For Capstone this year, I have chosen to do a TedTalk because I like talking in front of people instead of making a video because I feel like when you talk live, you hear more personality. I think this for two reasons, you can hear the person’s voice tone better and when you are doing a video, you have music in the background so it is not boring but, in a TedTalk you don’t have music so it is up to you to make it sound better.

My favorite part about making my final project was writing the script. It was my favorite part because I like writing and I thought that it was fun making the facts into a script, figuring out what I wanted to share and putting personality in it. I also thought that making the slides was fun because all the dogs in the pictures were doing really cool things and the dogs were also really cute.

I only encountered one big challenge, shortening my script because I had so much research that I had to cut a lot of it. At first my script was ten pages and now I made it seven. It is still really long but it is less than five minutes and thirty seconds so it is ok.

I am half excited and half not excited about sharing my presentation because I think that the script incorporates many cool facts and the pictures really resemble what I am talking about. I am not too excited about sharing because though I added a lot of personality, I have a lot of facts and I hope it is not boring. Overall, I really enjoyed Capstone and am going to be sad when it is over.

For Capstone this year, I interviewed Officer Tierney, an officer from the Westchester Canine Unit. I interviewed him because my topic is police dogs and he works with police dogs. He even has one of his own named Genesse. Setting up this interview was not hard at all because we knew that this would be a perfect place for an interview since a week before and we did not care who we interview because everyone there knows about police dogs, so it was perfect. I asked twelve questions and I got all the information that I needed. The most interesting thing that I learned was the police men look for certain qualities in a dog. For example the dog has to be independent when the owner meets them and they have to not like being on their backs because, in the wild the predator will kill them that way. I did not run into any troubles during this interview time luckily because it was easy to find and secure a person and I did not have trouble getting the amount of information I needed. Overall, the interview process was short, easy and fun.

For Capstone this year my topic is police dogs and the main inquiry question is “ What are the roles of police dogs in society and why are they important?”. 

What I think was helpful in choosing my main inquiry question is my love for animals and especially dogs. I have always loved dogs and I think that they are only thought of as pets but, they are really so much more. When I was in Grand Central before coronavirus, I loved looking at the dogs but my mom said that I could not pet them. I thought that it was really inspiring that dogs can control themselves to do this and help others, so I thought that this would spread awareness on how we should give them more credit.

What I think was hard about choosing my main inquiry question was that I had a lot of ideas about animal topics such as guide dogs, dying coral reefs, pollution impacts on animals, kill shelters legal or illegal and animal abuse. I think that it was really hard to choose between them but I chose my topic because I have done projects based on some of these topics and I thought that police dogs is a topic that is unlike most of what I have done.

I have learned that I really like to go big or go home as a learner. I don’t just like to learn simple facts, I like to learn huge facts. For example, when I learn about global warming, I don’t want to just hear about how it is impacting the polar bears, I like to learn how it is impacting all animals.