Our first step is Investigate, in this step we had a lot of discussions about what collaboration and cooperation is and what is the difference between working independently and as a group. After these discussions we researched about the app Minecraft, such as how it is used, what it is capable of and how to play. After researching we listed ideas of buildings, my group and I are working of the theme Horror, so we found pictures of types of buildings that would be appropriate for this project. What I mean by appropriate is that the structure won’t be so hard to build that you spend the whole time making and matches with your theme.

For the design step every group drew maps of the layout of their park. Here is a photo of my groups best map.

The next step is to plan, during this step we started planning the process of building our park. We made a table and listed the due dates and starting points. Finally we came to the step where we start building, the step create is when we go to go on minecraft and start building.

When building we looked at our design specification which we made during the investigate step. Below is my design specification.

Design specification:

1.Most of our houses/mansions will look scary old victorian style, but some will be in different shapes such as grave stone, bone, skull or ghost.

2.The haunted house is going to be big with 3 or more floors.

3.The haunted mansions are going to be all different sizes but will have 2 or more floors.

4.To build the buildings we could use stone,  but instead of torches I thought we could use redstone because it is more darker and haunted looking,wood, black wool, glow stone and other colors of wool anything that has a dull color will be good for my theme Horror.

5.Using rails I am going to build a cart ride inside a haunted house.

6.I will be making a town that looks medieval but abandoned. I could put some zombies or scary statues.

7.I am building a graveyard with a tomb in the middle with aruna. A miller’s that has animals and a windmill. For the windmill I will be making it out of stone.

8.We need to make our structures as dark and dull scary as possible because it also needs to look haunted in day time. The problem is that the zombies and spiders , bats all disappear in daytime.

9. Use redstone for blood on the floor.

When building we had a few problems like the server lagging and not saving our work, this happened quite a few times and had to rebuild parts. On the last lesson someone put TNT all over our world and blew it up, so the construction we did during that lesson was all gone, but my group worked at home to complete our park. Otherwise there were no other big problems in my group, I thought my group worked really well together both creating and planing.

Here is a photo of my groups finished work.

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For this project my group broke up into two groups, my friend Aruna and I were in charge  of building the town, forest and grave. The two other people in my group, Christopher and Peter were in charge of the haunted house and entrance, decorating places with blood and cob webs. Aruna made most of the town and me and peter helped build some parts, I made The grave, secret passage with cart ride and the forest. While peter added a part to the cart ride and made the gate and haunted house with Christopher, Christopher built a ship reck at our entrance and helped make bits of the town. I really think my group did a great job, everyone was on task, finished their own responsibilities then helped others in our group. My group was much better than I thought.

I think that my finished work meets with most of my design specification, although during construction I changed a few of my thoughts on the structures and made them better. Otherwise I tried my best to meet the specification, such as using redstone for blood, building and connecting the cart ride with the haunted house, using dark colors and using redstone. I could of made the grave more scary by breaking some parts of the gates or floor.

Overall I think I did best on the create part, because I am not super good at using minecraft and building a whole theme park sounded fun and hard, but I managed to finish it. I think that the structures I built were all quite good, when you fly up and look down or go in from the entrance it actually looks like a haunted theme so I am quite proud. There could be some improvements such as the planning section, where I should plan out more clearly so when I build it would of been more easy. I though that linking all our clases parks with a huge lake in the middle was a great idea and everything looks that everyone worked really hard on it. If we were to do this unit again, I would still eb happy to make another world and put in lots more cool attractions since I got used to the app more.

Here is the presentation I made with the data from the students from Luanda International school in Angola.

Here is my speech:

Click Here to see my slide show

We were all given a sheet to look at that had the three main Koto tunings, Hirajyōshi, Gaku-joshi and Nogijyōshi. On the sheet was also a piece of music named “Rokudan”. This piece uses the common Japanese tuning scale, Hirajyōshi. (D  G  A  B♭ D  E♭ G  A  B♭ D  E♭ G  A) This tuning is used in a lot of Japanese music it is also a pretty old scale, was a very common tuning before and now too.

This is the music for Rokudan

I think the reason for Rokudan to sound Japanese is mainly because of the tuning Hirajyōshi. The tuning Hirajyōshi has a dark kind of feeling or sound that makes it sound japanese. Not just the tuning makes it sound Japanese but also the techniques used to play this piece, for example the Kororin, Shan, Sha Sha and Ato Oshi. These techniques won’t apear when playing the Chinese Guzheng/Zither, there are techniques that are similar but the way of playing are different. Also the pattern these techniques are played makes this piece sound Japanese like repeating the Sha Sha and Shan. The pace, and the press like Ato Oshi makes the piece have a Japanese feeling to it.

Overall this is what I think makes Rokudan sound Japanese . This is a video our music teacher sent us, click on this link to hear how this piece “Rokudan” sounds like.

I liked all instruments but I think that my favorite is the Koto. I liked the koto the best because it had so much interesting techniques that I want to learn and the music it played was beautiful. When the Shakuhachi player asked one person to go up and try the Shakuhachi I realized that blowing it wasn’t as easy as it looks, that surprised me because I just thought you just blow into it but there is a lot of techniques when blowing so that was pretty interesting.

This are the songs that were performed:

Classical koto/shamisen/shakuhachi trio – Eghigo Jishi
Shakuhachi solo – Honkyoku
Koto/shakuhachi duet – Kaze no Uta (Song of the Wind)
Koto solo – Gensokyoku (Fantasy)
Koto/shakuhachi duet – Deep Forest

Out of all these songs I liked the last one “Deep forest” the most and also “Kaze no Uta”. I liked Deep forest because I liked the tuning of the koto and how it was played. With the Koto and Shakuhachi duet in this song sounded really peaceful and made a feeling of the forest. I also liked the “Kaze no Uta” because the instruments made it really sound like the wind and the Shakuhachi techniques used in this song were really windy and interesting. The song also made we feel the wind and it’s emotions or mood.

The tuning made it sound japanese but also the techniques and how the instrument is played. The instruments came from China but they really changed through time in Japan. The Shamisen looks a lot like the Chinese instrument “Erhu” but bigger and played differently, but both have a long thin neck that you slide your fingers up and down on. Overall I enjoyed the music and learned a few things and thank you to the Shakuhachi player for coming in and performing for us.

But before we drew our own we practiced drawing by choosing a Van Gogh line drawing and try to draw it, because for most of us I am pretty sure it is the first time drawing a whole scenery on a big paper with just different lines. These below are my practice tries at line drawing, they are both a line drawing by Van Gogh. It was really hard on our practices but I don’t think it is a bad start.

1st practice try

2nd practice

For my piece of drawing I chose 3 different pictures that had some kind of relationship with each other and I cropped it, fixed it, edit and cut it. The pictures I chose was of a big tent in the fore ground, hawk for middle ground and more tents and a big hill for the background. The scene is set on the grasslands in mongolia on a beautiful sunny day.

Here are the 3 pictures that I put together.

And this is how it looks like when I put them together after my cropping.

I choose this scenery because one of  the pictures caught my eye when I was looking through some images so I decided to do this scenery as my final scenery because I always wanted to go to such a beautiful open grassland on a beautiful sunny day like in the pictures I chose, also maybe because it is part of my culture.

Above is my final drawing. I worked especially hard on the grass and hill because it is all stippling. I thought the shading on the houses were hard to draw because I needed to think about if the shadow would match the tone on the grass and hill and how much shading should I do. Now looking back at my final drawing I am ralizing more places that I should fix and do better next time.

I think that my strengths in this drawing are drawing the hill and the stippling on the hill, because I think that really shows that the hill is lighter than the grass below because the light of the sun is shining on the hill. Also because the shadows on the hill looks natural, so I think that I put good tone and texture. We had a walk around tables in class when everyone in our class finished drawing, we all had to leave a comment about the strength and weakness we think about the other persons drawing. I had some comments saying that how I drew my sky and clouds were really good, I think I might agree to that because I really like how I also made the sky stand out in the background. The texture on my sky and how I showed my clouds I thought was pretty cool, but I think the sky could also be a weakness. Lastly I like how I drew the houses because I used thick lines and thin lines dot, not only just a straight line, so I thought that ended up nice too.

My sky, clouds and part of my hill. I used stippling and hatching.

I think my weaknesses are as I mentioned in my strengths, my sky could also be a weakness because the more I look at it I think the sky is a little too thick compared to most of my drawing parts, not the sky but my clouds so if I spread out the darkness a bit more it would be good. Another weakness is that my grass to me it does not look quite right, because I didn’t quite spread out the shadow to make it look natural, so I didn’t quite get the gradation right. I always hold my work up and stand back a little to see it because you can spot a lot of small bits that you forgot, missed or messed up, I did this at the end and I spotted that as I mentioned above that the patches of grasses that are darker I drew too drack so I will watch out for this kind of mistake next time.

A part of the grass.

Overall I am really proud of my work because it really shows a lot of progress through this unit and has lots of different types of techniques like tone, texture and stippling. I never thought before that I could actually draw a drawing on a huge piece of paper with just different line techniques, so this is a real surprise. I really enjoyed this unit, impressed with my work, happy that it’s done and that it was a success and looking forward to learning new stuff about visual art in our next unit.

The speech I think that I liked and did more better on was the frist speech, because it was about something I enjoy so I knew a lot about it and so it was easier to memorize what to say. Although the second speech we had palm cards I still thought the first speech was more easier to do and more of a success.

Here is my frist speech which is the 1 min speech

I think that I did a good job on speaking loud so my volume was good and clear enough for the audience to hear and understand me, I also had a happy expression so that wasn’t bad. But I should be more careful of not to fiddle around with things like my scarf that I had on and also to look at the audience. Although I did look at the audience but there were lots of times where I was looking somewhere else. So I think that I should improve on my posture, standing still but with a few gestures. Also I think at parts I spoke too fast so I need to watch out for my pace and pauses next time.

This is the given topic speech, my 2nd speech

For this speech we had to speak longer, the other speech was only 1 min but this time it was 3 min. During this speech we could use palm cards but our topics were given, we were given 5 topics to choose from. For this speech I had to research a lto and most parts were hard to memorize. I didn’t have much gestures and facial expressions but my posture was better than my first speech because I wasn’t fiddling much. This speech was much harder because we had to speech for 3 min and it was of a topic that wasn’t anything we wanted. I should improve on my pauses and inflection more because sometimes I didn’t have pauses and sometimes my pauses were too long. Also I need to improve eon these things because it will help my speech be more catchy and memorable and better.

Another student’s speech that  I thought was  caught my attention well

I thought that my class mate Aruna’s 1 min speech was really good, because she had lot’s of gestures, her volume was good, pace was good and she paused when she needed to. Although I thought she was moving around too much and needed to look at the audience more, but I thought her speech was great because it was catching peoples attention and very interesting.

Here is her speech

Overall, in this unit I learned many ways of how to make your speech be memorable and interesting. With the elements in a good speech, tone, pace, gesture, facial expressions, structure, pause, information and so on. I think that these elements will definitely help me in the future, in occasions like making a presentation, speech or acting. I really enjoyed this unit because it made me more confident than before and expanded my knowledge.

This is our presentation

So this is my favorite piece of work.

My map of before the Industrial revolution.

My map of after the Industrial revolution.