Organisation: By the end of the semester, I got all of my tasks done on time. I managed to do this because I developed my organisational and time management skills by writing down all of the things I needed to do, in the order I needed to do them so that I wouldn’t fall behind. All of my worksheets were immediately glued into my visual diary so that I wouldn’t lose my work
Creativity: In this unit we produced 2 pieces of art; a chalk drawing of a fruit of our choice, I did 2 oranges and a capsicum, and a painting of an apple. I am really happy with how my drawing turned out, it was realistic and I am proud of what I managed to do with the help of the shading and tonal techniques that I learnt. Not as much, but I am also satisfied with my apple. It was difficult to blend the colours together because the paint would often dry before I had the chance to blend but it was still a great and challenging experience that I would like to do again.
The red dot is the point of the timeline that we are at now
Plan For My Booth:
Since My Last Progress Update:
As you can see from my timeline. I have made quite a lot of progress since my last progress update. Last week I found some more research and organised all of my information from my references onto one word document. I also drew up a plan for how my presentation is going to look at the exhibition on the 11th of November. I’m going to have 3 pieces of cardboard stuck together in a wall-like structure displaying information. There will also be criminal files of all the main suspects of The Zodiac, along with a notebook explaining how the killer managed to get away, and a file with stories of each of his victims.
How I Have Been Incorporating My Capabilities Into My Project:
In my last progress update I mentioned the capabilities I would be using to complete my project –
Creativity
Organisation
Inquisitive
But this is more in depth-
Creativity
I have used creativity in my project to create a plan on how I am going to present my information in the exhibition. It was hard at first but after a few tries, I finished with a diagram of a booth which I am proud of and am looking forward to creating. Without creativity, I wouldn’t’ve been able to develop something as cool as what I have made; its more than just a PowerPoint, or words on paper. Hopefully it will attract the eye of the parents and students walking through the exhibition in Week 5.
Organisation
Without a good plan of how I was going to work for the next couple of weeks, it would be very difficult to produce a good quality project by the end with a large amount of research inside. I created a timeline of all the tasks I needed to do in the lead up to the exhibition, to ensure that I would have enough time and not just be rushing everything in the final few days. I tell myself goals of what I should complete by the end of the week to make sure I don’t fall behind. And as of right now, I am right on time.
Inquisitive
I found that this project has made me much more inquisitive about things than I was before. Since starting, I have shown much more interest in what I am learning which is something I struggled with before. This is greatly due to the fact that we got to choose what we wanted to do our projects on. I chose a crime case because I thought that it would be cool and unlike anything I’d ever done before, and it turns out I was right. I love working on this project and I am far more motivated to have a successful outcome when I am curious about what I am researching.
As part of our Year 10 Humanities course we are able to research a topic from either History, Civics, Geography or Economics, and create something that we can showcase at our final exhibition on the 11th of November, in Term 4. The topic I got was Civics which I was really happy with because I am interested in law, and with that murder and crime, which was what I wanted to do for my project as soon as I found out about this project. The crime I decided to research on was the Zodiac Killer because I have always found his case really interesting as he is one of the only serial killers that has ever managed to get away with no one knowing his identity.
So far I have found all 10 resources for my annotated bibliography. My annotated bibliography includes links to sources I found containing information for the Zodiac Killer as well as a brief description for each link of what was on the source, the authors purpose and how useful I found the source. I have also completed some pages in my booklet like the timeline, which gives me an idea of the tasks I need to do to be able to complete the project by the exhibition date in Week 5 of Term 4.
My plan for continuing my project is to get more onto the side of writing down points and using my links to gather all of the information about the Zodiac Killer in one place. Very soon I will start planning different ways that my project can be presented for the exhibition. I was thinking presenting it with a bloody dark/theme to match the crime.
I have started and plan on developing further, many capabilities from the capabilities wheel. These include:
Our most recent task in Year 10 English was to write a play as a group based on a problem that is shown in our society. The problem we chose was drug addiction, and how it can affect not only the person using, but also the relationship between friends and family. In our play, our main characters were a drug addict father, his wife, son, and the drug dealer. We showed in our performance how drugs can be deteriorating for a family, but also how reaching out and getting help can turn everyone’s lives around to create a healthy, happy family environment. My group members and I developed many of our capabilities from this task.
Problem Solving and Effective Communication:
On the day of the performance two of our group members were sick, so we had to figure out how we could do the play with only the 3 of our remaining members. We had to problem solve by communicating with each other what we needed to change. As both of our absent group members played significant roles, we had to divide their parts amongst the 3 of us, which we managed to do effectively. It was difficult but our performance managed to run relatively smoothly considering.
Creative
In our play, we included something where someone says “pause” and then the people currently acting in the scene pause what they’re doing, and someone gives context to what is going on in the scene as sometimes it can be hard to tell what is going on. We also would give facts on drug use and how it effects users and their family. This was a very creative aspect of our play and we found that it allowed for the audience to follow along better and pay attention to what was going on.
Overall, from this task I developed some of my capabilities including problem solving, effective communication and creativity. I found that this was a very beneficial task that taught me many new things.
In Maths, we were given a project where we had to research sustainability and then mathematically analyse and transfer the information. From this project, I learned how to read statistics and graphs better which could be very useful for me in the future. I enjoyed putting all the information, data and graphs together in a presentation to see everything that I have learnt about plastic reduction. Our first page includes statistics, graphs and information regarding how much rubbish is found in the oceans around Australia. By both images we can see that majority of the rubbish is plastic. The second page talks about our key concept which for us is “Futures.” The 3rd page explains ways that we can reduce plastic from getting into the oceans. Finally, the last page explains how plastic reduction affects the environmental, social and economic pillars of sustainability. I focused on page 2 and 4 and my partner Maddy focused on page 1 and 3. We worked well together and we are both very happy with the outcome of this project. We could however, have done better at including more graphs and statistics as most of them are all on page 1.
This year, my friends and I went on a camp down in Kalbarri. This camp came with a lot of opportunities to put our teamwork skills to the test. Some ways that our skills were shown was through team building and cooking.
On our last full day of camp, my group had a go at team building with Ms Kirkham. One of the activities we did was tarp volleyball. This game was basically just playing volleyball but instead of playing with our hands, each member of the team had to hold onto an end of a tarp and work together to hit the ball with the tarp, to the other side of the net. In order to win the game, we all communicated as a team to discuss game strategies. Our group was able to communicate that our main strategy was going to be to catch the ball in the tarp, and then rock it along the tarp back and forth to gain momentum and then on the final roll back we were to have the people holding the tarp at the back, to hit the ball so it flew off the tarp into the other teams side. This showed that our team had great teamwork and communication as our strategies and techniques almost always worked. We all listened to each other’s other ideas as well, some worked, and some did not but that was okay. Our teamwork skills obviously paid off because my team actually managed to win. We then worked together to come up with a victory dance to show off to the other team.
We also showed teamwork when we were cooking. In our cooking group, we had everyone with different jobs. Most nights we would have one person on cutting veggies, one on cooking veggies and another on cooking the meat. Then for cleaning we had someone washing the dishes and then the others drying with a tea towel and then distributing the dishes out to the carriers. We never ran into any problems with people not doing their jobs or someone slacking off, so we always managed to eat our meals happily and everyone got along. Obviously, without any teamwork skills, people would be getting frustrated at others for not pulling their weight, and it would’ve taken longer to make our food, not to mention make the whole camp less enjoyable as we had to work with our cooking groups at least twice a day.
My year group at school worked on a project collaborating with RAAFA to solve a problem. The problem was that the residents were not receiving quick-delivery, good-quality food coming from the cafes. My group and I designed a golf buggy that could deliver food to everyone under $50,000 and was environmentally friendly and appropriate for all climates.
My Experience
I had a great time working with RAAFA and learning so much about the community over there. Working with my group allowed me to use my teamwork skills. We needed to work together to be able to create something with everyone doing the same amount of work so that it was fair. We needed to communicate with each other in order to get our pitch of the solution done and so that we didn’t have more than 1 person in our group researching the same thing, so we could work effectively and use our time well. We needed to problem solve to be able to come up with a design that was efficient, practical, affordable and accessible. I learnt a lot about these powers during my time on this project and I really encourage you to meet with a service partner in your area and ask them about any problems that you can solve, to better your life and many others.
