Describe what you know about life in the trenches.

Life in trenches is absolutely horrid. The soldiers will stay in the trenches, with plenty of mud and rats. Some of the soldier's feet will slowly rot away, and they can't do anything about it. Their friends will be shot down and the only thing they can do is watch them. The food provided is very sparse and they do not get enough nutrition. Occasionally they will be called to run forward and shoot, which is basically looking straight at death in the eyes. If they disobeyed orders that tells them to run to the enemy, they will get shot and be considered unworthy. They lived in the trenches for several weeks/months, in a horrible condition. Many soldiers were forced to run forward and sacrifice their lives for a few inches of battleground gained. Their commanders are living a very happy, healthy and content life in hotels while the soldiers themselves suffer from such atrocities and death.

Why do you think the idea of conflict is more prominent than peace in the world?

I think the idea of conflict is more prominent as it is human nature to disagree against a certain idea. As more people disagree against a certain idea, a conflict will happen. In terms of films and television, a movie that regards more about the subject peace than the subject conflict is often boring, and will not grab the audience's attention at all. With that in mind, many historical incidences are conflicts and only a few of them are regarding peace. This is because that conflict is a prominent subject in the human mind if they disagree with something. The major population of the world will not sacrifice a piece of their fortune or themselves for poorer people, and greed and jealously constantly plagues their mind. With greed, people will start to fight over almost anything, which causes conflicts.

What is conflict?

Conflict is a war or a civil war that is happening. Conflicts tends to happen because of disagreements that causes rebel groups to start a war and "create" atrocities. Conflicts can also involve other countries, which will increase the scale of the war. Conflicts are making MDG's more and more impossible to reach, because it will cause many violations of the UDHR and problems that the MDG's are trying to get rid of. Conflicts will make a country to become less developed as resources are used in a non-beneficial way.

Luharia's Disappearance Mystery

Luharia left his village and went to the city because the government was planning to build a dam to regulate the flow of the Narmada River and stop it from flooding. Luharia at first refused to leave but when he heard that the dam will help 40 million civilians to gain access to clean water and electricity. In reality, they were actually building a dam so that Gujarat, who is very strong on the chemical front, will gain more profit. We believed that the chemical producers bribed the government officials to create a dam so they can produce more chemicals and consequently gained more profit. The World Bank at first wanted to loan India 450 million dollars but when they found out that the river calculations were inaccurate, they refused to give them money and the construction of the dam was halted. In the end Luharia didn't need to leave his village but because of a government that is corrupt to the core, he was made to move by the government.

This exercise was quite hard at first, but as we slowly pieced things together, we started to find out the truth.

Fair Trade Mystery

After categorising the cards, I figured that Grace was extremely happy and excited because she got the privilege to attend school, which is quite rare in Ghana as only 1 out of 3 girls can get an education. She was able to attend school because her father joined Kuapa Kokoo, which ensures that Grace's father earns the amount of money he deserves. They teach her father to not get cheated by greedy buyers. The Fairtrade Foundation also supports Kuapa Kokoo and also ensures that they get paid the amount they deserve.

Measuring Development

          This is my group's ranking of the 10 indicators that will determine whether a country is a MEDC or a LEDC. We think that the most important indicator is the GNP (Gross National Product) as that will show how wealthy a country is. This statistic is extremely important because if we know how rich a country is, we will know whether it is a developing country or a MEDC. We think that the most unimportant indicator is the Population Density as it cannot really determine if a country is developing or not, for example: London is extremely dense in terms of population yet they are still one of the most developed cities in the world. We think that the Literacy Rate and the Infant Mortality Rate as the second most important as with these two statistics, we can determine how developed the country is education-wise and health care-wise. These two factors are extremely important factors in measuring development. We think that the Number of People Per Doctor, Percentage of Population with Access to Clean Water and Population Growth Rates are not that important as if we know about the Infant Mortality Rate, we will have an idea of how the health care is like. The Number of People Per Doctor is also not really effective if the doctor is not effective or does not have access to proper health care. The Percentage of Population with Access to Clean Water is quite important but it doesn't play such a big role as the Literacy Rates or the Infant Mortality Rate. Population Growth Rate is quite important as we will know whether the country's population is decreasing or increasing but we feel that it is not as important as the top few. We feel that Percentage of Population Living in Urban Areas and Percentage of People Employed in Agriculture aren't that important because even though they show how developed one country is, it doesn't show it as obviously as the GNP. We didn't use the Car Ownership indicator because we felt that there were better ways of saying how rich a country is. We think there are other important indicators, particularly Life Expectancy, Birth Rate, Death Rate and Food Consumption that will make a difference as they will measure whether the countries are developing or not. I felt that it was a bit hard to make decisions as a group as sometimes the group either have a lot of conflicting ideas or have no ideas at all, which makes it very sophisicated.

How do you think we can measure development?

I think we can measure development by finding out the key statistics of each country, for example: Literacy Rate, Birth Rate, Death Rate, GDP per capita etc. etc. and compare it with other countries and track its own development year by year. With this information, we can find out whether it is a LEDC, MEDC or NIC because every key statistic will determine whether it fits the role of a MEDC, LEDC or a NIC.

Reflect about The Hazards Fair: -Describe the experience -What went well? -What could have been better?

I felt that the Hazards Fair was a very valuable experience as I have learnt a lot and enjoyed it to the fullest degree. But I felt that the time was too short, and we didn't get to show everyone all our work to the fullest degree. I was quite surprised by the amount of knowledge that the Primary know about tectonic plates already. I felt that the presentation went extremely well, and we answered a large amount of questions with confidence and we weren't nervous at all. The presentation was detailed and it answered most of the audience's queries. What I felt could have gone better was the hands-on-activity, as it failed the first time. We could've made sure we had the right amount of baking powder to the flour, as we added to much flour and too little baking powder on the first one. I also felt that we should have brought a charger for a simulation of an eruption as my laptop ran out of battery. Luckily we had another laptop and we had to put two games on there instead of one. I felt that we could also draw more attention to the posters, booklets and the games as too much of their attention were directed towards the presentation and hands-on-activity only. I also felt that we could do something more to draw the people's attention towards our work, by making it more grand, majestic and outstanding from the others. But other than that, I felt that the Hazards Fair was a really invaluable experience that I would love to do again if I get the chance.

Hazards ELP

I think I will be choosing the volcano hazard since I have already done quite a lot of research on it and I find it a very interesting topic since volcanic eruptions are extremely rare. As an extension I would also like to discover more about supervolcanoes as it poses as an extremely catastrophic disaster if it ever erupts, as it might trigger other supervolcanoes all around the world.

Success Criteria:

1. To be able to devise my own ways of escaping a volcano.

2. To be able to skim and scan a detailed text, summarising it afterwards.

3. To be able to analyse and link between the different eruptions in history.

Describe what you still have to prepare to finalize your project by tomorrow.

We are halfway finished on one of the posters, we still need to add things on the second poster, and I just started on the study guide with most of the research finished on a Google Doc. I'm on my second page on my study guide but most of my research is done. We still need to get the equipment and resources for the hands on baking soda volcano activity, but we already have the websites for online activity for primary students. All in all, we're doomed.

Discuss what you learned from the process of preparing for and doing the assembly.

I learnt that you can make a statement non-verbally just as effectively as speaking. I also expanded a lot of my skills, such as: Creativity and Information Processing. I also learnt to co-operate and work as a group when writing a script, designing a shirt etc etc. I also improved my leadership skills by assigning people different jobs. I also learnt to organise myself so I know when and what to do something.

Success Criteria and Achievement

Well today I mostly worked on the Fashion Show script, and only helped organised the research of my group. The success criteria I had in mind was: 1: to be able to organise my group into researching specific parts of the Restless Earth topic, 2: be able to split certain jobs according to the Belbin Roles and lastly: be able to co-operate with other students to create a script. I would say that I accomplished all these success criterias!

Child Soldiers Shirt Reflection

Our group didn't really have a success criteria for the shirts, we only had success criteria for the assignment about writing as a child soldier itself. But if we did, it would probably be to be able to express what we want to say on a shirt, to be able to make the audience understand what we are trying to express, and to be able to use Creativity effectively. I would say that we achieved this pretty well, as we went through a lot of different ways we could design a shirt, settled on a specific design, and managed to follow it according to plan. Although there were some minor changes, it was almost basically the same according to the plan. Although we don't know if the audience would understand what we are trying to express yet, we all felt that the message was very straightforward and clear. We successfully managed to express what we want to say on our shirt, and is extremely proud of that. From this learning experience, I learnt and expanded a lot of knowledge and skills, such as co-operation, creativity, organisational skills, and many more! These skills would be extremely helpful later in life when I'm working with other people, or when I'm needed to work on something that requires a lot of effort, which will put my organisational skills to work. The importance of knowing what is happening around the world is extremely crucial since if we don't know what's happening, we would be turning a blind eye towards important issues which needs solving. This also makes me want to do something, to initiate something that would be beneficial towards people who are suffering around the world. I used pretty much almost all the thinking skills in this project, Creativity when thinking of designs, Enquiry when asking myself questions that will make the design more unique, Information Processing when looking for examples and templates, and many, many more! My friends helped me by putting together everything we planned onto a shirt. I learnt that whenever I organise what I need to do, I work better and more efficiently, even if I don't follow my organisation exactly. I could improve my learning by, firstly: organise my work even more, secondly: plan and arrange projects more thoroughly and in-depth and lastly: make sure that every teammate gets an equal amount of work, so no-one does too little or too many work. All in all, the experience and knowledge gained in this ELP was extremely valuable, and I enjoyed it a lot!

What could the outcome of your research look like?

Basically we're going to split into sections, Primary and Secondary. Both of them are going to carry out the experiment while we split the information: presentations for Primary (more general fun facts) and posters + presentations for Secondary to back it up (detailed and slightly more sophisticated). For Primary a good idea is to summarise it and make it simpler. Videos are going to be inside presentations to make it more interesting. We should also print out our information to give more copies around to students. This is all we have got so far, but we might improvise along the way to fit with the style or make it flow more.