Spring POL 2015 - "It's a Theme Park" Project
For our second Presentation of Learning (POL) of the 2014-15 school year, we were to create either a) a project description planning a new project based on our learning over the year, or b) a prototype of a piece incorporating aspects or past projects from multiple classes. I chose to make a project description from scratch, which meant that its design would be inspired by aspects from any number of my classes. I chose to base my project off of all four classes from the past semester. You may view the project description I have written below, along with my reflection... Thank you!
In Humanities, I used our learning from reading The Odyssey for the concept of theme; for Multimedia, I used our experience operating cameras and filming from The Odyssey Stop Motion Film; for Physics, I was inspired by the Zero Landfill Mini Golf Courses we built; and for Math, I was influenced by the blueprints we created for the 9th Grade Commons Design Project. For the Humanities portion of the project I made, I was actually really troubled about how to incorporate our knowledge from this past year in my idea of making roller coasters. Then it hit me. Roller coasters can be found in theme parks, which is one of the concepts we discussed in class for a pretty lengthy period while reading The Odyssey. The main takeaway I have from that unit is that a theme is not an idea. A theme is a complete yet brief sentence that could summarize the morals of the story in a few words. Moving on to Multimedia, this is when the thought of producing a commercial came up. When someone reads a theme of a story, he/she is usually interested in learning more about the book. Likewise, a commercial is designed to be a brief snapshot of what the consumer will find when purchasing or consuming a product, or partaking in a certain service that is being offered. I thought that by using our skills that we gained by filming our The Odyssey spin-off films, it would not be very challenging to operate a camera, which is a huge chunk of the process behind the creation of a commercial. With both of these ideas in mind, my thought process for how Physics was going to tie in was actually fairly simple. For our big Exhibition in December, our team split up into small groups of about three or four students to design and build mini golf holes, and I thought that this experience fit the roller build mini golf holes, and I thought that this experience fit the roller coaster idea perfectly. Students would learn about the physics concepts behind how a roller coaster operates, which would set them up for success when it came time to build wooden models of their roller coasters. Finally, I wanted to see if I could find a way to add in a math component to the project, which led me to thinking about the 9th Grade Commons Design Project we did earlier this semester. For this project, we learned about different geometry concepts that we could incorporate in our design, and then sketched those out to scale on a piece of graph paper. I thought that this might be a nice idea to have both a three-dimensional model of our roller coaster, along with an accurately-drawn image that visitors could see when viewing a student's work. With all of this in mind, I have found that it is not impossible to connect all four classes together. In fact, that's what our school is all about: forming well-rounded individuals who are prepared to move on with the next phase of their lives. By searching for ways to mix our experience in each one of the classes from the past semesters, the project can help to influence learning and knowledge in all areas, and that's what I'm happy I was able to do.
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