Category: Projects

HASS PROJECT – The Napoleonic Wars (Week 1)

Matthew Baldock on

As part of our Year 10 Humanities course, we are able to research a project of our own choice and are required to create a final product to showcase at a final exhibition in Term 4. the topic that my group and I have chosen to research is the Napoleonic wars. Our main focus area is to give a better understanding of all elements of the time period. The steps that we have completed are:

  1. Dividing research into 3 topics: Military, Political and Diplomatic
  2. Find and Source 10 seperate sources that will be relevant in helping us acheive our end result
  3. Starting on a timeline for key parts of the project and setting deadlines for certain elements.

Our plan for continuing this project includes brainstorming ideas for how to present our final product and creating a rough sketch for how it will look on the Exhibition Night.

Year 10 English – Inquisitive growth

Matthew Baldock on

During this year in English, many of my learning skills have been tested to withstand the pressure of ATAR learning. One of these skills that had seen the most improvement is my inquisitive ability. This ability was tested during our second task of the year in which we had to write a speech about a problematic topic using a persona. The task was foreign as we had never written as someone else before, but it did not worry me. I had decided to write my speech on problems in YouTube’s suggestion algorithm and had taken on the persona of a YouTube PR representative. During the assignment preparation, I had researched how YouTube recommends their content and certain harmful events that were caused due to their lack of agency. My extensive research had gone so far that I had researched extra topics just so I could better understand the situation, I had essentially absorbed the knowledge needed to be my persona. My hard work was later rewarded with an amazing score for achieving greatness in a foreign field.

My inquisitive growth had also been showcased during our sixth assignment where we had to compare two separate texts in an essay. During the preparation time before the essay, I had extensively researched both texts by memorizing various quotes and scenes and pinpointing how each quote was similar and different to one another. I had even studied how to write an essay to the point where I had a formula for each paragraph. This thorough pursuit of knowledge had led me to achieve excellence in this assignment as well. Throughout both assessments, this inquisitive attitude had always been a highlight of my work, as I believe that a normal person trains themselves to remember a concept while I should strive to understand it.

Chat-Bot Challenge

Matthew Baldock on

Over the course of three weeks, My Group and I have been working closely with the team at Firetech/au to create a prototype chat-bot for the popular streaming service Netflix. In our group, we used Teamwork and Individual Leadership to distribute work between us.

We utilised AWS Educate and completed “badges” which expanded our knowledge about the systems used and we used Amazon Lex (Amazon’s private programming platform) to create the prototype for our chat-bot. We divided the work into three main roles: Project Manager, UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) Designer and Lead Programmer. Using these roles, we were able to expand our knowledge on the technology used and also developed teamwork and leadership skills

Sustainability using Maths

Matthew Baldock on

This project that spanned the last three weeks of school had taught us the correct ways to reach sustainability and how to communicate it through mathematic devices (Graphs, Statistics Etc.). This project had us use this knowledge to create products that would communicate sustainable acts through the taught mathematical devices.

Throughout the lessons, we had learnt about the effects of our chosen topic: Food Wastes. we had learnt its negatives, counters and we also learnt about the three pillars of sustainability. These pillars include the Economic, Environmental and the Social pillars which needed to be balanced in order to reach a sustainable future.

My group and I had created a pamphlet to convey sustainability through statistics. We had also created a presentation to show the class to support and successfully pitch the idea of the pamphlet. This had utilised the research we did in class and was based around the three pillars.

First page that covers the Economic Pillar
Second page that covers the Environmental Pillar
Final Page that covers the Social Pillar

Overall, the experience of this project was very beneficial to expanding my understanding and learning about sustainability.

Creative Industries – Rollercoaster

Matthew Baldock on

In Years 7 Creative industries we were assigned a list of categories that we could choose to do a project form. I had chosen to do rollercoasters. At first, I had thought it would be easy to build a rollercoaster from straws but I was wrong.  My group and I had to use the design thinking process to work out how to build the roller coaster, which methods were effective and how to give our roller coaster a creative edge over the other teams. This project that spanned 11 weeks had taught me creativity, time management and most importantly how to work and communicate in a team efficiently.