In my Digital Learning class, we were assigned to show the usage of the Creative Fluency steps in one of our past assignments. The assignment I chose to express the steps through was on my creation of a Low-Poly 3D Island in my Information and Communication Technologies class. For this project, we had to use a program called Blender as our medium for the island. I also followed a provided tutorial on how to do so.

IDENTIFY:

To be successful in this assignment you had to follow the criteria set by our teacher.

1. Hills (with peaks)
2. Trees (at least 2 different ones)
3. A small river that falls off the island
4. Cloud(s) (at least 1)
5. Good use of colours/shades
6. A castle (5 marks)
7. A background picture

The majority of this criteria could be met very easily, since they are all gone over in the tutorial. The castle however was meant to be from our own creativity, but through the tutorial I learnt skills that made making the castle like cutting through butter. Some challenges I faced was that the tutorial provided to us was using the Mac version of Blender compared to us who used the Windows one. Because of this some of the layout was misplaced on our screen and made finding the right tool and such more difficult. Unfortunately my program had also crashed quite a few times so I had to restart once or twice.

INSPIRE:

In our class we did not need to find more examples of our island because we already had a very descriptive video on it. On the other hand, this was a new program to me. So I was bound to make some mistakes and errors, sometimes this included accidentally hitting a hot key and enabling a setting I did not want, or making the project disappear entirely. The way I got help for this was by talking to my teacher and by looking it up in case other people encountered the same thing.

INTERPOLATE:

Watching the tutorial I followed his process until the filming area, this part is where I branched off and wanted to do my own style of editing. In some areas I did my island differently as to what he did. I noticed I could come up with more efficient methods of building my island, and I ended up liking my way better.

IMAGINE:

Soon after planning I got to work on Blender and created my island with the steps talked about earlier. I got help from my classmate for some of the sculpting and asked for his opinion on my work.

INSPECT:

Once I completed my island I looked at all the criteria to make sure I met all the requirements, after finally finishing, I handed my work in. Something I wish I did differently was the structure of my trees, they were a bit droopy and could have been improved on.

For this month’s assignment on Digital Footprints, I did my PowerPoint on CalebCity. Caleb is a YouTuber who makes short skits that are meant to be relatable and funny. In this PowerPoint I’ve gone into his details to check whether or not he is being careful about his digital footprint. I’ve included how safe he is with his content, how much is known about him, and about his work as a whole. The said PowerPoint can be accessed below.

Digital Footprint

A vital aspect that is significant in the short story and movie Flowers for Algernon is Charlie’s mental illness. It’s noted that Charlie is at his original state in the start of the book and movie, and later reverts in the end. Charlie’s Aspergers is his incentive to undergo his operation. His mother always wanted Charlie to be “normal,” even going to extremes to do so. Thus Charlie made it his goal to become smart. When he had the chance to take the surgery he agreed without hesitation. Similar to the movie the book also had side effects after the surgery, this included Charlie’s gradual return to his low intelligence and possibly even lower. Its important that this detail is left untouched, because if not the thorough meaning to the whole film would be lost. Daniel Keyes the author of the book wrote it off of events that happened to him in his own life, his inspiration for Charlie came from one boy in his English class for lower I.Q. Students. “If I try hard and I get smart by the end of the term, will you put me in a regular class? I want to be smart.” To Daniel, Charlie is someone he knew, not entirely fictionally made up. This made the whole premise of the book based on David’s perception on a cure for the disadvantaged. This is a key principle to the story, and it is important to be not be tampered with. Charlie’s illness sets up the entire plot, and without it the film and book are nothing more than a ships sail pointing the wrong way.

Despite this important similarity, the film is a newer, more refined version and some things are changed and made different. Charlie had reoccurring flashbacks about Harriet, a girl who didn’t mock him or bully him for entertainment, but laughed with him. And Charlie decided that she meant a lot to him. Soon after he asked his cousin to write a note for her, he placed the note and a locket at her doorstep waited for the next day. Things went awry and Charlie hadn’t felt that way since. Charlie soon lost the ability to love someone as a partner and could only muster basic emotions. After his operation and going on some dates with Ms. Kinnian, he began to understand how much he truly appreciated her. Then the sequence in which he falls in love with Ms. Kinnian commences. What differs from the shirt story and film is that it is not clear if Ms. Kinnian loved him back, whereas in the film they were together. Charlie returned to his old self different in the sense that he didn’t feel at peace with himself in the book.

These two paragraphs were taken from my compare and contrast essay between the film and short story for Flowers for Algernon, I wrote this on October 2nd, I did this because it was an assignment. I hoped to have a piece of work done to the best of my ability.

I was proud of the vocabulary I used in my essay.

Somethings had made more sense in my head than what I had written out, making the grammar and flow a challenge to write out.

I wish I could fix my formatting, because my title page was not done correctly.