The Hunger for Innovation

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What originally started out as a small, simple idea became a big reality, where it was much more than just spurring innovation into the minds of teenagers. It was about putting ourselves out there in world, changing the world, and creating the deeper bond between one another. To do this, we decided to use food as our method. So why did we choose food for our small-scale project while others are doing much bigger things, like volunteering and fundraising? Well, we believe that food is a common language that we all share and love to embrace. It is absolutely awesome how you can do a lot to help the world, you don’t just need to be an inventor, a scientist, etc. to create these great things. You can always have that secondary job of distributing your knowledge and experience and use that invention created in a way to help several people and only then you would be as importantly equal as that scientist or inventor who created that invention. 

So when you’re going out and you’re suddenly in the mood for food, where do you go to eat? Right off the top of your head, a fast food restaurant is the best idea. It’s cheap, quick, quite filling, and there’s always a fast food place nearby. This is a huge problem, as there are much better places to eat out besides fast food, where the food is healthy (to some extent) and actually tastes like real food without the added preservatives and flavorings. However, many people these days are just too lazy to look for a good place to eat, as a fast food restaurant like McDonald’s could be found within a mile radius anywhere, or they just don’t know any good food places because they eat fast food so often. We felt that this was a popular need as a lot of people, including us, are related to this struggle. So we decided. We had 30 days. 720 hours. 43,200 minutes. 30 days to change the concept of eating out. That was how was how much time we put into our innovation project. We may only have less than a month to do this project, but hopefully our results will far exceed the time frame.

At first, we had no idea what our end product of this project would be. We only knew that our ultimate goal was to reach out to the community. Directly. We decided to create a working list of best restaurants in the OC area. In order to confirm our picks and expand our food IQ, we set out as a group to try some of these places for ourselves. That was how we were able to give food recommendations for some of the restaurants we had listed. We had our restaurants, but we still had to find a way for attention to be shed on it. We set about making a food pamphlet with our settled 37 favorite restaurants with their individual food picks each. On each food pamphlet, added a QR code to the back where when scanned, it would open a link to our blog. In total, we printed 350+ copies, which was about $35 total at Office Depot, and passed them out in our neighborhoods.

To further expand our project into the global conversation, we made our own blog titled “fvhsmoodforfood” and a twitter account called the same time. On this blog, we blogged about our favorite places to eat out, along with food recommendations. Also on our blog, we have an interactive google map of all 37 of our favorite places to eat out, from restaurants, to bakeries, and to ice cream parlors. On our twitter account, we took pictures showing our progress for the past 30 days.

Overall, we had a great time with this project. It may not have a huge impact on the world, but it’s meaningful and we’re satisfied with it.

B.R.A.W.L: Brief Reflection About War Logic

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The title isn’t really what B.R.A.W.L stands for. B.R.A.W.L is a debate that we did in my English in an original way over the book All Quiet on the Western Front, By Erich Maria Remarque where we form groups of four and we have ten questions to answer together. After that the teacher chooses one question and two groups (each formed of two people of the original four) go up and debate on that topic against each other. We had two rounds, this was for the first round The second round was the same except with a different set of ten questions and something new that was added, three buzzers that the other groups can use if they want to add something on what the other two groups said or argue against them. It was really interesting although I didn’t use the buzzers. I wish I did.

I learned from the B.R.A.W.L was more of a discussion than learning in my opinion because we already learned stuff and we applied what we learned in the B.R.A.W.L, it wasn’t meant to teach us a lot maybe we got a fact from here or there but personally I believe that the main purpose of the whole debate was to be able to apply what we learned in an academic way where we can combine more than one fact into an idea of our creation. My group worked a lot on finding outside sources and we discussed every question together. We agreed on everything together and Katrina, one of my partners had a lot of videos as sources for the second B.R.A.W.L because she really likes music and other than that we all tried to link the questions to as much real life examples and logic solutions to situations as possible so that we can back up our opinions on each question with real evidence. We didn’t really take pictures of the first B.R.A.W.L the one in which I went because we didn’t have an account set so yeah that is why we have a picture of the music video my group was showing during the second B.R.A.W.L.

I did as much as I could, I added a lot of real life examples that we actually included in our scripts for each question. My famous line that I was supposed to say in the first B.R.A.W.L “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” since I speak French I didn’t get to say because we got a different question. I was so prepared to say it so that is why I wish we were able to choose our own questions as all the questions are on the same difficulty level anyways. I contributed with most of thinking in the first B.R.A.W.L and for the second B.R.A.W.L we divided up the questions where we answered four questions in class and it took my share by answering two questions at home. I took notes of our plan and also when other people presented as well. I don’t really like to talk about myself a lot in group projects to be honest but I really enjoyed the experience even though my B.R.A.W.L was bad because I only thought we had to go back and forth twice and not beyond that but I had a lot of stuff to say. The second B.R.A.W.L’s technique was better but the first one’s questions were better.

Mirror of Thoughts

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This post is a reflection on my blog since I started blogging! It was something new for me a whole other way to share my thoughts in a better way. I learned a lot from my experience and I hope that I taught someone something as well. It was like being in thought mode another whole new mode in a game that you are playing the game of life. I’ve always spent a lot of time think of what to write about and I always wanted something new; something that no one else has done before so that I can enjoy my blogging experience to the maximum. I achieved a lot of stuff through my blog that I never expected myself to be able to achieve and I was successful in what I achieved that is why i’ll try as much as I could to keep blogging at least twice a month even if this school year is over.Untitled-1

What did I learn from my blog?

I learned how to write to an audience that can reply to you with their comments and thoughts on what you wrote and interact with you and this is my first time actually writing for an audience because all the essays we do in school are just directed toward no one and the feedback we get on them doesn’t really help us improve as writers, in my opinion, teachers just check them but they never tell you what you need to work on. On the other hand, blog posts can help you get better feedback from a wide community. I also learned how important pictures are, how to choose pictures to put on the blog, various styles of writing and techniques to improve posts #thinkingtuesdays. I also learned patience as many times I made posts that didn’t get views at all but hopefully they would someday. I learned how to think in a broader way rather than focusing on addressing a specific audience, I learned how to use the right tags and a lot more and More and MORE.

What worked for me is what I expected to work the least I wrote this one post about evolution of communication, it was one of my first posts that i thought was horrible, and i still get views on it until this day. I never expected a post to get that much views alone. Like seriously this post gained more views than all my other posts combined for some reason. I think it is luck. People say it because of my last name that I get views from all over the world, however, I don’t have my last name on the blog and I never posted it. I’m really proud that all these countries decided to visit my blog. Currently I have 80+ countries that visited my blog thanks to that one random magical post that I once made. I’m really curious to know though are the rest of my posts worse than that one? or is it just that the audience interested in the communication topic more? I really don’t know.

What I would do differently next time is probably share my blog out more and try to improve my topics to make them more interesting for people that is what I’m planning on doing for my very next post to find a topic that interest people a lot. My advice for next year bloggers is to ALWAYS TAG their posts that is how they get the views because no tagging equals no views. I tagged every single post since I started blogging never missed one. That is why I started off strong by receiving eight likes on my very first post. I would also advice them to share more and do something interesting that people at school need for example I made a resources page for my fellow classmates of AP European History before the AP test and they were actually useful resources that led people to check my blog more often during this week of AP testing. It was a very smart move, I need to confess it.

I think maybe for next year Mr. Theriault you can have like a day every two weeks where the whole class just brainstorms ideas for blogging so that when they go to the computer lab they wouldn’t be stuck in thinking like I was. I really think discussing several ideas where each student adds an idea would be awesome because the students would be more eager to check their Reader more often and visit each other blogs as well. 

At last I would like to thank you for giving us that blogging experience during high school as it might help us now and later in our lives where we can enter the global conversation!!

Smiles Are Worth While

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“Smiles are precious… Smiles are a gift” are two very important phrases that my friend, Ally, mentioned because the words “precious” and “gift” are the main values that a smile carries. Smiles are precious not because they are expensive but because of the values they can contain. For example, a smile can carry a warm reassuring feeling to show your support for other people. They are a gift because people appreciate them and feel that you are really thoughtful and actually a true friend, it also makes people sense accomplishment because you usually get a prize when you do something good; something that can change someone’s day or maybe the whole world. A smile!! So smile today and keep troubles away 🙂

Ally's Wonderland

Something very precious to both ourselves and to this world is that little thing we often take for granted. We do it without realizing it, we think but we don’t realize that meaning behind it, the amazingness of the idea of what it is we are doing.

The action itself is universal all around the world no matter where you go. You don’t need to know a different language or how to say something right, all it takes is a little twitch of your muscles and bam.

What is this amazing, life changing thing?

Why, it’s a smile of course.

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Smiling is such a huge part of our lives. It conveys messages, feelings, hidden thoughts and wishes, secrets, smiles express our greatest joys to our bravest triumphs. They help show our emotions and our feelings, and they us express ourselves in a way unlike any other.

Can you imagine…

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Writing For A Better World

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Most people write to make money but I don’t. I write mainly for school because we have an assignment to write. Probably when i’m done with all the assignments I wouldn’t write every week anymore but i’ll always try to make time for writing in this busy world. Before my experience in writing for my English class I would have never thought about creating a blog and writing every week. Now I really like the experience and I think that it is extremely important to write!

Writing doesn’t just benefit others with the information you are going to share but more importantly it benefits the writer who learns from the experience, which is improving writing, communicating more with other people, researching new ideas and cultures, trying to find interesting topics, choice of words, staying on topic and a lot more. I believe that writers learn more than readers as they write, some people are better writers than others but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write. I know i’m  a horrible writer but I still write hoping my writing would improve. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” is what we always say but always do. For me, the books I read are because i’m required to read, I thought the cover is interesting or depending on people’s recommendations.

The most important aspect of writing is sharing ideas and communicating because if everyone shares the ideas they have the world is going to be a better place, not all your thoughts need to be applied but at least some of them so that is why your ideas need to be unique don’t think the same way everyone is thinking try to find new paths and discover you abilities you thought you would have never been able to apply. However, if you should NEVER give up on your beliefs. Foe instance, if you have a good relation with good don’t break it because your intellectual beliefs lead you to giving up your personal, specially religious beliefs.

People aren’t easily impressed and that is why you need to keep that comforting smile on your face always and try to find ways around the topic that might give your audience a better chance at understanding you. If you just throw the ideas and topic in the face of your reader there is a big chance that you readers wouldn’t have any clue what you are talking about because it is most likely something they are not familiar with. That is why connections are very important to help the reader understand. If every single person knew how to write to express what they need this world is going to be a great place because it all starts with that one small idea that people keep expanding on until it has become so easy to understand and this is all what the global conversation is about; sharing, elaborating, and expanding a set of ideas