Innovative 8s

Before the year started I was super excited for Innovations 8. I would have the opportunity to learn and use technology in so many different ways. But when I heard what we were doing for our first unit, my excitement dropped.  We were going to learn how to use different G-Suite apps. I thought that I had already learned all that I needed in terms of G-Suite apps, but I realized pretty quickly that many of the things Mr Griffiths was teaching us were very valuable and much more fun than I expected. In fact, I used Google Sheets to make a pie chart for my choice piece which is one of our biggest assignments of the year and I realized that the stuff Mr Griffiths was teaching us was very important.  What I didn’t know was that Innovations was only going to get more and more fun. Our next unit was something that may not be useful to me right now but will most definitely be useful to me and the rest of the Grade 8s in the near future. Coding was very fun as we got to make our own games and drawings by using commands such as “move forward”, “turn left/right xº” etc. I thought that that was going to be the highlight of the year in Innovations but once again I was wrong. Next we made our very own Virtual Reality sets using only cardboard. Our class learned fine mechanical skills using exacto-knives to cut on miniscule lines as well as glue small things together.  Our next unit required us to be much more creative as we had to film and edit a newscast. The newscasts even surprised me on how remarkable the students in this class were at editing and I was even more surprised that I was able to edit a video with no prior experience. Our final unit was 3D printing. This unit is similar to our coding unit as we learned how to use the shapes and finish the unit by creating our own 3D shapes. On behalf of all of the 8s, I would like to thank Mr Griffiths for teaching this creative but chaotic group of students. Dylan G, Whittall ‘23