Month: November 2017

Each school year, my school has students create a way to present what they have learned so far in the school year, until around the last few months until winter break to their parents. This year, we are having our student led-conferences this week, and different classes have been preparing different presentations for their parents. The student led-conferences take place after school and over the weekend so that they don’t interfere with normal school schedule.

My class’ teacher gave us a Google Slide with different topics to discuss with our parents. As the students, we worked over the previous week to change the Google Slide so that it would personally cater to ourselves. Once we believed that we had completed the slide, our teacher would check it over with as and maybe help us change a few things or give advice on what to talk about with the parents. I had my student led-conference after school today, so I’ve already gotten it finished. As a student in the intermediate division of our school, I had to do my student led-conference inside the gym as opposed to in the classroom where most other classes do theirs. Most of the Google Slide was talking about high school, what we want to do in the future, what we can do to help ourselves to improve, and things like that.

Overall, I think that the student led-conference went alright since I was able to get it over with after school, so it wasn’t that bad. I think the worst part of it was, the preparation for the presentation which took a lot of time and the fact that we have to go to the school for the conference but otherwise, it wasn’t too bad.

Today my school had an event called Educamp for the junior division of the school. Educamp was a group of activities organized by some teachers and taught by some of the Grade Sevens. Some of the activities at Educamp were coding, robotics, 3D printing, and stop-motion animation. A few of my friends and I got to participate in Educamp by being in charge of one of the coding classes. A few weeks before today, we had prepared a Google Slide on how to use a program called Scratch to learn basic code.

The way the day worked was that the junior students were divided into groups designated by colours, and the different colours went to different classrooms that taught different things. The students and teachers split up into whatever subject they would be apart of and then go to a designated classroom. There were either one or two teachers in each classroom, but most of the teaching was done by the Grade Seven students. Since my friends and I were teaching coding we had to set up a lot of laptops for the students to use before the classes actually started. The actual hard part of teaching the classes to code was starting off and explaining the very basics, so for the rest of the time it was pretty easy because most kids are off doing things on their own while experimenting. Of course, there were some times where we would help some students who didn’t quite understand, but generally it was pretty easy. Most kids were well behaved, but occasionally there would be some students who went and played other peoples games that weren’t created by them, and they don’t even understand how it works.

Overall being one of the “instructors” at the Educamp was pretty fun and it was actually not too bad. We even got to play around with the program ourselves when making examples for the class. This was my experience being an instructor for my school’s Educamp.

Last week, I was playing CS:GO (one of my favourite video games) with one of my friends and ranked up for the first time in a long time. In CS:GO, there are many different ranks but there three main groups and two ranks on their own. From lowest to highest they are, Silver ranks, Gold Nova ranks, Master Guardian ranks, Legendary Eagle ranks, Supreme Master First Class, and The Global Elite. In order to rank up, you have to actually get better at the game and win your matches. For a few months until now I was Silver Elite Master which is the highest Silver rank, the next rank after that is Gold Nova 1 which is what rank I have right now.

I usually play with some of my friends because it’s generally easier to communicate and more fun to play with rather than playing with random people. Over the past few days I’ve been playing with two friends, one is Gold Nova 3 and the other is Silver 4. Since we are playing with each other and we all have different ranks we usually get matched up against people with ranks between Gold Nova 2 and Gold Nova 1. This means that if we win our games my Silver 4 friend and I rank up faster because we are playing against more skilled players, but if we lose then my Gold Nova 3 friend will start to derank because he’s losing against lower skilled players. The game I actually ranked up in was when I was just playing with my Gold Nova 3 friend and our game wasn’t going too well, we began with losing 0-6 until we won our first round. Each game ends when either team gets to 16 rounds won. The enemy team was about to win, with 12 rounds won and we were still far behind. Eventually, we made a comeback and ended up winning the game 16-13. Although it was a close game, I still ranked up and my Gold Nova 3 friend and I were both really happy because I wasn’t in Silver anymore and he wouldn’t derank as easily anymore if we played together.

Overall, CS:GO can be really frustrating at times like when you derank which happened to me after I ranked up to Gold Nova 2 the next day. Although I’m still only Gold Nova 1 I still strive to get better at the game and have fun playing it.

Last weekend, my friend bought me a game on Steam called Castle Crashers. Castle Crashers is a game where you start as one of four knights and have to finish a campaign by defeating enemies and bosses. My brother and I already had the game on the Xbox 360, but since we mostly use our PC’s it would be better to just have it on the PC rather than having to go downstairs to the basement to play. Castle Crashers has a leveling system for each of your characters, but even though after one or two years of having the game on the Xbox, our main characters were only around levels 20-30. However, after only having the game on PC for less than a day my brother, friend and I were all already around the same level as on the Xbox. This made me slightly curious, but it doesn’t really affect me too much.

To me, Castle Crashers is one of those games where I can just play and not care too much if I lose or if I have to leave mid game since it’s kind of easy to just return to the same point. If you die in the game you don’t lose too much besides a few minutes of your time. Castle Crashers is also one of my favourite games to play with friends since it’s really easy to get friends together using Steam. However, the game’s multiplayer system is limited to four players which kind of sucks. The game doesn’t take too long to beat if you play regularly or if you play for a few hours a day, so after you beat the game there’s not much to do. Fortunately, in Castle Crashers there are different characters to unlock, so after you beat the game you could try and beat it again with different characters or try and unlock new ones. You could also try to maximize a specific character’s level to level 99 which is the highest level a player can achieve, or alternatively you could try beating the game on insane mode which you unlock after beating the game. Insane mode makes the game more difficult by giving your enemies more health and make your enemies do more damage.

Overall the game is really fun to play with friends, but if you play alone there’s not much to do besides completing repetitive actions to level up your numerous amount of different characters you possess.