Category: Capstone

There were a lot of ways I prepare to present. But first, I had to finish my script and slides. My script was not that hard to finish. The only part that was hard was shortening it so it was only 5 minutes long. The slideshow was not that hard to complete. I included a lot of special effects. I really like it and I think its cool, but I’ll let you decide for yourself. This is it:

After those were both done, I had to practice. One of the things I practiced was switching the slide when I had to. That was my weakness. I don’t know why, but I just never did it at the right time. Also, I filmed myself doing it and presenting and I realized that I talked to fast. Also, I need to avoid distractions. This will be really helpful when I present to the other grades and classes, because there’s bound to be somebody messing around in the audience. The resources I used for this project are:

Videos:

How Did YouTube Start?

What Is YouTube?

YouTube Rewind Compilation

The History Of YouTube

How BIG Is Google?

Books:

YouTube: The Company And Its Founders

Articles:

How YouTube Changed The World

What Is YouTube?

The Differences Between YouTube And Twitch

Key Turning Points In The History Of YouTube

If you are wondering about anything related to YouTube, these resources are probably the best places to look for information. Thanks for reading!

My main inquiry was really easy to answer. It was “How has YouTube impacted the world”. It was really easy to answer because YouTube has impacted the world in so many ways. I did a lot of research on how YouTube impacted the world. Some ways it has are that 80% of its viewers are out of America, so not only America was impacted but the world was too. Another way is that 7 billion hours of video are watched every month. That’s an insane amount of video! The research I did to answer this question helped me with my script because I could include some cool facts I learned from that research. My interview also helped me answer my main inquiry question because some of the things I learned from that were reasons YouTube impacted the world. My script and slideshow are done. If you have time and want to, please read it and comment any things I might want to change. This is the script:

 

Slide	Time	Script	Image
1	00:00 – 00:25	Hello, Hello! My name is Danny! I have a question for you ladies and gentlemen. Do you know about YouTube? You probably do, since it is 28 percent of all Google searches. I mean, who doesn’t love watching a good Saturday Night Live video, or a great Ninja video? Ninja is a famous gamer who plays Fortnite, if you didn’t know. The point is, YouTube is an amazing website where you can find everything about everything. I hope you learn a lot about the incredible website during this presentation.	YouTube Logo
2	00:25 – 1:25	First off, I’ll tell you about YouTube’s founders. Their names are Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen. They are 3 former PayPal employees. Fun fact about Steve Chen: He was born in Taiwan, and his father owned a successful business there. It was so successful that Steve Chen’s father decided to move it to America. Steve was 8 years old at that the time. He didn’t speak English, so it was pretty hard for him to move to his new school. As an added challenge, he was not put in any special program to learn English, so he just had to learn the language from being exposed to it. When Steve was 13 years old, he moved to the Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) in Illinois. IMSA was a good school for Steve, since he had a gift with technology. He later applied for The University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign. It was the only college Steve applied to, and he got accepted. After college, he started working at PayPal, where he met Jawed and Chad.	Picture of Steve Chen
3	1:25 – 2:10	And now for the amazing, incredible Chad Hurley! He was born in Pennsylvania, so unlike Steve Chen, Hurley is an American native. As a child, he had a lot of talent in the computer area. He also had a lot of talent in the art area. With those talents and interests, he was drawn to Web Design and Computer Animation. During his studies, he attended Twin Valley High School. In his free time, Chad tinkered with robotics. When he got to college, he wanted to work in the tech area. But Computer Science was too technical for Chad. He wanted to do creative things. After college, Chad started working at PayPal, where he met Steve and Jawed. Another cool fact about him is in 2006, he was 28th in Business 2.0’s “50 People Who Matter Now”	Picture of Chad Hurley
4	2:10 – 2:45	And now Jawed Karim. In May 1979, Jawed Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany. He then moved to America. Like his parents, Jawed was interested in science and technology. When Jawed was 10 years old, his parents bought him a Commodore computer. Jawed spent a lot of time toying with the computer and soon learned how to write code. Jawed attended St. Paul Central High School.  When Jawed graduated from high school, he wanted to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign. He planned to major in computer science. But the school did not accept him. So he wrote a letter in return explaining why he should be in the school. The letter made a difference and he was accepted. In 2000, Jawed left the college and started working at PayPal. There, he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.	Picture of Jawed Karim
5	2:45 – 3:10	YouTube’s origins are kind of hilarious. I mean, they started out as a dating site called Tune In, Hook Up. The way that worked is people would put videos of themselves on the site, and if other people liked those videos they could comment them their number. But nobody used Tune In, Hook Up the right way. People started posting videos of themselves doing challenges, and basically everything else you can see on YouTube today. So Tune In, Hook Up built on their strengths and made it a place where people could post themselves doing random things, like the YouTube we know and love today.	Person on computer
6	3:10 – 3:50	But there is still an important question. What is the best video viewing platform? You probably know about Twitch. It is YouTube’s main competitor, and most gamers on YouTube are on Twitch also. Let’s compare them to see which is better, mainly gaming videos, because that’s all that Twitch does. The first category is the presentation of the videos. YouTube lets you choose a thumbnail for your videos, which is good because thumbnails partly tell the story of the video, but Twitch doesn’t have that feature and you can’t choose a thumbnail. So its YouTube 1, Twitch 0. The next category is content. On Twitch, you can only find gaming videos. But on YouTube, you can find all sorts of categories of videos. So its YouTube 2, Twitch 0. So YouTube is the better video viewing platform.	YouTube Logo vs. Twitch Logo
7	3:50 – 4:00	YouTube is a website that has changed so many lives, and is constantly changing more.  I don’t know about you, but I love watching YouTube and seeing how it gets better and better.	YouTube Site
8	4:00 – 4:45	Does anybody have a question?	Question Mark
9	4:45 – 5:00	Check out my blog for more information.	Link to blog and QR code
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Planning Phase:

For my Capstone project, I am researching YouTube. During the Capstone project, we have to conduct a Site Visit. For my Site Visit, I want to go to the YouTube Space. The YouTube Space is a productions facility where YouTubers with over 10K subscribers can go to record their videos. I want to visit there because I think I can learn a lot about what YouTubers do and how they record their videos and what they use. I am still waiting to hear back from them. I think they will email me back today though. But if they don’t my back up plan is to create a YouTube channel and film the process. I have already made the account I will make the YouTube channel on and today I ill film it. I will talk about the actual Site Visit in the next paragraph.

Actual Phase:

The YouTube Space team didn’t email me back, so I decided to take a video of me making a YouTube channel. I had a lot of technical issues. One was that the camera was upside down but everything else was amazing, so in editing I flipped the camera over. Another issue was that I messed up on some words or forgot something. I finally got it right the last time. This is it:

Learning Phase:

This really helped me because now I know how to make a YouTube channel. I think I did a pretty good job explaining how its done. I filmed it at my house, but there were a lot of problems. I eventually fixed them all, but it was annoying. I learned some valuable filming skills. Overall, I learned a lot and I really enjoyed it.

Planning Phase

If you don’t know, I am researching YouTube for Capstone. For Capstone, we have to interview someone (and do a Site Visit, but I’ll talk about that in my next blog post. So stay tuned!) A month or so ago, Ms. Boyer invited her friend and former student to come to the class and talk to us.  He said he used to work at Google, but left and started his own company. The part about his own company was pretty cool, but I was more interested in the part about Google. In fact, that sparked my interest in Google. But I like YouTube, and I figured since this guy used to work at Google, he might know a thing or two about YouTube. So I asked Ms. Boyer to contact him. I’ll talk about the actual interview in the next paragraph.

Interview Phase:

I was really worried and nervous to interview Greg. I thought “What if I pronounce a word incorrectly?” or “What if I forget something?” But as soon as I started the interview, I calmed down. I was sitting on a stool, but I never had time to sit down comfortably. So I half sat, half stood during the 20 minutes of my interview. It turned out Greg knew a lot more about YouTube than I thought, and he was able to answer almost all the questions I asked him. I’ll talk about what I learned in the next paragraph.

Learning Phase:

I learned so much during my interview with Greg! I recorded it on my phone, so now I can watch it whenever I want. One thing I learned is that Google didn’t really buy YouTube that recently. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it was pretty recent, but from my perspective, it was a LONG time ago. Another thing I learned is the first ever video posted to YouTube was called “Me at the zoo”, and that kind of set the tone that this was a video sharing website where ordinary people could post random things. The interview helped me so much, and now I just have to do a site visit. That concludes my third blog post. Thanks for reading!

My main Inquiry Question while studying YouTube for Capstone is “How did YouTube impact the world?” We also had to pick sub  questions, which are questions that relate to the main inquiry question, but they mean less to us than the Main Inquiry Question. My sub questions are:

What is YouTube? (Sub Question)How does YouTube work? (Sub Question)

When was YouTube created? (Sub Question)

How has YouTube evolved over time? (Sub Question)

What do people like about YouTube? (Sub Question)

Will YouTube be around for the next generation (Sub Question)

Is YouTube better than Twitch? (Sub Question)

Who are the top 10 YouTubers? (Sub Question)

How much do YouTubers get paid to do ads? (Sub Question)

Who are YouTube’s competitors? (Sub Question)

What is the most viewed video on YouTube? (Sub Question)

What are YouTube Easter Eggs? (Sub Question)

I am excited to research these questions and my main question. Thanks for reading, and i will post more Capstone blog posts soon.

In class we are doing a project called Capstone. It is basically a bigger version of a Passion Project. We got to choose topics, and I chose Google. But when I started thinking of questions, I realized Google was way too broad. I realized I would have to narrow down my topic. After thinking for a while, I decided to do YouTube. I almost did Python. Not the snake, but the coding language. I almost did it because when I grow up I want to be a video game maker, so I should probably learn Python. But then I realized that I really enjoy watching YouTube videos, and whenever I watch a YouTube video I get curious about the company’s origins, how it was acquired by Google, and a lot of other questions. In this project, I hope to learn about YouTube so I don’t wonder about it every time I watch a YouTube video.