: reading long, important, confusing, and very specific documents and interpreting the information in a useful way. Reading the rules for our first ever challenge felt a bit like trying to actually read the terms and conditions before using an app or other software, but as I already mentioned, it eventually became important to read and understand them– and we did it. We went through and highlighted important things, moved pages into different apps so we could read smaller sections without it being so overwhelming, made notes paraphrasing important information as we went so we could keep track of it, and basically any other techniques we could think of (using our aforementioned creativity and critical thinking), and we developed a skill that we weren necessarily already strong at.
To summarize, I think the skills that DI helps you build are somewhat misconstrued; sure, it can help develop the skills and attributes you already have as strengths, but what it does more is force you to pick up whatever new skills happen to be necessary to your challenge (for instance, we all learned improv!) by making you commit even when it gets difficult– and that can be extremely important.
Anyway, I won’t make this blog post so long and confusing it feels like reading terms and conditions.
So we’re in the midst of another round of Destination Imagination . I’m doing improv again this year, but this time around it’s themed around explorers . The gist of the challenge is that we had to research a bunch of different explorers, ranging from fictional explorers to space explorers to just plain old traditional explorers, and a set of “cultural treasures” and then make an improv skit incorporating a random two explorers and one cultural treasure.
The explorers that I researched were Alice Liddle (from Alice in Wonderland), Jacques Cousteau, and Howard Carter. These were the notes I took on them:
Alice (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass)
(treasure: the books)
– 7 years old
– Mid-Victorian era
– Alice Liddell
– May have been loosely based on the real Alice Liddell, the daughter of a friend of Lewis Carroll’s
– Older sister
– Pet cat (Dinah)
– Adventurous, kind, smart, questions authority
– High social standing
– Appears in: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, various cartoons, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, and two live action movies created by Tim Burton
Jacques Cousteau (Artifact: Aqua lung):
– French explorer
– Naval officer
– Researcher
– Co-developed the aqua lung
– Studied the sea + marine life
– Lived 1910-1997
– Started in naval aviation but was unable to continue after being hurt in a car accident
– Wrote books on his marine research
– Pioneered marine conservation
Howard Carter (Artifact: Tutankhamun):
– British archeologist
– Discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb
– Egyptologist
– Lived 1874-1939
– Born in Kensington
– After retiring from archeology, worked part time as an agent for museums
The other explorers that we had to learn about were Ann Bancroft, Leif Ericsson, Captain Kidd, Ruth Benedict, Katherine Johnson, John Audborn, Elon Musk, Blackbeard, and Captain Nemo. For each explorer that we researched, we chose a corresponding cultural treasure: not literal treasure, but an artifact that was/is important to the culture the explorer came from, and is somehow related to each explorer.
Along with integrating the explorers and treasure, we were also given a weird setting for our skit to take place in (our setting ended up being a department store perfume department, which we ended up narrowing down to a singular bottle of perfume), and we were given a setback to incorporate partway through the performance (in which the perfume bottle started filling up with mud. For some reason.).
When we weren’t researching, we prepared by trying to learn how to do improv. We had an improv lesson during one of our flex blocks, and we spent a lot of time working through improv games and scenarios, and then through versions of the requirements for the end skit.
After months of preparation, we attended the regional tournament, convienently located at our school. We performed our skit, featuring me and Sydney as unsuspecting department store patrons who got put in a perfume bottle, Kyle as Elon Musk, and Ethan as the ghost of Ruth Benedict.
Once our performance was finished, the judges decided on our raw scores, which would eventually lead to deciding how well we did against the other teams, and whether we could continue to provincials. Our raw scores were as follows:
As for how we stacked up against the other teams? Well…
We got first place! We actually came in first for both our team challenge and our instant challenge, meaning that we’ll definitely be advancing to provincials.
Before we do go to provincials, however, we have some more work to do, so we took the time to reflect on what we thought we did well, what we should work on, and what will get us the most points.
Now, I’ve got to go get started preparing for provincials.
So we’ve been doing a unit on chemistry. Specifically, we’ve learnt about chemical reactions, the Ph scale, and balancing chemical equations.
At the start of this unit, we each made a mindmap about chemistry. This was my mindmap:
At the end of the unit, I made another mindmap, which looked like this:
Our main project for this unit was to design and perform a chemistry experiment. My group designed an experiment based around testing the acid levels in different substances: a pineapple, a banana, some dirt, a bath bomb, and Diet Coke.
We tested these items using red cabbage juice, which is what’s known as an indicator: a substance that turns different colours when it comes into contact with acids or bases.
This was our final experiment:
We also did a write up explaining the science behind our experiment:
So recently in math we’ve been working on alegebra, polynomials, and algebra tiles. We learned three main things: expanding, factoring, and perfect squares. Then we, working in partners, had to put these things into a game.
This was the criteria for the game:
We went through several sets of rules in order to meet this criteria, but these were the rules we ended up with:
GAME RULES:
Cards: x, -x, 1, -1
Materials needed: pencil, paper, algebra cards, dice
Rules:
– roll dice. Number on dice = number of cards you pull
– randomly position cards on grid
– roll dice again to assign ‘x’ a value
– solve equation
– answer to equation = score
– 5 turns each per round
– BONUS: In case of a perfect square, square your current score
(If game is too simple, increase number of dice to 2)
Based on these rules, we created game pieces and recorded a video of us actually playing the game, as is shown below.
All in all, I think we did an alright job of incorporating the skills into our game. However, it could have been a lot better.
So, as I mentioned in my last post we recently took a class trip to California, specifically San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. We did this trip as part of a social studies unit on disruption, and specifically with some focus on how technology is disruptive.
Now, in order to fully understand what this unit was all about, you need to understand exactly what disruption means. The word disruption has some negative connotations, but in essence it just means something that interrupts or changes something else. A lot of the disruptions that we looked at in this unit were positive.
On the technology side, we focussed on newer technology, and we spent a lot of time talking about Silicon Valley (not to mention visiting it), both as a disruption itself, and as the birthplace of a lot of disruptive companies and technology. Some of the major companies that we discussed that came out of Silicon Valley or have headquarters there include Google, Apple, Facebook, HP, Twitter, Intel, and Instagram. In fact, I made a video about the history of Instagram, and the story of how it disrupted the incumbents of social media at the time.
We also learned a lot about Silicon Valley in general; what it is, what’s happening there, and why it’s such a big disruption. We watched some videos in class to learn about it, as well as watching Pirates of Silicon Valley outside of class time. Additionally, we learned about the history of Fairchild and Robert Noyce prior to Intel.
I took some excellent, relevant and very academic notes on these videos including:
…and, you know, a lot of other stuff that actually helped summarize what the videos were talking about. The gist is that Silicon Valley is a place where people go to work on start ups and try to connect with investors, as well as other people to help with their startups, in the hopes of becoming the next big thing. As for the Fairchild video, it explained the history of Fairchild beginning with Shockley Semiconductors: William Shockley discovered the semiconductor while working on the east coast, came over to the west coast to be near his ailing mother, started a company called Shockley Semiconductors and hired a bunch of Stanford students (who were close to geniuses) to work for him, all went well for a little while, and then Shockley’s ego got the better of him and he started treating his employees terribly, leading eight of them to leave the company and go start their own company, Fairchild, led by Robert Noyce. Fairchild would go on to provide important technology to NASA during the Space Race, and to improve semiconductors quite significantly so computers could be made more compact and work better, before the company split and the founders moved onto their own different companies (such as Intel), known as the “Fairchildren”.
At the intel museum taking a selfie in the reflection of a wafer
Robert Noyce
For the end of the unit, we all wrote essays answering the unit question: How has technology acted as a disruption with its creation throughout history?
I started out with the thesis that technology is disruptive because it allows us access to information we might not otherwise have. From there, I created an essay outline, during the making of which I got bored and decided to represent each point with a quippy headline/strange nonfiction book title, and a subheading, which were as follows:
Intro
Paragraph one: Info we’re given
Trump’s Twitter: an insight into the president’s thoughts (AKA: holy guacamole how did this guy get to be president?)
Worldwide news and the speed that information travels: What allows us to read articles online but Dennis the Menace in print
Anticensorship: internet friends, social media, the blogosphere, and other things that allow us to unveil the truth
Paragraph two: Info we go get
People are hacking, security is lacking: the potential for people to get access to your personal info, people who overshare on the internet and don’t bother with being secure about it, how this could ruin your future job
Tweet, delete, repeat: why deleting stuff doesn’t stop people from being able to access it, and how the public can pull up information from throughout the years in a way they weren’t always able to
Getting the Googley eyes for someone: our innate need to cyberstalk people when we meet them and how this is potentially helpful/damaging
Paragraph three: Info we didn’t used to have
George Washington Is Instagram Famous: posing the question of how different history would be with our current technology
Newsprince: How the newspaper used to lord over us all and what it would be like if the paper was still our main/only source of info
Conclusion
Then we were given time in class to write our essays. I didn’t use every point in my outline, but chose some of them to elaborate on, and a few specifically to connect to the book we read for this unit. I ended up with this as my essay:
How Technology Has Acted as a Disruption Throughout History
Throughout history, humans have developed more and more complex tools, or
technology. This technology changes the way we live; we eat, sleep, think, speak, and act differently from any other animal. In short, technology disrupts our daily lives. One of the things technology, especially more recent technology such as computer, the internet and social media, has interrupted is our flow of information. Technology disrupts how, when, and how much we receive information, allows us to get information that wouldn’t come easily to us otherwise, and allows us to have and share much more information than we did in the past.
First of all, technology means we are being given more information, from more sources,
some of which is much less filtered than it once was. A good example of this comes in the form of the twitter account of Donald Trump, the current US president. Until recently, almost anything a president said to the publication large would have to be planned, and usually happened via a public appearance in person or on tv. However, the last few presidents have had access to social media sites that allow them to share any thought at any time, unfiltered and without much planning. Many articles, books, and videos talking about Trump’s presidency have discussed statements from his twitter, which he uses regularly to publicly comment on recent or future events. Trump’s twitter allows us to have an insight into his real thoughts and plans, in a way we haven’t had with many people of power throughout history. A Time article described a series of tweets from the president as “angry, sometimes profane and occasionally misspelled outbursts” that “gave the world a glimpse into what was going on in [Trump’s] head” and “brought to light what it’s like to work for [Trump].” Of course, it’s not just Trump who can now share things unfiltered. The internet allows anyone to share opinions and information on the spot, through social media, blogging, or commenting on existing sites. Groups of people who would not have been able to publicly share their thoughts in the past are now able to in a matter of minutes, and as a result we now have access to new, uncensored opinions and information. People from different parts of the world can easily speak directly to one another and talk about where and how they live. There are tutorials and instructions teaching anyone who wants to learn how to do a multitude of things. For better or for worse, information is being shared more than ever before.
However, not all the information shared with technology is public. At the very least, it’s
not all meant to be public. According to a Quartzy article, “few of us deliberately show our whole selves online or elsewhere, even when we’re trying to seem… honest.”. Many people have private information protected with passwords or other forms of required identification. Others still overshare what should be private information, which can lead to security problems. Sometimes, people overshare and then realize their mistake and delete whatever they posted. However, the speed at which information travels means that just pressing delete doesn’t necessarily ensure something is gone forever. Technology gives people the power to find information even if it’s not immediately presented to them, which can be an issue depending on their intentions. The book Little Brother has a running theme of security, lack thereof, and people hacking or cheating the system with technology. Within the first chapter the main character, Marcus, evades various kinds of security technology at his school by either shutting them down or finding a way to “confuse” them into not working. Throughout the book, Marcus is able to hack into almost anything he needs to– while simultaneously taking extra precautions to make sure nobody can do the same thing to him. While Marcus, as the protagonist, has the right intentions for hacking to get past security, the things he does in the book mirror the not-so-wholesome actions of real life people. As much as technology helps to keep our information safe, it also makes it possible for people to gain access to information that they shouldn’t have.
One of the most significant things about technology allowing us access to information is
the sheer amount of information we are able to access now in comparison to the past. At one point, people got almost all their knowledge of world events from either a newspaper or speaking directly to another person. Learning about things from such limited sources meant limited information, and less chance of misinformation being corrected. With the rise of radio, tv, and now the internet, people are able to find hundreds of different sources of information on the same thing. They’re also able to find information on exactly what they’re looking for, quickly and readily. This allows people to learn much more, make sure what they’re learning is correct, and find multiple points of view on things. It also allows people to easily save or share the information once they have it, so knowledge travels faster, and can be kept accurate for a longer amount of time. Had the technologies we use today been able to exist much earlier, we might perceive history very differently.
All in all, technology is disruptive because it changes our ability to get and share
information, be it information that is given to us or information that we seek out ourselves, and it lets us have information that we wouldn’t have had in the past. Technology not only disrupts how we get information, but also when we get information, how much information we can find, and what information that is. As communicating information is incredibly crucial to our ability to function as humans, technology will most likely continue to disrupt how and when we get information, and how much information we get. Technology could go far enough to make the ways that we share information today seem primitive, but who knows what will happen? That’s not information we have access to yet.
Alongside our essays, we were also asked to each create a video, podcast, or puppet show with a partner about how one of the places we visited in San Diego acted as a disruption. My partner and I chose to create a podcast about High Tech High, a high school where we spent time with a grade nine class for a couple days. High Tech High is a charter school that focuses on using project based learning to help prepare kids for the real world, a bit like PLP. High Tech High also works to create equal learning opportunities for students, choosing students to attend via a lottery system by zip code, with more spots available to the lower income areas that typically might not have as nice an education readily available.
So, as I mentioned before, we recently went on a trip to California. While we were there we did an iBook about the different things we did.
The book included different pictures, videos, and text explaining the places we went, people we saw, and things we learned about, all staying within our theme of disruption.
Doing the book allowed us to reflect on the trip and get lots of good pictures and other documentation throughout.
Which is important, because we did a LOT on this trip. My favourite thing we did was visiting High Tech High in San Diego. However, we also visited the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, saw the USS Midway museum, wandered around Old Town, ate a lot of Mexican food, took seven kinds of transportation, saw the birthplace of HP, visited the googleplex, looked around the Apple visitors’ center, toured Stanford, spoke with people who work in Silicon Valley, went bowling, chanted something in Spanish, rode cable cars, went to Alcatraz, toured Haight-Ashbury and the Castro, and looked around the official headquarters of Twitter.
These were some of my favourite pictures from the trip:
Me inside a giant donut at Google
Living the high fashion life
Aboard the USS Midway museum
A hot air balloon that we got to ride in (which was super zen)
Me becoming a fish
Some koalaty sourdough bread at a bread place in San Francisco
Me at High Tech High with a new friend
All in all it was a super interesting trip, and I feel like I learned a lot from the experience, about not just disruption but also technology, school, and aircraft carriers. I’m really glad I had the experience of going on the trip.
So, my classmates and I recently returned from California.
Specifically, we visited three places: San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. Right now I want to expand on that first place we visited: San Diego.
Now, we did some interesting things in San Diego. We went to the Safari Park, we saw the USS Midway, we saw Old Town.
(That’s me at the zoo blending in with some cacti)
My favourite thing we did in San Diego, however, was visiting High Tech High , a charter school that uses Project-Based Learning to teach their students. While there, we were each paired up with a grade nine student or two (or four, in my case) who we shadowed throughout the day. We went to classes with our students, ate lunch with them, and at the end of our first of two days there, we interviewed them about life at High Tech High.
I found it very interesting to hear about High Tech High, both because it’s different than Seycove and because in some ways it’s similar to PLP. I also did my main project for this trip on High Tech High, and in the process I interviewed one of the teachers of the class we were working with. Being able to hear what she said about High Tech High in comparison to what the students said gave me some different perspectives on the school as a whole.
