Evaluate

5-6 : The student evaluates the success of the product/solution in an objective manner based on the results of testing, and the views of the intended users. The student provides an evaluation of his or her own performance at each stage of the design cycle and suggests improvements. The student provides an appropriate evaluation of the impact of the product/solution on life, society and/or the environment.

House Appreciation Reflection (discussed in evaluation paragraph bellow)

Appreciate

• 4 movements & 15+ minutes?
• To what degree have you used different styles/genres/types of music?
• Linkin Park?? How effective??
• Clarity of sound?

• I WANT A COPY!!!

Evaluation: I think I did quite a good job on this project. During all my other assignments my attitude got worse towards the end, but I really feel like I have improved in that aspect. In general, I think my music was good for what my capabilities are, but after listening to some of the other music put together by some of my class mates, I ended up being disappointed with my music. I love music and being creative, but when it comes to making music, I think that I am not capable of creating something that sounds great. I showed my track to two people and they seemed to like it because it included a variety of types of music. Regarding my criteria, I feel like I have kept on track, and always written in my 'create' section when I was modifying or simply processing with my music. If I were to do this project again, I would probably try an easier approach to it. I would try find different pieces of music which are similar to one another, so that there is not a huge change of atmosphere and mood when another movement comes in. I was able to stick to the guidelines, which were to have a track between 15-30 minutes. I also included more than 4 movements, which was also another guideline. I think I have done a really good job with including different types of music, in order to create an interesting piece which would please an audience with different musical tastes. Using different types of music made it hard to create effective linking parts, although I think I did a good job with linking the classical and pop music together. My track is fairly simple, so the clarity of it is pretty good, I don't think I have crammed it with other sounds which did not fit well together. Hopefully the others will like it.

Create

5-6 : The student competently uses appropriate techniques and equipment. The student follows the plan and justifies any modifications made, resulting in a product/solution of appropriate quality using the resources available.

23 April: What I will do- Today I created my timeline. Mr. Holmes will have to give us our final day our project is due, but the dates for the rest of the tasks have been established.
What I achieved- I updated my blog, and created the timeline. 

25 April: What I will do- Today I will start gathering sources for my bibliography. While I get informations from my sources, I will also proceed with my actually creation on garageband.
What I achieved- I downloaded music and listened to house music remixes.

27th April: What I will do- Today I will start playing around with Garage Band.
What I achieved- Today I looked at more music, and tried seeing what worked with what. I included more beats. (:

30th April: What I will do- Today I will start playing with my base line so that I have a fixed sound throughout my music.
What I achieved- I found music and possible beats I could work with. I also used these beats against music that I will hopefully use.

7th May: What I will do- Today I will start mixing lyrics and new beats with my basic base line.
What I achieved- I downloaded classical music, and faded it in with more modern r&b music.

18th May: What I will do- I have about 7 songs which I want to plat around with.
What I achieved- I am currently working on incorporating more tracks in my project. Till now I have: Indulge (classical music), Born to Die (Lana Del Rey), and Every teardrop is a waterfall (Coldplay).

28th May: I have been sick for about a week, but nevertheless I still thought about other things I could incorporate in my music. I thought that it would be an interesting idea if i were to include many genres of music, so I decided to include: classical (at the beginning), Pop-Lana DR, house/ alternative- Coldplay, world/ arabian- Born Again, other world and club beats from MyGarageBand.

4th June: What I will do- Today I will wrap up my music. I'm going through it making sure that everything sounds like I want it to.
What I did- I still haven't finished my piece but I will in the next days.


Evaluate: Through keeping track of what I did during this project, I managed to accomplish what I wanted to. I will finish the music on time, so I feel that this post has really helped me with time management and organization. What didn't go so well was trying to get a base line that fit with the music that I wanted to. I am happy of my over all process, but if I had to do it again, I would probably used a different technique to do this project (make my own music from different beats, rather than 'famous'/'popular' music.) 

Plan

5-6 : The student produces a plan that contains a number of detailed, logical steps that describe the use of resources and time. The student critically evaluates the plan and justifies any modifications to the design.

THE TIMELINE DISCUSSED IN CLASS 

1. April 27 - bibliography due (including where you got your music samples)
2. April 30 - planning complete
3. June 1 - session complete 
4. June 8 - evaluation complete

MY TIMELINE

1. April 27: Bibliography due 
2. May 3: All of my music from youtube downloaded 
3. May 8: Find a beat to act as a 'base' 
4. May 9-16: Experiment with music, and distract the songs/ tracks that don't work well with the base 
5. May 17- 25: Cut down my music to a maximum of four different tracks (which turned out to be pieces by Cold Play, LDR, Garageband Intro, and Born Again) 
6. May 25- June 2: Put music together and experiment with sequences, loops, and breaks. Keep track with the criteria questions.
7. June 3- 8: Clean up my track and make sure that there are no 'errors', export and hand in to Mr. Holmes. 

Evaluation: I designed my own timeline, because I know that if I only used the three dates assigned by Mr. Holmes, I would not have done a good job. I didn't necessarily stick to this plan, because creativity can't be planned. I was also sick for about two weeks, so I did not really move forward with it during those days. Nevertheless, I managed to finish my piece on time!

Investigate

5-6 : The student explains the problem, discussing its relevance. The student critically investigates the problem, evaluating information from a broad range of appropriate, acknowledged sources. The student describes detailed methods for appropriate testing to evaluate the product/solution against the design specification.

The 'problem' is to create a piece of house music from 15 to 30 minutes long. 

20th April 2012 : Today Mr. Chettri came to talk to us about music. He did a presentation on rythm, pitch, chourus, verse, bridge etc 

25th April 2012: BIBLIOGRAPHY EXEMPLAR + ACTUAL BIBLIOGRAPHY -

Bibliography: 

- Presentation by mr. Chettri (Stonehill music teacher)

- Video on house music: Chemical Brothers, Propeller Heads, Greenday, DJ Tiesto, Daft Punk, Saint Sense  (shown by Mr.Holmes)

- My Playlist: I looked through music in my Itunes, and I found some music I think would be appropriate for this project. The songs I was interested in using were: Strobe by Deadmau5e, Born to Die by Lana Del Rey, Faux Berlin by Deadmau5e, 42 by Coldplay, Every Teardrop is a Waterfall by Coldplay, Babylonia by Born Again, Greyhound by Swedish House Mafia, etc. 

- Soundcloud- I went to Soundcloud to look at what other people came up with, and perhaps get some inspiration. (http://soundcloud.com/) 

- Youtube- Youtube can't really be used as a 'source' because it is too vague, but I basically searched possible music I could use on there and then downloaded it. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxRrrfpMON8&feature=related - the only song I downloaded from youtube) 

- Youtube-mp3: I used this website to download music from youtube (http://www.youtube-mp3.org/) 

Music I used: Classical music- Indulge (MGB), Pop- Born to die (Itunes library), House- Every teardrop is a waterfall (Coldplay), World Music/ House- Babylonia (Itunes library).

Reflection:The 'problem' is to create a piece of house music from 15 to 30 minutes long. Firstly I had to have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to put together a track which would involve different varieties of music. I think I used a good variety of sources to retrieve my actual music from. It would have been a good idea to have more primary sources such as people to talk to me about music. I wanted to create a 'hook' at the beginning of the track, but I didn't want anything more 'powerful' than the rest of the music, so I used classical music fading into pop, and then it built up from there. The presentation done by Mr. Chettri was extremely helpful, he gave me some really good information especially when he talked about the instruments that work well together. 

First time garageband.

Today I got on garage band I tried mixing some beats together from: 15 Faxing Berlin (Deadmau5e), Greyhound (Swedish House Mafia), and Teenage Crime (Adrian Lux). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Once my video was deleted twice with all of my footage that I download it, I had only one week to re create everythihng, so I could not include all of these sources, but I learnt a lot from these always, and were part of my investigation and plan, so I think that it is important to include some of these.

- Drinking & Driving . (n.d.). WWW2 Webserver. Retrieved March 29, 2012, from http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/DrinkingAndDriving

This webpage is text on drinking and driving with a lot of information which I can get my facts from.

- CDC Vital Signs - Drinking and Driving: A Threat to Everyone. (n.d.). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved March 29, 2012, from http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/drinkinganddriving

This website has really good and crutial information on drinking and driving which includes may statisctics. My video needs to be informative as well, so I will base many of my statistics form here.

-Drinking and Driving Ad - YouTube . (n.d.). YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. . Retrieved March 29, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpYq9CBZoKQ

This is another add on not drinking and driving. I think that it is important to have a veriety of different footage to make the video more interesting.

-Don't Drink and Drive - YouTube . (n.d.). YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. . Retrieved March 29, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymiF-okrdMg

This is a really sad commerical, and if I cut out the really sad bits, I can still use it. It is about a soccer player which gets drunk and drives home and crashes into a backyard and ends up killing a boy playing soccer.

- Enduring Regret - YouTube . (n.d.). YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. . Retrieved March 29, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVnuVC9j52U

This is what my documentary is mostly going to focus on because it is a true story. The video includes all the aspects which I want to cover: why he was drinking, the damage he did to himself and others, the concequences and how he is dealing with them.

-http://www.hbo.com/addiction/

This is a really reliable source since it is the official Home Box Office website, which contains many free videos on teenagers and alcohol addiciton. I think that this could be very helpful for facts and footage.

QUESTIONS

QUESTIONS:

1) AFter knowing the intent of this documentary, do you feel like my documentary did focus and achieve that? why or why not? 
2) What could have I done in order to make the point of this documentary more clear.
3) Discuss what you learnt and what you found more effective
4) In general how can I improve?
\
BROTHER:

1) I think that it was good, and that you really left a mark on the audience with the story you had in it.

2) I think you could have had different stories in it and different voices. Maybe you can have yourself at the beggining explaining what the point of the document was.

3) I learnt that drinking and driving can be really dangerous, and anything can happen unexpectedly when you are driving under the influence of alcohol.

4) I think it should have been more long becuase it was interesting.

FATHER:

1) Good job, the story was clear so you really understood what the point of the documentary was.

2) Maybe you could have put in intreviews with experts so that the point is also explained, eg: why do people drink and drive, it it becuase the wat to show off? or becuase they are unaware under that state of mind?

3) I knew a lot of htis before, but I learnt that such an 'innocent' man can coincidetally do this. Wrong time, wrong place.

4) Definatley should have been more long. I really liked it though.

EVALUATE

EVALUATE:

I really think that I had a good attidue towards this project at the beggining, but that definatley changed towards the end when my almost finished documentary was deleted from my computer twice. I think I did a lot more work than I was meant to because of this, but I feel like my end product is definatley not as good as what I had before I lost all of my data. I really iked this project because it let me explore different types of research, such as internet, diaries, documentaries, etc. Even if I missed some IT classes for an extra curricular class trip, I still think that I was on track and doing well. My turning point was definatley the loss of all my data, but I do realize that I should have backed it up on a hard drive. Nevertheless, I think that I still manage to accomplish what I wanted to, which was to convince an audience into not rinking and driving. I showed this documentary to my father, and he seemed surprised and sad as well from the story which i featured in my documentary, I hope that teenagers can feel the same way he did. Even if my final product was not what I planned, I think that I learnt a lot and really understood what I need to do next time (not just on documentary making) to improve my final product and the road I take to get there.

CREATE

CREATE:

Like I said in my INVESTIGATION post, the reason why I chose to do a documentary revolved around teenagers and drinking abuse, is because I personally feel that the school does not do much about it. Every year each middle year class has a 6 week course on alcohol and drug abuse, and I dont think it is very informative, or convincing to students, especially the ones that do abuse alcohol or/ and drugs. I created a detailed mind map which helped my narrow down my topic to drinking and driving in general. I also had a rich bibliography. It was a shame that we were not allowed to film in school, but I dont think that my creations was effected by that greatley. I had a lot of archival footage, which was then deleted twice from my computer. I think that my documentary was really good untill a couple of weeks ago when my computer deleted all of my data... this happend twice, so I was very behind. I didnt not want to take chances on my documentary and my grade, so I re-did my documentary on another computer. I think that this really effected my creation of this documentary, becuase I had very little time to re-do it. I definatley learnt from this that I should use backup such as a hard drive.

PLAN

PLAN:

 

Task:                Bibliography Due                                                          Date due:    23 Jan 2012           

Process:

My bibliography is full of good and valuble reaserch. It is helping me narrow down exactly what I want to focus on since Teenage Alcohol Abuse is a wide toppic.

Step Three

Task:                Design Complete                                  Date due:    Jan 27 2012

Process:

My design is done, and I think that the length is good as well. I include various types of videos with different people so that my video can be interseting. I think that the ammount of introduction, body, and coclusion is appropriate and doable.

Step Four

Task:                Planning Complete                                Date due: January 31 2012

Process:

I changed some of my planning becuase I decided to focus only on drinking and driving, but luckily I already had footage on that from my previous wide toppic.
 

Step Five

Task:                Filming Complete                                              Date due:   March 3 2012

Process: We were not allowed to film in school, so I used footage from the internet which was just as good, or even better in this case because I dont really have a chance to visit a person arrested for a DUI for example.

Step Six

Task:    Evaluations due                                                Date due:    March 23 2012           

Process: My evaluation is going good, a lot of it got deleted from my computer just lik e my documentary (which i then re-started).

Step Seven

Task:    ALL DONE                        Date due:    March 30 2012

INVESTIGATE

INVESTIGATE:

The task was to create a documentary which would inform, persuade or entertain an audience. I chose inform and persuade becuase I dont think that watching videos about drinking an driving is very entertaining. The reason why I chose to do a documentary revolved around teenagers and drinking abuse, is because I personally feel that the school does not do much about it. Every year each middle year class has a 6 week course on alcohol and drug abuse, and I dont think it is very informative, or convincing to students, especially the ones that do abuse alcohol or/ and drugs. That is the problem to me. Before I actually deided to do this, I did some background reaserach, I asked my classmates if they thought if the six week course was effective or not... the majority said not completley. Once I finalized that I wanted to do a documentary on teenagers and drinking I used various media as my recourses: videos and internet. I did a mindmap which helped me to find my rescourses effectivley which covered every subtopic in my documentary, for example a subtopic was long term mental effects; I looked up information specifically about this topic, and in the end only used 1 small piece of information, but never the less valuble and informative. My specification was that students were convinced by my documentary that stoping abuse of alcohol can save lifes, and that I ha to keep on track with my time line.

TIMELINE

Tuseday 14 February: Today I started to gather my video sources from the internet. I found great videos on teenage alcohol abuse (http://www.hbo.com/addiction/ , http://www.mediainternational.com/substance_abuse.htm). Some of them are long, but I planed on how I could cut out the pieces that were not neccessary.

Wednesday 15 February: Today I continued with my video gathering.

Monday 20 February: Today I printed out information (facts) and highlited the information I wanted to include.

Friday 24 February: On the 22nd Mr.Holmes told us that the school did not allow filming at school, so a part of my project was completley un-doable.

28 February: Once I reorganized my video structure, I started to compose my video. I decided to focus it on Drinking and Driving in general. I found a video about a man who was brought to jail for a DUI which killed to people during the drive. I mainly wanted to focus on that.

3 March: Today I put in text and information, and edited the video in order for it to fit with the written information.

5th March: I did the same thing as March 3

9th March: Today all of my work had been deleted... So i restarted my project again

20 March: Today my video again got deleted.

21 March: I was getting closer to the dead line, so I started to rush. This time I did not want to take any chances so I worked on another computer.

DESIGN

My choices were: Teenage alcohol abuse
Teenage hard drugs abuse
Drinking and driving

Bellow is my outline for teenage alcohol abuse, which then turned into drinking and driving. This same plan I used for my drinking and driving topic. \

Intro: Title (5 seconds) - Teenage Alcohol Abuse

Video from youtube: A quick overview video of a real life story on a teenager dealing with the consequences of alcohol abuse. (30 seconds)

Text: 3 facts on alcohol abuse  (10 seconds)

School councellor talking: General information on alcohol abuse, what is alcohol abuse, when does alcohol consumption become alcohol abuse, what are some reasons which teenager might tend towards this addiction. (120 seconds)

Video from http://enduringregret.org/documentary/: 2:08-2:12, and then > First 1 min- "What if.......... and that was what my life was about" (90 seconds)

School councellor: How does alcohol abuse mainly start (40 seconds)

Video http://enduringregret.org/documentary/: 2:44- 2:47

Annotated Bibliography

I need to keep in mind the following:

-What is it (title)
-What does the source suggest, what is it about
-Who is the author
-How will it contribute to my documentary 

EVALUATE

EVALUATE:

Since I wasn't at school for my evaluation I had to ask my brother to evaluate it. He was a perfect person to evaluate it since he is a gamer.

The questions were:

1) Discuss the good points in your game and why they are effective.
2) Which are some bad points and why are they not effective?
3) Discuss what you learnt through the game and how the new knowledge is applicable.
4) Was the layout understandable yet showed effort?
5) How can the negative points be improved.


1) The game is good, it's simple, and I could understand what you wanted to teach. It's also good for beginners who don't know anything about this sport. 


2)The game would be better if it had more levels and was a bit more colorful. Maybe you should have put some music in the background just so that the player can interact more with your game.


3)I have been horse riding for 7 years so I knew all of the things, but still, it was good. There was some basic but good information, it's good for a person that wants to just start this sport.


4)Game Salad seems kind of complicated so I understand why it isn't very detailed but it seemed like she put effort into making it. There is color so the objects appear more and contrast more from one another. 


5)I think you should have had more time so that you could have watched more videos and learnt more about the mind behind these programs. 


Personal Evaluation: Unfortunately I had to leave the country before the unit was over so I didn’t have a lot of time to put in this project. It was hard leaving my project unfinished, especially because I planned my plan when I didn’t know that I had to leave so soon. Another factor that affected my game was my attitude; during my plan I was quote negative because gaming isn’t usually what I do, and I wasn’t familiar enough with it to create a stable and advanced plan. As I lost some of my negative attitude I started working on the game at home because it started to interest me. My brother really motivated me to doing this game well, I talked to him a couple of times about it and he went home and showed me how to do certain things that I wasn’t able to. I think that if I had more time, I would have achieved more and made this game more educational for my audience since that was my main intent. Although, I did what was required, so I'm happy and proud with my product. Next time I would maybe use a less complicated program like Scratch or Kodu, I'm not familiar with them either, but I hope that they are a bit more simpler. I wish that I would have been able to improve my game after my brother gave me the feedback to my questions. From what my brother told me, he said that if he never knew what this sport was about, he would definitely be motivated to try it out. My parents' and brother's feedback was actually really useful, and I would definitely change some things if I could go back. 

CREATE

CREATE:

The tasks bellow are my steps that I did to create my game, some of the rules and what the game is about.

Task 1: I chose to create a game about horse riding for beginner, teaching any MYP student the basics of horse riding. Before I actually started to create my game, I tried doing different things with Game Salad, I played around with it, getting comfortable.

Task 2: I then started to design level 1, before the game started there was a pop-up which explained the rules and how to play. Level one consisted of a horse and the rider in the arena. In this level the gamer had to press "W" (on the key board) in order to make the horse walk, "H" to make the horse halt, "T" to make the horse trot, and "C" to make the horse canter. After a couple of times of doing this, the level was complete and Level 2 was in the making.

Task 4: Level 2 was hard to make because when the horse moved it moved all at once, obviously it is not an advanced game so it doesn't move its legs at different times. Even if it didn't seem very realistic esthetically speaking, I tried to create a jump horse. Every time there was an obstacle the player would have to click the up arrow to jump. If the player didn't succeed to jump, the level would re-begin. This level was really hard to create, especially when not being familiar to the whole gaming field.

Task 5: I didn't make any more levels because it got quite complicated, so instead of making more i went back and added more features to my levels. For example, every time that the player would succeed in certain things, then a star would pop up, or sometimes a heart would show on the screen and they had to get it before it disappeared in order to increase their lives.

Evaluation of Create: I think that my attitude affected my game. At the beginning of this project I wasn’t very positive about it because I didn’t feel like I was going to achieve a lot since I didn’t know much about gaming. But as I got used to working with GameSalad I got more positive and achieved more than I wanted. I think that it would have been better if I tried using Kodu as well so I could see what fitted best for me. During create I really put a lot of effort even if I had to leave the country before the unit ended. Overall I followed my plan except the fact that I didn’t manage to finish it fully.

PLAN

PLAN:

Task 1: Plan

Procedure: Write a plan on what I’m going to do from the beginning to the end and how I am going to do all these steps in Create. Include the equipment I need, any problems I might have with realizing this game, what I am going to teach through it or how it is going to benefit someone else, and my audience.

Task 2: Familiarize with Game Salad

Procedure: To plan my game I have to first get familiar with gaming in general, so I’m going to go on YouTube and watch various tutorials so that I can understand some of the terminology and get comfortable with the program I’m using. I want to watch videos that are at different difficulty levels so I can understand where my game should be at.

The three main videos I’m going to watch are:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-0-mZqMUbY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YhFnT72xVE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7z8pvKvQTU

Task 3: What is appealing to the audience

Procedure: I’m going to ask people which are familiar with computer games what makes a good game good. One of these people is going to be my father.

Task 4: What do I want to do?

Procedure: I’m going to do a list of possible and realistic ideas, and then from that narrow it down until I manage to chose one. What I’m going to do needs to be something that I’m going to enjoy doing and something which is interesting and educational to an audience.

Task 5: Audience

Procedure: Once that I chose my game, I need to chose my audience which will help me decide on how hard and how educational my game is going to be. The audience I chose is also going to be the audience that will evaluate my game in the end in order to give me feedback and constructive criticism.

Task 6: Software and Designing  

Once I have all of the tasks above completed, I will draw out on a paper my scenes and what I want my characters to look like. This plan will also include some of the rules and regulations. I need to also decide on what program/ software I want to use: Kodu or GameSalad. I’m probably going to choose the software which works on a mac so that I can work on it at home.

Task 7: Creating the game

Procedure: I am going to create my game and write a short evaluation on how much I proceeded in that day. In these evaluations I will have to include how much time did it take, what I did, any technical problems I had, etc.

Task 8: Finishing the game

Procedure: Once I am going to achieve what I want to achieve, I am going to go back to this plan and see if I followed the plan in order to so I can give my self a fair and understandable evaluation.

Task 9: Evaluation

Procedure: I am going to complete my evaluation, and write it according to my plan and creation. My evaluation is also going to change depending on the feedback I get from one of the audiences.

Evaluation of Plan: I think that this is a good plan, I think that it is effective because it is clear and easy to understand. It is going to guide me adequately and clearly through this project helping me realize these ideas into a game. For this plan to work like I want it to, I need to keep a time line at home so that every day I can see at what point I’m at and understand if I’m on track or behind. I didn’t make any modifications to my plan in terms of creation because I think that I will be able to finish it on time and efficiently.

DOCUMENTARY- 9/11

Yesterday I watched Between the Lies. A documentary composed mainly out of news broadcasts from 9/11, 9/12, and 9/13. The film shows the media lies that stuck with the public, and mostly the truth that should never be forgotten.