15th July Group 4

Group 4

Alison Kwok 3T (17)

Nichole Cheung 3T (9)

Chelsea Wong 3S (32)

Sharon Ng 3A (25)

15th July, 2016 

We had a visual design lesson today and we learnt more about creative art and drawing with confidence. We did an exercise on visual thinking and drawing, for example, using different fonts of various sizes to wrote out the characters of alphabets from A to Z with a permanent marker, then seeing how confident we are in ourselves. We were asked to first use a pencil or a colored pencil to draw a draft of all our letter, then trace them back with the permanent markers. Through this exercise, we had a boost in confidence as we learnt that even though we might make a mistake with our pencils and colored pencils, we could correct and overlap our mistakes and change our drawings by using that permanent marker. We also understood that making mistakes are perfectly fine, as they are a good way of learning, and that as long as we learn from our mistakes and change what we have done wrong; making mistakes aren't bad at all. We were also given three different choices- to continue with our previous construction, to begin a new sketch or to start a company and build a car.

Some of us chose the 2^nd option, which was to design a new sketch. Some chose the 3^rd option, which was to build a company and construct a new car. We all had fun doing our own little projects. The group mates that chose to design a new sketch sat outside in the lounge and shared their ideas on the new project. We combined all our ideas and art together and constructed our different ideas and we all applied the new things we learnt in our previous lessons about visual design and creativity. By the end of the lesson, both groups of people learnt that creativity didn’t only come from one person or any particular person, yet everyone put together would boost creativity and expand ideas. We also learnt that creativity can come is various ways from various people, and that by applying that creativity we can then succeed in making something new and original. The people who chose the 3^rd choice and built a car also learnt about creativity, but in another method. We first wrote different car brand names like BMW, Benz, Acura and anything that has similar function with cars like bicycle, train, horse on little memo sheets and stick onto a big drawing paper. After combining and elaborating our ideas, we finally came out to have a car to have 6 wheels, 4 seats and self-driving. By putting our ideas together, we managed to compose a weird but creative and original car.

We also gained insight on how we should judge media from our own perspectives. We learnt that not all media is made equal. Bloggers can put forth any opinion on any topic, with no qualifications required. This might harm the person the blogger may writing about or harm the person in various ways. Also, the biography offered by the author might or might not be entirely true. Anyone can say whatever they want on a blog, so it is quite unsafe for teens nowadays to trust everything the media puts out there and says. Blogs used to be the places where people got the most trustworthy information before, and at the time, people really believed in blogging and the blogs people put out on t eh internet. However, the internet is dangerous and can be full of fakes, so we have to be aware of our beliefs and we mustn’t believe everything the internet says these days.

We also learnt more about better communication. Communication is when there is feedback and overall it consists of 3 things. The first is to listen to the speaker and receive the information. Then we are supposed to decode the message and to give feedback that we have heard the message. Communication can be compared to that of a tennis match, like the back and forth of a tennis match. There are also different types of medium and communication, for example radio station broadcasting through a transmitter, phone calling and texting. To transmit a message, or to know if someone’s listening or not, a person can see if people have called the show to give on opinion, or to leave a text message and voice out their comments and their opinions. Newspapers and magazines however, have a different method of transmitting information. Feedback on an article in the newspaper can be recorded by the editorial page by writing to the editor, or by commenting on their websites or blogs.

Reflection

Today, we had our very last visual design lesson, and we had a great time today. For the first part, we have practiced calligraphy. We have learnt how to improve our handwriting and the importance of having good handwriting. A neat and tidy handwriting can impress people and may also give an artistic quality, so we are going to apply what we have learnt in this session in our daily life by trying to improve our handwriting and please our teachers with tidy homework. During the second part of the lecture, we have been divided into groups and we focused on different work - some of us started new individual sketches, and the others work on a design, such as designing a car of the future, in groups.

Most of us chose to participate the last activity, “establishing a company”, which means we had to make something new and special by combing all our ideas together. In today’s lesson, we decided to make a car. We first wrote different car brand names like BMW, Benz, Acura and anything that has similar function with cars like bicycle, train, horse on little memo sheets and stick onto a big drawing paper. We got endless ideas and we use a large amount of memos to write our ideas on, the process was fun! After combining and elaborating our ideas, we finally came out to have a car to have 6 wheels, 4 seats and self-driving. Although it seems weird and funny, we enjoyed this activity as it gave us a chance to strengthen our team work and let us to be more creative. We were all so impressed in our unique invention!

After this session, we have learnt that we can unleash our creativity and come up with a new idea immediately; on the other hand, we have also learnt how to work with others and how we will benefit from it, for example, we can exchange ideas and know more about other people's thinking. This skill would be very useful when we are doing group project as we can know more about others' thoughts and hence improve the quality of the output.

We also found the internet blogging lesson very useful for our everyday life as the teacher us how to avoid being fooled on the internet. We should believe in professional journals, books and documentaries other than blogs on the internet as people could fool around using fake identities. After the teacher gave some examples of internet fraud, we were so shocked about the various methods of the swindlers that we swore to be more careful of the internet in the future. For example, some people will disguise as experts on the web and spread false information in order to deceive people. Last but not least, we learnt how to comment on other classmates’ blogs. We appreciated it and found it fun to do so as we could make use of all our resources and communicate more with our classmates. We could make new friends or strengthen our friendship by then.