Prepping for the end.

Prepping for the end.

Hey guys! Thanks for tuning in to most likely our last blog of our journey. Alex here and I speak for the both of us that this was a roller coaster of a project.

Last week we were in the process of editing and posting our YouTube videos and we now have two of them up. You can go check us out at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMhtUmAFCRQgufI2Om9dVug?view_as=subscriber

 

This week we are touching up our final details of our project such as finishing posting YouTube videos. Cameron and I will be heading our to Hawaii tomorrow and we will hopefully have sometime to edit in peace.
This coming week we will officially have our finished product and hope to give an amazing Ted-X like presentation to our school along with our peers who also have been doing genius hour projects of all sorts of genres.
Thanks once again,
Alex and Cameron

YouTube Posting

Hey Guys!
         Last week, we talked about how we were filming over the weekend for our YouTube channel. We finished filming two videos last weekend and we are working an editing them now. we should be uploading this week end and be finishing the video today. Currently we are using iMovie but we may change to windows movie maker if the quality improves. Our first video will be Alexander demonstrating the Ollie. Our second video will be me (Cameron) demonstrating and teaching the pop shuvit. We struggled with the way to film the videos and making the videos longer. We will try to lengthen the next videos to make them more in depth and explain more.

         We plan on working on more videos and more tricks this weekend. We are still trying to land a kickflip and we will hopefully be filming the journey.

         We hope you come back next week where we will have a couple new videos!

Youtube filming

Hey guys! Welcome back to another insert of our project!

                Last week, we focused on working on our YouTube channel and setting it up. Thinking of what we were going to put on it was the real challenge, after all, there are hundreds and hundreds of tricks to choose from and a wide variety of topics about them. However we got it don’t and hope to be uploading content ASAP.

                This week is filming week for us, we are working together aiming to try to film easy how to videos for beginners by beginners. Yes, it won’t be pro quality, however, there will be a good connection between the teacher (us) and the learner (whoever watches the video). We are in the process of tree videos currently and hope to drop them sometime this weekend, so make sure to check in regularly!

Next week, we will talk about the results of our first YouTube experience and simply give you guys a few jists of the good and bad things we ran into. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more!

YouTube Channel

      YouTube Channel


Last week, we talked about how we learned better board control and how to land without falling off and talked about how we are trying to go down ramps.

     This week, we finally finished our YouTube channel and created our circle with the connections we have used to come this far in our project. We added a background and our vlog video about our future goal! Now we have the basis of our platform for reaching out to a bigger, more accessible audience. We hope to grow in subscriber count and upload weekly. This will be very challenging with school on top of genius hour but we will make it work.

     We are currently working on landing the kick flip. We are at the stage of getting rotation all the way around, but cannot land back on the board. we will keep trying and keep you all updated!

Thanks for tuning in!

Cameron Cropper

Update: Board Control

            Hey guys! Welcome back to learning to skate. Alexander here and to day I'll be talking to you guys about our what we did this week, what were working on now, and our plans coming up.
             Last week, we learned how to Ollie higher.
             This week, we worked on board control. Board control is crucial because if you don't know how to control your board, you will not be able to land tricks or even ride around. As we were riding around on our boards, we learned that the best way to stay on and gain control is if you have one foot perpendicular to the board and one foot parallel with the board keeping them spread apart about food and a few inches, rather than having both feet parallel to the board and having them very close together, you wouldn't want the board to slip right out from under you.
            We currently are working on going down ramps which so far has proven difficulty because the speed really takes of and the sudden slant change going from the ramp to the ground. We have made pads a staple and helmets are always good you you can keep your head safe. Hopefully we will master slanted ramps and move on to vert rams shortly.
            Coming up in this series will be more advanced tricks such as doing the basic tricks but moving, which will prove to be a monster in itself. Also, we will be focusing on riding off things such as small wooden boxes, low to the ground of course.
Hope you guys tune in next week to see our progress, Tanks for watching!

Alexander Gales

My College effect

Alexander Gales

             Hey guys, today I am going to steer away from the whole skateboarding thing and talk to you guys about college. As a sophomore at a private school, colleges are looking at us as soon as we set foot in high school which reminds us that we need to have our mind set on the future. As we continue to work on our project it is always good to keep in mind the effects this project will have on us, big and small. College is at wide field of knowledge and there are endless topics to study. Whatever one may be doing in early life could foreshadow what they could be doing in college and/ or our adult lives. This genius hour project enables us to demonstrate our inner passions and help others in some physical or mental form. As we quickly approach college, having a solid resume is key and what would be better than to say you helped a huge charity... or even started one. From teaching kids to skate, to starting a book club, everything has an effect. Even though there have been complications in this project, I am thankful I have the opportunity to learn something new and to hopefully apply the lessons I learned in college and then my life, the things that impact one the most are usually undetected. one never knows what colleges could be looking out for. I would personally like to give thanks to Mrs. Jaynes for helping me realize that anything can affect your college life, even teaching kids to skate.

Higher Ollie and Vlog

 Higher Ollie and Vlog

                Last week, we learned how to pop-shuvit. this week, we learned how to Ollie higher than before and clean the Ollie itself up. To start off, we wanted to start our forward foot closer to the middle of the board and further back. This way, when you pop the board up by pressing down on the back of the board, the board has more room to come up rather than be limited by your foot placement. Therefore when you even out, you have Ollied much higher and looks much better. Right now, we are working on creating a YouTube channel to further our reach out to kids that need inspiration. This will be a great platform for us to post more videos on our journey. Furthermore, we hope to grow our audience by doing so.

Now here is a vlog we made talking about our experience with our Genus Hour project so far.

College Effect

        
           

 College Effect

 
                        This week, we will be talking about the effect this project will have on our lives through college. For me, Cameron, Genius Hour is a great opportunity to express what we love and show the passion we have for it. Being able to show off to colleges and stand out is very important for a student to do and this project will help us accomplish that. While our personal project may not change the world, it will however, change peoples opinions on life. Motivation is very important and if colleges look for someone who created a movement for people to get out and do what they want to do, that is exactly what we are trying to convey.  Given that there are scholarships for everything, we could also seek a scholarship that would help us along the way in college. As a sophomore, I struggle to decide which college I may want to attend but that is the benefit of Genius Hour. If we take our project and push it to the limits, the colleges will be coming to us.  Finding something that can help you in not just college but also in life is very hard but Genius Hour helps you do exactly that. Also, while the aspect of skating itself is not very logical in the end goal of life, our aspect of the tenacity of trying something new that could potentially hurt or injure us with no experience at all... That is what will help us in life from this project. I am so glad we have the opportunity to do Genius Hour in our English class and we cannot wait to see the benefits toward college.

Update #3

Long term goals

This week, we looked in at the long term affects this project will have on our lives. 

            Out of all the things and possibilities to do on this project, why would we chose skateboarding, it won't deeply affect peoples lives and change it forever. It has the possibility to motivate, however. The process of this project is to demonstrate to people that anyone can do almost anything they set their mind to through the help of others such as professionals. Through the rest of high school, moving into college, we will be able to reflect on this experience and have a feeling of success knowing our accomplishments and how we learned something new. Learning something new is always an accomplishment especially when it is a task which will give much fruit from its labor. Our fruit being learning new tricks and being able to teach others.
            For this coming week, Cameron and Alexander will be focusing on board control, with is basically feeling comfortable on your board. Board control is key to skaters because if one does not have good board control, it will be very hard to perform almost every trick.

The Pop Shuvit

update #2

The Pop Shuvit.

            Last week, we learned how to ollie, one of the most important tricks to learn. This week on learning to skate, we taught ourselves to shuvit, here are our tips to landing it! The shuvit perhaps is the most basic trick in the book, even simpler than the Ollie (which we explained and taught you how to do in our previous blog). The shuvit is simply rotating the board  180 degrees (aka.  half or semicircle). The first key to successfully landing a shuvit is keeping your balance, then you want to keep your front foot steady in the middle of the board while you kick back your rear foot resting on the tail. Even when your board is in rotation, the front foot should remain in the middle, the middle foot serves as a guide for the board so it will not flip out or backwards form your feet. Major key two- always, always, always make sure your feet are a good width apart. If they are right beside each other, you have a really good chance of the board coming out from under you and that's not good. The pop shuvit is simply combining the Ollie and Shuvit into one trick. At the moment, we are working on making connections with our mentor. Tune in next week, we hope to perfect our ollie and learn to jump higher than before.