Owain is by all accounts humble and uncomfortable with anything that could be mistaken for pride.
So when the recent SelfDesign learner and member of SelfDesign’s Class of 2023 received notice that he’d won the Governor General’s Academic Medal in June, he responded in his usual low-key way.
“Yeah, I was pleased,” he says. “In fact, I felt I needed to share the news with somebody, so I went outside to look for my dad to tell him.”
Established 150 years ago by Canada’s third Governor General after Confederation, the medals are considered one of the most prestigious academic awards available to students in Canadian schools. The bronze award for secondary students is given to the student graduating with the highest average in all grade 11 and grade 12 courses from a high school.
Owain commenced from SelfDesign in the spring after 12 years of independent, personalized learning. During the last two years, he focused his learning at SelfDesign on completing as many science and math courses as he could, achieving 100 per cent in Physics 11, Pre-calculus 12 and Chemistry 12.
The honour, SelfDesign Learning Community Principal Catherine Dinim wrote in the email announcing the award, “is a reflection of your exceptional abilities, tireless dedication to your studies and the countless hours you have invested in expanding your knowledge and understanding.”
Too busy learning to sit in a classroom
Owain enjoyed listening to countless fiction and non-fiction books being read to him at a young age, his mom Sherri says. During weekly visits to the local library, he would fill a milk crateful of children’s books to enjoy. At about age 8, he graduated to listening to the classics read by his mom and by listening to audiobooks. Mark Twain remains a favourite author, to this day,
His interest in science also started at a young age. One of his favourite pastimes was studying the images of the family Volvo manual as bedtime reading and watching numerous How Things Work videos. One of his favourites, which he watched many times and still quotes from, is The 7 Wonders of the World.
He and his neighbourhood friends would excavate the front yard, building roads, bridges and ponds with water and mud with his Tonka collection. And he experimented with building structures with natural materials in the stream near his family’s Thetis Island home, on B.C.’s coast.
“Owain spent hours and hours and weeks and weeks — so much time! — building berms and dams in that stream,” mom Sherri says. “He started experimenting hands-on from a very young age — every day, he’d go for a walk, and he’d just find things to build — and he could see that what he was doing wasn’t working, but he constantly experimented to see what might work.”
He would analyze Google Earth and other maps and share his learning. He watched videos about how engines worked and immersed himself in inventing and building things like computers and machines with recyclables, experimenting for a whole day with common household materials. He actively experimented with materials like Capsella, Quadrilla, Snap Circuit, Lego, and Mindstorms robotics, Brio train set, and Meccano to learn physics concepts.
“He was so busy learning on a daily basis and so engaged with what he was learning that, when he turned five, I felt putting him in a brick-and-mortar school would not only put an end to all that active exploration and learning and enthusiasm, it might stifle it,” Sherri says. “So we learned at home and did other alternative schooling instead, where he learned through living.”
For a couple of years, he attended Wolf Outdoor Education (Thriving Roots Wilderness School), a full-time program for kids ages 8 to 14 on Saltspring Island. He spent one winter in Belize with the group, learning self-sufficiency skills such as lighting a fire in a stream. When he lived on the family farm in Cranbrook, he got involved in 4-H, raising steers for the annual auction and helping out with the family’s chicken-raising business. One year, he and his steer won second prize for Showmanship.
And he enrolled with SelfDesign Learning Community, where Sherri works as a learning consultant.
He also attended coding courses and, as a young teen, started reading different coding languages to deepen and broaden his understanding. He enjoyed gaming online a lot when he was younger and continues to enjoy playing the role-playing online game, Dungeons and Dragons, with his friends from SelfDesign.
He eventually asked to learn math formally and completed the curriculum up to grade 9 in just a couple of years. That curiosity about mathematics deepened throughout high school.
A love of science and math
Owain’s Governor General’s Academic Award shows that kids who geek out on mathematics, physics and chemistry can excel at SelfDesign.
The grades that gained Owain the award are no accident. This learner loves experimenting with materials and tools to further his understanding of chemistry and physics. Owain used the weekly learning challenges and personal projects in grades 10 to 12 to explore science topics that interested him.
In one case, he applied what he’d learned during one of his Grade 10 projects about cultivating mushrooms — a real-world experiment that continues three years later.
“I followed the methodology that I had developed in the paper to do the project,” he says. One day, when he was helping out on the family property by thinning out a stand of young trees, he set up his own mushroom-growing trial. He split the logs into sections and drilled holes into them. He introduced into the holes spores that he’d ordered online of blue oyster and a couple of other gourmet mushroom species. He sealed the holes with wax and then left the logs out in the yard, watering them occasionally. The mycelium, or network of fungus threads, is spreading through the logs.
“Cultivating mushrooms takes a very long time,” he says, “so I don’t have the results yet. But at some point, we should have some mushrooms that we can eat for lunch or something.”
In another project, Owain researched how lasers work. He read the published research on the topic, analyzed it, and worked out, in theory, how to create a laser, a narrow beam of light in which all of the light waves have very similar wavelengths and travel together with their peaks lined up.
And in what he calls the most interesting of all his SelfDesign projects, Owain used an online web tool called Gizmo to generate and collect data that would help him predict how long an object would take to fall from any distance.
“Basically, Gizmo allows you to drop a ball and observe how gravity affects it, depending on the weight, size, and shape,” he says. “I had a kind of strange idea that I would try and figure out a way of predicting how the ball would work.”
He recorded thousands upon thousands of data points for ball drops from this tool for learning online in spreadsheets. He plotted each data point on a graph, then tried to identify the equation that best captures the resulting line of data points on the graph — a method called regression analysis.
“This took me many, many hours to do it correctly, because I’d never done it before,” he says. “I refused to look it up, and I refused to get my dad [an engineer] to tell me or give me a hint or anything — I refused to do any of that. It took me a long time to figure it out, but once I did it, it was so rewarding to know that I could work out with an equation what was going on with a very high degree of certainty.”
He even identified the source of uncertainty in his results: Gizmo rounded the numbers obtained for each ball drop. This introduced a degree of error.
“It was very satisfying to see that I could guess, depending on the weight and size of these balls that one was dropping, what would happen, where it would be at a given time, or how fast it would be going,” Owain says. “It was very cool to do that, and I really enjoyed it.”
He also used that project to investigate how fluid dynamics and how air resistance work and how they work depending on an object’s shape.
“I would consider that the most serious and most interesting of all the projects I did based on some sort of experiment, rather than research and analysis on research, which was my primary focus,” Owain says.
Now that he’s finished high school, Owain is continuing to increase his skills by taking an advanced math course to further prepare for university.
What’s next?
Owain plans to attend university to study civil engineering, following in the career footsteps of his father and grandfather. He has been accepted into the University of Cape Town, in South Africa, and intends to start there next September.
The choice of university is influenced by his father’s own personal and professional experiences.
“My dad worked for a time in Africa early in his career,” Owain says. He started a charity to relieve poverty via education. “It was a pretty important time in his life, and for as long as I remember, he’s told these amazing stories about his time there. I guess you can say I’m fascinated by Africa.”
In the meantime, Owain is taking a gap year to expand his work experience and knowledge, shadowing his father on site investigations for and implementation of wastewater designs. He will also learn the financial, legal and practical details of the family business heading up the completion and operation of the strata his dad and mom started on Thetis Island before Owain was born.
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