Just to show you all that I'm still alive and kicking everything that's kickable with some very cool steel toed boots...

Fear not, minions, this blog is still alive! It's just hibernating 'cause of winter. SO, since I last blogged, school has started again (booooo) but I (fortunately) did not have to come back to mock exams, having done them back in November and freaking out like crazy. The results weren't too bad but I do see that I do actually need to revise. That being said, I don't think I did too badly for someone who didn't actually revise a helluva lot.

Anyhoo, I had a Product Design GCSE resit this week which had me freaking out like crazy for a bit. Fortunately, it's not an exam you can really revise for, seeing as it's called an "Innovation Challenge". Unfortunately, it does require you to come up with some wacky designs and then attempt to make a prototype of one of those designs. It's a good idea to have some completely crazay designs as your first plans, but then you do have to make things a bit more simple so you can make at least a little bit of it function in real life in the prototype.

I preferred the theme we were given for this exam better than last year's 'cause this one was so much more interesting: last year's involved a school sport's day; this year's involved a jungle theme park. Basically, in the Challenge, candidates get given a theme (e.g. theme park, sports day etc.) and then four situations out of which they pick one to design a product for. One of these situations is generally to do with food and as I'm a Product Design student, we leave those alone and run far far away from them. The situations in this case were:

- a 3D way of advertising special events e.g. clowns/facepainting around the park
- a generic uniform for the park staff that can be easily changed to identify different jobs
- a toy for children under 5, which must be interactive

Now, students choose a situation and start drawing their initial thoughts. As they're for a "jungle theme park", the designs do have to be jungle related and look all jungley. I chose the first situation and ended up designing a mechanical elephant that would walk around the park. That idea may have had something to do with the fact that I had just reread Behemoth by Scott Westerfield but shhhhh. I think it was a pretty good idea and I'm quite proud of the fact that I managed to draw it and then (semi)make it. As it was an exam, and I was designing in a booklet, I can't post any pictures of the design or prototype but I'll try and recreate the drawing and then post that sometime. Don't expect it any time soon, though. My friend's mum does want to see proof of the design so I'm going to be redrawing it for her and I'll post it then. Basically, before the exam my friend told me to remember "elephant, dinosaur and post it notes", told her mum that she had told me about those three magic words and then got told by her mum that if I got a good grade (C or higher; I'm keeping my fingers crossed for waaaay higher), she wants to celebrate the fact that "such idiocy shall and will be celebrated". =D

So yeah; such has been life over the past week for me. I'm back to making my T-Rex in P.D. lessons and so far it's going very well! Long post is long and so I think I'll leave it here for now.
I love you all vair vair much and I shall see you next time! So long, my ducklings! =D



P.S. If all (or at least a few) you lovely readers could comment, it would be ever so nice for me. It gets a little bit lonely posting and then not having anything to read afterwords. Love you all lots like Jelly Tots!