Inquiry Update

Well there hasn’t been all that much progress since I last posted an Inquiry update.  🙁  I have been sick for two weeks and missed that much school, The demo track that me and Nolan completed is ready to upload but its too big to upload on my blog. We are going to fine somewhere to upload it to, then ill post a link. We plan to pretty much finish the song this weekend so next time I blog hopefully I will have a lot more to talk about but for now there isn’t much to report.

Today in digital media Heidi Gable taught the class about copyright. We were shown several examples of people/companies that used copyrighted material and were sued. The one example that I will talk about on my blog is a commercial for GoldieBlox that used a Beastie Boys song without permission in a commercial. The link is here:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/11/goldieblox-beastie-boys-girls-removed/

 We also talked about if its legal to cover songs without talking to the artist first, I also learned that people are not supposed to take photos off the internet without making sure that the person who posted the photo is OK with use of it. The course was very good and I really enjoyed it.

🙂

Inquiry Update

The inquiry I am currently working on with Nolan is going fairly well, we have now recorded our first full demo of the song we wrote! 🙂 The only thing we have left to do is to finish the song and to add/create a drum track. I do not play drums (not sure about Nolan) but I think the best idea is to use the recorder to make a drum track for the song. This is a bit of a setback because we still have to make drum beats for all the parts of the song and figure out how to add them in with the instruments. This isn’t going to be hard at all so I’m actually quite exited!

P.S. I will post the demo soon. 🙂

My three most trusted websites for information:

Wikipedia

I use this website more than anything for information, and despite the fact that not everything on Wikipedia is 100% true it is still very useful.

NHL.com

Its the official website of the NHL, all the information on this site is true. Its on my list because I use it about twice a day.

YouTube

This site is full of primary sources in video format, stuff like interviews and many other types of videos.

Started New Inquiry

A few weeks ago me and Nolan started a new Inquiry project. We are going to make a song and a music video. The first step in this inquiry is to decide on a theme, at this moment in time we have a number of ideas and are working on narrowing it down to one idea for our theme. I got a ZOOM R8 music recorder (think that’s what its called) for Christmas and once i learn how to use it i can record a song in excellent quality. Our plans for the song are pretty good, I will play bass and guitar (lead and rhythm) and Nolan will play piano. We will also use drums, the ZOOM R8 also has a built-in finger drumming kit so we will be able to add drums in the song. We are still not to sure who will sing but finding someone should not be to hard. Hopefully we will have a recording of the song by next week and if we do I will post that on my blog. I’m very exited about learning how to use the ZOOM R8 because not only will it help with this inquiry but it will also allow me to create music in the future.

Card Trick!

Today in digital media the class’s assignment was to solve another puzzle. Mr Khalili demonstrated the card trick once and then instructed us to find out how he did it. He had 5 cards: Ace, 2, 3, 4, and 5 of hearts. He first placed the aces down on the table, then placed the card behind it at the back of the deck (5 cards), then placed the next card on the table, and sent the one behind it to the back of the deck and so on until all 5 cards were on the table in the order: Ace, 2, 3, 4, and 5. We (the students) were then put into pairs and each given a cards deck, the objective was to replicate what Mr. Khalili had done with the five cards. Me and my partner (Bailie) took about 7 minutes to figure out how to do the trick, Mr Khalili then told us to try it with 6 cards instead of 5. We did, it took about 7 or 8 minutes and I was shocked how 1 card could make it  so much harder. after we finally did that we then tried it with all the hearts in the deck (13 cards). We spent about 15 minutes on this but then ran out of time, we came close a few time but couldn’t do it in the time given. The entire thing was a lot of fun, it is just to bad that we couldn’t figure out how to complete the trick with all 13 cards.

I-Hub Open house!

Yesterday (2014-01-16) the I-Hub held an open house. About 40 students showed up and they all had their parents with them so the school was very crowded. I am looking forward to having new people come to the I-Hub next year and meeting so many people yesterday was great! The open house was very successful. I spent my time at the open house getting people to sign their name on a large piece of paper and then directing them to the classroom where the presentations were being held. We removed the wall between the classrooms and filled both of them with chairs, my guess is that the space could have seated almost 150 people. I didn’t attend the presentations because I was in the hallway greeting people and telling them where to go. I had a great time at the open house and am hoping that our visitors did also.

3 Humans, 2 Monkeys & 1 Gorilla: Reflection

Three Humans, two Monkeys & one Gorilla was a game/puzzle that we had to solve in class today (2014-01-17). Our objective was to get all of our popsicle sticks across a river, we had three different color popsicle sticks: one purple, two green and three blue. The blue popsicle sticks were humans, green were monkeys and the purple was a gorilla. There was one boat, the boat could only hold two popsicle sticks at a time but could not hold both monkeys because monkeys couldn’t drive the boat. The one last rule that made this almost impossible was that the apes could not outnumber the humans at any time or they would kill the humans and you would lose, Example: Two apes and one human on the one side of the river at any time would mean “game over”. Once me and my partner (Harry) knew the rules it was only a matter of trying to figure out how to complete the puzzle. The first challenge we had to overcome was an opening move. If we sent the gorilla and a human over first and left the human on the far side the gorilla would kill the two humans on his return. It took us about fifteen minutes of trying and failing before Harry came up with the idea of trying it backwards. We realized we needed to have all the humans and the gorilla on the far side and then we would win, (the gorilla could just go back and forth bringing the monkeys over). We spent about five minutes trying to solve it and we did but sadly we forgot how we did it. We then had to solve it again and this time record all the moves we made. We finally solved the puzzle and recorded all the moves that we made! We started by moving both monkeys to one side with the gorilla, the gorilla than brings the boat back and two humans go over. One humans then brings a monkey back to the side they started on meaning that one human and one monkey are on the far side but the boat is on the side we started on. The gorilla and a human then take the boat over and a human and a monkey take it back. This means that a human and the gorilla are on the far side without the boat. The two humans on the original side then take the boat to the far side, the gorilla makes two trips to get the monkeys and VICTORY!!! I had a lot of fun with this puzzle and am looking forward to any more puzzles that we do in the future.

Could you be friends with a protagonist in your novel? Why or why not?

Yes I could be friends with the protagonist that survived the plane crash in the book World War Z.

World War Z has many protagonists, all of them are people trying to survive in a world overrun with the living dead. Being friends with the protagonist would help us both survive. Like the other protagonists in the book, the woman’s only objective was survival. She almost died trying to find a way to get out of the zone filled with the living dead. The only reason my protagonist lived was because a voice on her radio continued to tell her to keep going. If a real human was there instead she would have done much better and would have had an easier time surviving.

Another reason that I could be her friend would be because in the story she is a fairly friendly character and would probably be able to accept help from another living human being. In the story she was helping pilot a supply plane over land infested by zombies when something went wrong and the plane partly exploded. Only two people survived the crash and one of them landed near several zombies. Although the protagonist had a gun and shot the zombies, it was too late to save her friend, the zombies had already killed him. This helps prove that I could be friends with her because I believe after she had lost a friend and was stranded in territory filled with zombies, she would welcome any company from another human being.

My answer to the question is yes, I could be friends with her and almost all the other protagonists in the story. Like I said before, her only objective was survival and if I was living in that same world survival would be my objective also. Humans survive better in numbers and when trapped alone in the middle of nowhere one of the best things to have with you would be a friend. Being friends with the protagonist would help us both survive.