Neuroplasticity: Neuroplasticity allows the brain to constantly grow. This happens when you are doing things. Every time you do something your brain will create a path for that, the more you do it the stronger the path gets or if you are doing something new the path will be created. These paths allow you to get better at everything you do whenever you do it. By knowing about this it gives you the mindset that every time you do something even if you have done it many times before you will always get a little bit better even if you can’t notice the difference.
Training your brain: Training your brain is all about doing something many times to get better at it. If you are doing training with your brain you will improve all the time. It doesn’t matter how old you are, if you put in the work you will get better at it. You can train your brain in everything that you do but some main things you can improve on are, reaction time, attention to detail, and other cool skills.
Grit: Grit is the ability to keep going and be patient. Grit isn’t talked about much but is very important. If you have good grit you are more likely to do well in school and in life. Many people think success is all about being smart but there are many other factors like grit. There are many people with lots of grit and some people don’t have so much but if you have a lot of grit you will be able to get through tough times, get things done and do well in life.
Happiness: Happiness is one of the most important things in life. It allows you to have fun and enjoy life which is something we all want because we don’t want to waste our lives being sad or just alright. Some main ways to be happy are, do things that you enjoy, hang out with people that you like, and try to stay away from things that bother you. There are many things that you can do to be happy but happiness is also a mindset. If you always look on the bright side of things and try to stay positive you should be able to maintain a happy mindset. Happiness is one of the most important things in the world and if you can always try to be happy, you should be able to enjoy yourself.
On Wednesday the 16th of June, 2021, I took part in an Innovate ED program called $20 Boss. $20 Boss is where you get into groups and receive 20 dollars each. You then have to use many different design thinking processes that will help you develop an idea that you can sell at markets. Our group went through many different products but ended up making laser-cut keychains. In my group, I had Simba, Xander, Max, and me. We were then thinking and making many designs that we can cut but were having some problems with copyright. After a long time of thinking, we decided that we would laser cut letters for people’s names as it wasn’t copyrighted and we thought that it would sell well. Me and one of the other group members went to bunnings on the weekend and bought the keyrings. After making those outlines and getting ready to cut I stayed a couple of days after school and got the cutting done. We had some problems with how easily it would break on the vulnerable parts. The vulnerable parts were where the hole for the ring was and the outside as we thought it might snap. After changing the design a bit we came up with our final product. While I was doing all the cutting Simba was making posters and Xander was making an excel document to keep track of purchases and sales.
Market
The market was in the morning and I went early to set up. Not long after that, all our group members were there and we started the market. It started slow with a few sales but we got running and we started selling more. We had sold out of a product that a customer wanted and they placed an order. We sold lots of our stock and made a solid profit so that we didn’t have to pay any money back to the school that gave us the loan.
What we learnt
Overall it was a very fun project and we learned a lot. Although there were many challenges along the way our team persevered and got through it. After the challenges, there was always a bright side which was either getting through a hard time or getting through to a fun time.
Project Utopia is a project that the year seven cohort had been assigned. The aim of the project was to create a utopia (that is a perfect society) with your group and then present it on presentation night. This covered a lot of subjects as there were a lot of parts to it and it took a long time but on the 18th of September, we presented the project to visiting parents and grandparents. This was very hard but fun so here is my reflection of this experience.
The Process
The process of this Utopia Project started with reading The Giver in English which taught us about Utopias and Dystopias which was something really important for this project as it is about a utopia. Then in science, we started learning about sustainability and made a sustainable house where we learnt a lot about how we should make our houses. After that there was Hass, This taught us about livability factors and what types of things would make countries more and less livable. This helped as it showed us some things that we could focus on so our utopia will be very livable. Then also in Hass, we made individual utopias. These were only drawn and were not as big of a project but helped us understand a lot more about utopias and what we would be doing. After all of that, in InnovatED we started to create our utopias. My group used CoSpaces to build our model. Creating the cities consisted of planning, learning about global goals and gaining accreditation for them, and constructing the cities. While this was happening in Hass we started learning about civics and citizenship. This knowledge helped us learn more about how government works so that we could make better decisions about our government structure. After that, in Hass, we learnt about constitutions and wrote one for our utopia. Lastly in English our group presented a little presentation about our city. This gave us some feedback for the presentation afternoon and gave us an idea about what the presentation would be like. After all this, we finally got onto the presentation.
The Presentation
On the 18th of September, we were all finished and were ready to present. Eventually, they opened the doors and parents started coming in. As the evening went on parents and family would come up to our table and we would tell them about our utopia. We talked about our reasons for certain parts of our utopia, such as green power, community interaction, sustainability, quality education, and community services. Guests would ask questions and we would respond. I think our group did well as we were able to respond to all the questions with good detail and clarity. Some of the questions were a bit hard to answer (such as “where does the money come from to build the utopia?”) but most of the questions we had already thought of. The presentation went for a long time but in the end, everyone felt accomplished and proud of what they did.
My Utopia
My group consisted of Seth, Ayneschkanna, and me. I think we did well with our utopia as our utopia was very sustainable and had some amazing features like having 60% green areas,
My Reflection
Learning area connections:
I think that this is connected to a lot of different learning areas. The first one that comes to mind is science because we learnt about sustainability and made sustainable houses. We implemented the sustainable houses into our community and some people even brought a house for the showcase. Another one was English as we read The Giver which was about living in a utopia. This was the first thing we did that had anything to with utopias.
Most important information you have learnt:
The most important information that I learnt during this was that when you think outside the box you think of some ideas that work. Even if this idea is way too expensive or big to do because you don’t have to pay for it or build it so you can do it.
What you enjoyed the most:
Something that I enjoyed the most was being able to think freely without there being certain things that you have to do. There was only a brief goal saying that you needed to make a utopia but everything else you could do however you wanted to and you made your own decisions.
What aspects did you find most challenging:
Probably working as a team. Some decisions that you thought were good your team may not have liked. Also sometimes they can get angry because their idea didn`t make it into the final product. Although this was quite challenging, without the team I would have struggled a lot.
What would I do differently:
Next time what I might do differently is I might try to focus on gaining accreditation more than the building because in the end we didn`t have that many accreditations and we wanted to get more. Another thing that I would do differently is to maybe do a physical model instead of one on CoSpaces because on CoSpaces there is only a certain amount of things that you can build, but for a physical model, you can build whatever you want.
