Lesson 11: Presentation

Today was the last day to take the class in this term and we had a final group to present. They were overall very clear and persuasive all the way through the presentation. However, I found it boring that they also featured color therapy and nature therapy, which almost all the groups used. I simply thought that they did not make a progress at all in terms of creativity and imagination. Their ideas were monotonous because it just looked so much like the ones, which many people came up with last term. So in conclusion, their presentation was not that exciting even though their speaking and interaction were substantial.
After the presentation, each team were called one by one and talled their grades. My grade was a bit lower than what I expected, but I thought it was adequate considering the fact that I kept fidgeting while presenting and stammered too much. I think that's all because of lack of preparation and communication inside the group so I would like to try to improve those skills next term.

Lesson 10: Presentation

Today, it was our turn to present the classroom project. After two groups presented their project, our group name was called. I was not that nervous because I was rather excited to present and desperate to finish the assignment as fast as possible. Although the previous groups did an excellent well-structured presentation, it didn't put so much pressure on me so I think I was able to present in a relatively good condition. However, even in that good condition we had exposed many mistakes and lack of preparation in front of the audiences.
There are several things that we did well in the presentation. One thing that should be highly evaluated in our presentation is that it included a lot of dopamine-generators, which are jokes, gestures or words that make audiences laugh in order to attract their attention. Luckily, most of the audiences laughed a lot during the presentation. It might have been just ridicule or derision, but it's important that they were motivated to at least listen to our presentation. It was unexpectedly lucky that my little mistakes and misstatement somehow triggered a laugh. Considering the fact that so many of the audiences laughed during the presentation, I can be confident that our presentation somehow, even if not intentionally, became an entertainment.
Compared to the  number of things that we did well in the presentation, there are too many points to reflect. The main point is the lack of preparation. None of us perfectly prepared for the presentation and about a half of what we said during the presentation was ad-lib. I did not count how many times I mumbled and said 'uh' or 'ah', but I'm pretty sure that it was hard to fully understand what I said and that's virtually all because of lack of preparation. To improve, I believe it's necessary to rehearse and make points clear in advance.
Lastly, it was such a dissapointment that my presentation skill and English has dropped dramatically. Even though my English was never good, it was shocking to watch my own speaking in video and realize how awful it is and how much I lost in just one year of life in Japan. I think I need fundamental change in attitude towards English-speaking and opportunities to learn English within everyday life.

Lesson 9: Presentation

Today was the presentation day and we had 3 groups presenting. The first group was talking about music room and how to improve it. I did not quite get the point of rennovating the music room because I do not think music room is that important and we have no problem using the room. They basically raised bad points of the room and some solutions, but none of them take music class so their arguments seemed a little unconvincing.
One thing that I learned from their presentation is that it was a bad idea talking while standing behind the desk with a computer on top of it.
Next group was really good and communicated well. Their claims were clear all the way through the presentation and explanation was clear overall. I thought the idea of putting ball pool was ridiculous, but other ideas such as round desks and wheel chairs were mind blowing. What I liked about the group was their way of talking and interaction with the audiences. They had some dopamine generators and visual tools in the presentation, which kept me listening to them. They were all confident and communicated very well.
The last group has done the best work. Although their idea was not that creative, but they made it seem innovative and somehow attractive by emphasizing the key points of the ideas. Their intreraction with the audiences was also good, especially Shion and Monika. They used gestures efficiently at the right time.I'm hoping to communicate with the audiences as this group.

Lesson 8: Preparation

Today was simply a preparation day for the presentation of the project. As our progress over the last 2 months was extremely limited, we had to clarify what's already done and what has to be done by next Tuesday and it turned out that the only thing done at the moment is logo. We basically made no progress over the last 2 months so we just divided the work and decided when to work together.
Then, we went to the science room for inspection and interviewed Mr. Nagatomo, a physics teacher. He claimed that the science room is too messy and should have more proper storage for equipments. He also complained the room cannot be completely dark and he has trouble conducting experiments that need darkness. His complaints were new to us and i think it could give us a clue to improve the room.
After the interview, we moved onto discussion on the video. I wanted to create catchy video so I suggested putting funny introduction of the team members like in a music video, but it was denied. Finally, we just took a video of blackboard animation, which I suggested.

Lesson 7: Decipacito

Today, we listend to various language versions of Despacito. Decipacito is the most viewed video on youtube hitting 4 billion views and will soon reach 5 billion. Although it was released only 6 months ago, it immediately passed the record of "Gangnam style". According to Mr.Paterson's analysis, the video became so viral because of its staging and casting. A lesson we could learn from the video and the spread of it is that no one knows what's going to be popular and everything has a chance to be globally famous and viral. I also became a fan of the song and listen to it over and over again even though I rarely listen to music. I thought we can get tips to create attractive video from this video, which we can use for the project. I am actually a video editor for the group so I'm hoping to possibly make a great video that can attract people's attention.
Based on the plans we made in the last lesson, we started bringing some ideas of renovation. We decided which chairs to replace old chairs without backrest, which is the main progress in today's lesson.

Leeson 6: Exploration of the science room

Today, as we have already decided which room to renovate, we moved on to the next step, which is examining and exploring the room. We walked around the science room and searched a spot that could be improved or possibly removed. We also took a few pictures suggesting the dirtiness and uselessness of the room. We mainly took pictures of unorganized garbage and dirt around the sink, which was the most unclean place in the room. The main purpose of our renovation is to provide students more comfortable place and promote more efficient scientific reserch, so we thought carefully of the students' conviniences at all times. Below are the points that we must change to improve the room.

・Overall extremely d

irty

・Many apparatus and shelves not used at all/efficiently

・Uncomfortable chairs; cannot be even considered a chair due to its hardness and form

・Garbage can not used properly

・Get rid of all the shelves on both sides of the class

・Space under the tables can be used in a better way

・Unsanitized sink

・Safety Goggles are not sanitary and safe to use

teachers table are extremely messy

・The place where you put dusk cloth is dirty and not used well

・WIndows too large, too much sunlight --- Sleepy students

・Testing tubes are not kept cleanly

・Cannot see the black board/smart board from the back

・Every items in the classroom are disorganized

・Difficult to write and erase on the table 

Our job now is to come up with an idea to make the room comfortable and functionable, based on the lists above. In the next lesson, we are planning to interview students studying science and think of more detailed renovation process.

Lesson 5: New project

Today, we were assigned a new task o work on through the semester. Although it was a big surprize that we are going to work on the same topic as the last semester, I thought it's a good idea and I'm expecting to make something good in this project.
We had a discussion on the topic and already decided a few important things for the project.
These are what we decided today:
⚫coordinater: me
⚫website editor: Kento and Joseph
⚫Video editor: me
⚫Brochure: Keito
⚫Room that we rennovate: Science room
⚫Things to to
1. Interview students and teachers who use the science room
2. Take a picture of the room
3. Research
4. Budgetary
5. Summarize opinions
6. Make Powerpoint presentation
The reason we have already decided fundamentals is because I failed this project last semester in my previous group due to procrastination and prolongation of a meaningless discussion. I thought it's significant to decide things quickly as well as completing work accurately. I actually recalled the phrase "if you are not fast, you are last" during today's discussion. I'm planning to concretely discuss the  rennovation plan.

Lesson 4:Marshmallow-spaghetti challenge

Today, we did marshmallow-spaghetti challenge. Our task was to build a tower made out of spaghetti and tapes with a marshmallow on top of it. It is an activity that tests many important skills in life, such as creativity, thinking skills, teamwork, collaboration skills both as a group and as an individual. 

Our group made the 4th tallest tower of all groups, which is 33 centimeters. Our tower was way below the average of regular people, which is 50 centimeters, and I immediately felt weakness of the group members. 

Our main problem was a lack of teamwork and hesitation towards try and error. We did not concide with each other and each member tried their own way of building. Also, we did not spend much time actually building the tower because we had prolonged discussion on the shape of the tower and physics. Time management was also a tough task for us and as a result of unsophisticated scheduling, we were left with useless time, which was too short to fix the tower.

According to the Ted talk that we watched after the activity, this challenge has been done many times everywhere and brought interesting results. I was puzzled by the result that kindergarten children built a tower higher than what smart adults built. One thing that I presumed from this results and the talk is that in case of an activity like this, already learnt knowledge and intelligence is useless. Pure efforts and experience are the only thing needed to easily overcome physics in a short time.

If we could do this activity again, I would try to test strong structures of spaghetti, rather than observing them and contemplating my image of the completed structures.

Lesson 3: New group

 In the beginning of the class, we divided into groups of 4 without a former group member. Then, we were told to discuss reasons why it took so long to divide up into groups. The discussion was hard because our group was established a second after we were told to divide into groups. We mainly claimed that girls' have too complicated friendship and many complex mentalities, which lead to prolongation of negotiations and compromises. Compared to girls, boys were extremely simple-minded and instantly got into groups, so the main cause of the problem was girls' persistent negotiation. Not only the uncomfortable relationship between girls, the absence of a leader was also the main cause of the problem. As we are used to teacher-led groupings, such as changing seating arrangement, we needed a leader with dominance over everyone. However, we all went selfish because this grouping was significant and no one could afford to be a leader or accept someone as a leader to let him/her decide the grouping. As I expected, grouping on our own wasn't an easy job.
After deciding the groups, we discussed the strength and weakness of the group and roles of each members. The most obvious strength is that we are all boys from the same homeroom class, which means we already know each other well and it will be easy to meet up outside the class, and we can freely exchange opinions and argue with each other without hesitation, promoting a smooth progress of discussion. Although a team fully composed by boys seems unlikely to function effectively, our members are actually hard-working and solemn.
Also, our members have special talent each. Kento is a hard-worker that works over night and tend to pursuit perfectness for every assignment given and brings motivation and enthusiasm to a group. Joseph is a native English speaker and brilliant writer. We can fully rely on his ability to get language-related work done. Keito is also a great worker. He has outstanding music talent and could be in charge of sound-effects when creating video/audio/presentations. Finally, I am the coordinator and the video-editor for the group. I have Mac and am used to edit videos and make it humorous as I engaged in those activity in previous school.
Overall, our group is united and I believe we can create a masterpiece.

Lesson 2: Introduction to Feedly

In today's lesson, we learned about a website called Feedly. After checking if everyone else has done their homework, we were guided to Feedly, a website that allows us to easily organize and check subscribed websites. Although it was the first time I've heard of the website, I immediately understood the usefulness of the website and imagined how smooth our work will be. According to my understanding of Feedly, it assumably allows us to search URL and subscribe a discovered website and organize websites by folders. One thing that I found and thought advantageous about the system is that it doesn't only list countless websites and allows us to access the website, but it shows us the number of unread sections of the websites and provides us a quick view of those sections. I believe this function is extremely unique and none other sites have such function. After we learned how to use Feedly, we subscribed class mates' blog and organize them in a folder. We just had to paste the URL and click 'Add' and rename the website and I spent unexpectedly short time on this. Following the subscription of our class mates' blog, I added a few websites that I usually check.

Along with other super useful websites, applications and chrome extensions, I learned Feedly in the last class. As I mentioned, Feedly was also an incredible site and I decided to use it in many occasions. I will also seek other ways to utilize Feedly wisely.

Lesson 1: Reflection on the last project

Today, we did the reflection on the classroom project. We mainly discussed the good points and the bad points of our project. Our presentation itself was not so bad as our delivery and slides were interesting and our idea was moderately innovative. Although we failed to create a 3d model of the classroom, which we tried to make, we clarified the prices of all pieces of equipment and explained the usefulness of new equipment so we did not completely fail on the project. One thing that was successful in our group and not in other groups was dopamine-generating. We included many pieces of little funny elements in the talk and triggered the audiences to laugh and cause secretion of dopamine. As a result of lack of planning, we accidentally and strategically created a lively atmosphere in the room and unexpectedly made the progress of the presentation smooth. However, it is very disappointing that not all the members engaged in the project. There was clearly a big difference in efforts each member put on the project and even I did not do so much work. The total time that we spent to complete the project was about 5 hours when other groups probably spent more than about 10 hours on average.
 The meeting I had today had an important meaning to me because I wasn't sure how my delivery was and how well our presentation was at all. Although I believed that I tried my best and eventually did well on the project, according to my group members, I could and needed to do a lot better than what I did. Then, I have realized I should always reflect on my act from different people's perspective.
As it turned out, my grade for this project was terrible. However, there were multiple important things I learned from the project and many weaknesses that I figured out throughout a series of advance so this project was definitely significant to me.