​Anjali Phadke's P​ortfolio

Castle Drawing

At the Dayton Regional STEM School we have a class called World History. In all classes at the STEM School, we have project based learning. In the process of learning with quizzes and tests, we also have projects that are really fun and they actually teach the students. One example that I am going to talk about is my Castle Drawing. At the time of that project we were learning about the medieval times. We had to make an accurate drawing of a medieval castle which had to have 14 of 20 features in a castle. Some of the features include the moat, portcullis, dungeon, garden well, etc.

Our purpose of the project was to make an accurate drawing of a castle with 14 of the 20 features (I have already mentioned some). I think Ms. Miller wanted us to learn about the features. I think we had to learn about the topic because Ms. Miller wanted to show how castles were way harsher in protection compared to a house. For example, a normal house may have a security system or at most a weapon. A castle has guards, arrows, different forms of hot liquids and other very evil things. Ms. Miller wanted us to have an idea in mind before drawing the castle because she wanted it to be accurate. Accuracy is important but you can’t make something absolutely perfect. Ms. Miller wanted us to know what a real castle looked like. She lso  wanted us to make another one in our own way. She didn’t want us to copy from pictures of real castles. One of the requirements of this project was to make the castle neat. Neatness is a quality that you will use all your life. In future school years neatness is also required. Neatness is a quality that painters may use. Instead of being sloppy with the things you do in life, you should try to make them neat and organized. Ms. Miller probably wanted us to practice that. Another requirement was color. When I think I of why she wanted us to use color, I think of the color white. White is a plain, boring and lifeless color. Adding color makes things interesting and more vivid. Ms. Miller probably wanted us to use creativity. Creativity is something that you will use in all jobs. In science you are supposed to know a lot of terms. There could be many medicines to solve a specific disease. The doctor is supposed to think of the most innovative medicine that could help the patient out the most. Creativity sets people apart from others. If there was no creativity in this world, then everything would be very boring. Creativity is a skill that everyone has in their own way. Creativity is when you think of a unique way to solve a problem.

The coolest part of the project was learning about the evil features of an actual castle in the medieval times. It was also really cool actually drawing and coloring the castle that was designed in my head come to life. I also struggled a little bit in this project. The different features were really hard to do because I was doing a birds eye view. I overcame this problem by looking up pictures of a birds eye view. The pictures really helped my brain to flow.
We had drafts to do for this project. Our first draft was to just see where things go. We did do some research from a PowerPoint. Ms. Miller had a PowerPoint presentation on the medieval castles in World History class. We took notes on the different features because our teacher wanted us to know information about these features before we drew them.  We had two drafts. Our first draft had to be signed and then we had to work on our final draft. I used a lot of colors. For example, I made a garden that had the colors green, yellow and red. I also had a well which was blue and brown. I also made a dungeon that was a rectangle with a diamond pattern that was gray. Those are my drafts. It really did take a lot of coloring to do though.

I used creativity and persistence in this project. Creativity means to think of a unique way to solve a problem. Creativity was a quality that I was not good at. Ms. Miller told my class that we could make our castle look however we wanted. This was a hard task because I really had no idea how to draw the different features or even how they looked! As the project started, my creativity grew a lot. I remember when I came up with a problem when there was not enough room. I decided to make a few things smaller so everything could fit. I only made a few things smaller. I used creativity because I improvised with size and shapes which is hard to do in a castle. I also used persistence. Persistence is when you try your hardest to accomplish something multiple times, but improving on each one of them is the key. When we had to make the first draft, I had to make multiple copies! I had to keep redrawing the lines and shapes. I used at least 3 papers. The drafts did change from draft to draft. The first copy was really messy so I wanted it to be neater. On the second draft, I was so focused on the features being neat that I made the spaces all wrong. The third draft was the best one where all my features were perfect. Those drafts were necessary because Ms. Miller had to approve them. If they weren't right then Ms. Miller would tell me to do them over again. So I took the responsibility myself to make my rough draft perfect.   The final draft was easy since I knew what to do. These are the qualities that I used.