My artifact is the “Strawberry Cheesecake Cookies” that we made during our most recent lab for the cookie competition.
Creative Thinking Skills
During the Food Studies 10 course this year, I demonstrated creative thinking skills. A specific time I want to highlight is during this competition lab.
An example of where I built upon someone else’s ideas was when I was working with my group to write the recipe we chose to follow. We were able to take an online recipe, take off of the elements and main ideas, and adapt the recipe to fit the criteria for this lab. For example, when finding inspiration for our recipe, I had to take the amount of ingredients and what the school kitchen had or didn’t have into consideration and worked around that.
Another demonstration of how I used creative thinking was in terms of presentation, brainstorming with my group for a card design and how to plate our cookies. We settled on “stacking” 3 cookies in the middle, slightly overlapping and one more cookie split in half to display the cream cheese filling. Topping all of them with half a strawberry and half white chocolate drizzle.
Transitioning from middle school to Grade 9 was a big change. High school is definitely more demanding in terms of workload, and you learn a lot more material in class. However, it also offers more opportunities to explore different subjects and activities, giving you more freedom. This year, I learned that time management is important for balancing a heavier workload. I had to get used to the larger campus and having more teachers, which took a bit, but I quickly adjusted. This year, I enjoyed taking both Science 9 and 10, where I got to do a lot of fun labs alongside the same classmates for the whole year. I’m most proud of my growth as a student in terms of work ethic, perseverance, and independence. My strengths are in writing, and I realized I learn best through pictures, visual examples and clear explanations.
I chose Khan Academy because it’s been helpful when I need to review concepts, usually in math, or need extra practice problems before tests. It’s beneficial to me because it offers many easy-to-follow videos. With many math and science units to choose from, I find it to be an extremely valuable website that makes learning easier for me.
My Useful Educational Video
I chose the “Dihybrid and Two Trait Crosses” video by the Amoeba Sisters because it simplifies 16-square Punnett squares in an easy to understand explanation using some real life examples that are simple but still allow you to fully make sense of concepts. The Amoeba Sisters’ animation style and clear explanations make learning about genetics more fun along with helping my understanding. This video helped me grasp dihybrid crosses, how to use Punnett squares for them and how different traits are inherited, a very important part of my biology unit in class.
My Useful Educational Image
I chose this picture of an animal cell because it really helped me during the Biology unit in Science 9 last semester. In middle school, I hadn’t learned about this, so I had no prior knowledge. Seeing all the parts of the cell labeled made it easier to understand how cells function and where each organelle is located. It was like a map that showed me where everything is, which made remembering parts of cells much simpler for me.
My Inspirational Quote
“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” – Vince Lombardi.
I chose this quote because the idea of perfection is something many people strive for, yet it’s unattainable because in reality nothing can ever be “perfect”. However, if we pursue perfection, we can still achieve excellence along the way, which is better than not trying at all. Which is motivating to me.
Works Cited
Amoeba Sisters. Dihybrid and Two-Trait Crosses. 2015. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIGXTJLrLf8.
Austen, Leilani. “‘Perfection Is Not Attainable, but If We Chase Perfection, We Can Catch Excellence.’” The Daily Cuppa, 12 June 2021, https://medium.com/the-daily-cuppa/perfection-is-not-attainable-but-if-we-chase-perfection-we-can-catch-excellence-773d508bf4e7.
“Khan Academy | Free Online Courses, Lessons & Practice.” Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/. Accessed 27 May 2024.
My artifact is the “Crispy Panko Mac N Cheese” that we made during our most recent lab.
Creative Thinking Skills
During Food Studies 10 this semester, I demonstrated creative thinking skills. A time I want to highlight is during this lab.
An example of where I built upon someone else’s ideas is when I was writing the recipe by incorporating the elements and ideas from the online recipe while still making it follow the portions and roux from the original mac and cheese recipe. When finding inspiration for our recipe, I had to take the amount of ingredients and what the school kitchen had or didn’t have into consideration and worked around that.
Collaboration Skills
For our “Mac and Cheese Off!”, we had to collaborate with our group members to come up with and design a creative mac and cheese dish that would compete with the ones of the other groups.
If there is disagreement within the group, I find it helpful to weigh out the options and consider both the pros and cons of each. I make sure not to completely shut down the ideas of others, make sure they still feel heard, and try to incorporate some elements from their ideas if possible.
Reflection Question: Is violence justified during a revolution/protest?
A) How did the use of AI assist you in developing this project
For this project I used Perplexity.ai to help assist with gathering ideas and sources to argue for my side effectively. Having the AI to suggest arguments and sources, helped me develop my ideas further by expanding my perspective and helped me back my ideas up with credible evidence from the sources it provided.
B) How did you ensure that the work you created was still your own, rather than just a product of the AI
To ensure the work I created was still my own, I took what the AI found as sources, picked out the main points, and with the ideas in mind, I wrote in my own words about it, adding my own insights as well.
C) Did you agree with the position you had to argue? Why or why not?
I don’t fully agree or disagree with the position I argued. I think its very circumstance based and depends on factors such as the oppression and the potential for peaceful resolution if possible.
Core Competency Reflection
I use evidence to make judgments or decisions as demonstrated in this by citing credible sources found and analyzing them compared to the argument.
I seek, develop and weigh options as demonstrated by gathering information from a few related sources, and considering the different possibilities or potential outcomes before forming my argument.
One leadership quality that I currently posess is accountabillity. I’m able to take responsibility for my mistakes and learn from them so that I can move forward from it knowing what I did wrong.
One leadership skill I posess is time management. I’m well organized and can follow deadlines and plan accordingly, I’m able to identify realistic goals in time frames, and I’m adaptable with changes in the schedule.
Initiative is a leadership trait I hope to acquire at the end of this course. I made this my goal since I feel like I’m more afraid to speak up and take initiative right now. Initiative is a great leadership quality in my eyes, which is why I want to work towards showing more of it.
One leadership skill I would like to delvelop by the end of this course is decision making. I find that I’m very hesitant when it comes to making decisions and I tend to waver between lines a lot. PThat connects back to initiative mentioned before, which is another reason I want to work on it. It’s a useful leadership skill that helps tasks become simpler.
Core Competency Reflection
I can work with others to achieve a goal.…
I can work with others to achieve a common goal. Throughout this course, you get to meet and work with many individuals, which you need to get along with to be sucessful in your tasks. I’m able to make effort to speak openly with other people, share my ideas, and give them time to speak too. Clear communication helps us reach our goal more smoothly.
When deciding on what each character’s avatar should look like, I cross-referenced quotes and things said in the book, using inferences to try to be as accurate as possible. For example, in Act 3, Scene 2, Line 258, when Lysander tells Hermia, “Away, you Ethiopie”, he’s most likely referring to how her skin is of a darker complexion. After that, I figured that chances are, Egeus would most likely be of an Ethiopian descent. Taking note of the clothing and other physical features not mentioned in text from the images featured in the book at the beginning of each scene also helped determine how each character should look like.
I went back to the original book to find the place of this story, starting at the very beginning when it mentions “the city of Athens,” which is located in Greece. Theseus, the Duke of Athens, was the first character talked about. The majority of the story is set in this large, central city. Later in the story, around Act 2, Scene 1, when Hermia and Lysander decide to run away to a nearby forest, which is another major setting in the story. The mood that forests convey is creepy and mysterious, which fit nicely with our movie’s theme. We tried to capture the atmosphere of the forest by choosing dark, earthy colours in an attempt to recreate the feel of the forest.
In movies and literature, mood refers to the tone and feeling that a piece of media creates. Moods include things like sadness, empathy, loneliness, etc. Many different things in media can impact the mood. Such as music or audio, colours used, the level of detail, or on the other hand, blatant simplicity. I choose “Piano Moment” by Ben Tissot from Bensound.com for our movie soundtrack since I feel like A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a more calm novel with some action and a hint of underlying scariness. The song is suitable because it isn’t a fast paced song full of action, instead it matches the serenity.
To conclude, when creating this movie, there was a lot of cross-referencing and revisiting the book. Despite the fact that some details weren’t provided, I made inferences and tried to draw conclusions to get the most accurate look for our movie.
Core Competency Reflection
In discussions and conversations, I help to build and extend understanding by going into depth on topics we’re discussing, such as incorporating quotes from the book along with character perspective to better help our understanding. Being able to make sense of the story and each character as a whole helped support me when working this project.
Some skills I have developed to make my creative activities better are learning how to use more applications and exposing myself to more tools such as “Coolors.co” and “AvatarMaker.com”, which helps me add elements to my PowerPoint movie that make it more engaging and visually appealing to the audience. Another skill I learned was multi-slide animating using the “morph” transition in PowerPoint, allowing me to add smooth animations to my slides.
I respectfully advocate for my needs. When there is a problem, I politely bring it up to my partner or other group members. I try to resolve it, although it may not always work. In that case, I will continue to remind them about what I mentioned earlier. Additionally, I listen to them when they communicate their needs, keep an open mind, and do my best to make my partner feel welcomed and comfortable.
Building our ball launcher improved my understanding of the scientific method process by giving the situation and outline for us to apply the scientific method to. Starting with the “problem”, then getting us to come up with a hypothesis, design an experiment, conduct the experiement and draw a conclusion about if our hypothesis was supported or not.
Inductive and Deductive Learning… During our 2 scientific method labs, we used deductive learning to test our hypothesis through experiments. Specifically pointing out our golf ball tower challenge lab because we got a prototype testing day for it. We were able to see what worked and what we could improve on from day 1 to day 2. For the ball launcher challenge lab, we used deductive learning by tweaking different aspects of our launcher and reviever until we had a supported hypothesis. In terms of inductive learning for this challenge, it was demonstrated after we would test and notice a problem using observations, and with those observations we would re-hypothesize, test and repeat the process.
Core Competency Self Assessment and Creative Thinking
I’m most proud of our ball launcher because it was a lot more successful than we initially thought it would be, achieving the distance of 350cm.
Some of the issues we faced were lack of time, inconsitency (and difficulty aiming), etc. The way we faced our main one was booking extra flex time, and splitting up tasks, so each of us had something to do at any given moment. When it came to issues with inconsistency, there wasn’t a solution we could come up with in the given period of time we had, so we just had to persevere, making small adjustments as we tried to land it in the reciever.
My experience understanding the scientific method with these two labs was pretty benifical overall in my opinion. It was a good demonstration with hands on portions too. I think it helped me understand the process better by physically using it in 2 labs.
I demonstrated that I can create new things when my group and I came up with the design of our launcher. Althought we were slightly inspired by a design online, our end product was significantly different from our original reference. Our group took advantage of the hole in our ruler and used it to keep our launcher stable by sticking a pencil through it.
I demonstrated that I can build on the ideas of others when we were coming up with the design for our reciever, by combining different aspects from each other’s prototypes to create a final product, which I would deem pretty sucessful.
When trying new things, I expect setbacks and failure and use them to develop my ideas. An example of this from the Scientific Method labs would be during the golf tower challenge lab. I’m not very experienced, nor do I have much knowledge on tower building, so I struggled with this lab quite a bit. During the prototype testing day, our tower was pretty successful when compared to others that day, but when we attempted to replicate it the next day, we were faced with many more issues than the day prior. So, with the materials that we could salvage, we used another idea to improve on what we previously failed on.
How to Stay Safe on Snapchat. https://help.snapchat.com/hc/en-us/articles/7012304746644-How-to-Stay-Safe-on-Snapchat.
Your Digital Footprint in a Snapchat Era. https://directemployers.org/2013/04/11/your-digital-footprint-in-a-snapchat-era/.
Screenshot a Snap Without Them Knowing . https://www.awesomescreenshot.com/blog/screenshot/how-to-screenshot-a-snap-without-them-knowing.
What Is Our Story on Snapchat and How to Use It in 2023. https://boostmeup.com/blog/what-is-our-story-on-snapchat-and-how-to-use-it/.
Poster 2 (Instagram):
Who Can See Your Instagram Profile Picture and Bio. https://help.instagram.com/347751748650214.
Why You Should Care About the Tracks Left By Your Digital Footprint. https://www.makeuseof.com/tracks-digital-footprint/.
Why You Should NEVER Rely on Instagram’s Close Friends Feature for a “Safe Space.” https://medium.com/illumination/why-you-should-never-rely-on-instagrams-close-friends-feature-for-a-safe-space-65f6879c647e.
Poster 3 (Deleting Majority of Digital Footprint):
How to DELETE 99.9% of Your Digital Footprint from the Internet [a Thread]. https://twitter.com/somenerdliam/status/1183916568771792897?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1183916568771792897%7Ctwgr%5Ee972a0c0da44f8681d9ab320d1ecf181d316e272%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.redditmedia.com%2Fmediaembed%2Fdig5x2%3Fresponsive%3Dtrueis_nightmode%3Dfalse.
Personal/Social Competency Reflection
I know that my digital footprint can have both positive and negative consequences, including impersenation, location safety concern, and more so I adjust my actions to ensure I stay safe when using all forms of digital media.
Teachers’ TEAMS pages is helpful to me because it helps for me to catch up on days I am absent to make sure I’m not behind or missing any work. It also helps me organize any of my different tasks/projects/assignments that I may have.
By taking time to check in on my friends and talking to them online, I make a positive difference to my peers by giving them a space where they aren’t judged and can be open without feeling shamed when talking about their feelings.
