Interview 2 – Capstone #3b

After my site visit and interview, I was less nervous about my second interview, but I was still pretty nervous. The week I had my first interview, my mom went on Common Sense Media, and she got in contact with Michael Robb, the Director of Research, and they agreed to do an interview on Tuesday, May 22. However, we realized later on that we had to move it because of my Ellis Island Field Trip, so we moved the interveiw one day later (I was kind of happy about that because I think if he interview was on Tuesday, I wouldn’t have been ready for it)

I met with Mrs. Edwards on Wednesday at school, and we got my questions ready. I came up with 10 questions with the help of my mom and Mrs. Edwards. Here they are:

  1. What attracted you to your line of work?
  2. What are your responsibilities at Common Sense Media?
  3. What are the pros and cons of playing video games?
  4. What makes video games so addictive and how is an addition to video games the same and/or different from an addiction to drugs?
  5. What’s your company doing to help alleviate the problem of addiction?
  6. How can you minimize the negative effects from playing video games?
  7. What role does age play when talking about the effects of video game playing on the brain?
  8. What trends have you observed in kids and their electronic usage?
  9. What percentage of kids are mostly affected?
  10. What can we (parents, teachers, educators) do to help kids to be less addicted?

At 4:00 after school, my mom and I called Michael Robb using Skype. My mom voice recorded the whole thing, and she helped type up the information while I wrote it down.

Afterward, I really think I learned a lot, like the main problems with video games, and how Common Sense Media addresses those problems. I realized there wasn’t really anything to be nervous of.

Rube Goldberg #3 – Planning at Hana’s

A day after our first meet, we met again because it had snowed so much the day before, that our school gave us another day off. This time we went to Hana’s house so we could actually start the sketch.

The day before we had made a list of materials we wanted to use for our machine. Each of us brought some of the materials over. We looked at our materials, and thought about how we wanted to start it, how to end it, how many steps to include, and so on. While we were brainstorming the simple task that would end our machine, we thought up a lot of things it could end with, but we couldn’t all agree on one. So, we decided to leave that for later, to not waste too much time.

It was kind of weird that we started to build our project before we started the sketch, but that’s what we did. We did it because we didn’t know how we wanted to start it or end it, so we couldn’t draw something because it might be drawn in the wrong spot once we develop our plan.

When we left that day, we had succeeded in building a wooden marble track.