Capstone #6 Working on Final Project

This was not the easiest process, as a matter of fact it was the hardest. From the immense time working on the script to the small time working on the presentation in the crazy heat waves this process was much harder than I had anticipated. In the beginning, I was super excited because I was coming upon the last stretch of my  capstone project. The most difficult part so far has been memorizing my script and cutting it down so that it is under 8 minutes. It times like right now when I am regretting not doing a Ignite presentation or a movie.  I felt compelled to choose the most challenging one.  Hopefully, it will help me later on in life.  The reason why I feel memorizing my script is the hardest is because there are a lot of details that are hard to remember.  Some examples are the numbers, statistics and order of the slides.  I hope presenting this will be much easier than writing and memorizing this.  I feel a little bit nervous to present but excited at the same time.  While I was going over my script, I realized that this is similar to memorizing my toy theatre script in fourth grade.  While this has been quite a process, I am very excited about the presentation and hope I present well!

Blog Post #4 Answering main Inquiry and Sub-Questions

The main use for Google is an organized search engine. The owners of Google are Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Sergey Brin And Larry Page were both math, engineering, science, and coding prodigies, they weren’t like every other kid. They got straight A’s, and worked when they didn’t need to. Kids today are becoming much more involved with coding and technology. Kid are learning to code many types of games, action games, puzzle games, and so much more. For example, kids are using coding apps such as Scratch and Tinker. Every day Sergey Brin and Larry Page are working at making Google a better company and improving how people live their daily lives with their products. Such as the Google Home which works as a personal artificial intelligence or AI assistant the Google Home and the Amazon Echo are rivals of each other. The Google Home is supposed to replace smartphones in the times it is annoying to use them.  For example,  when you’re cooking and the recipe is on your phone and keep having to look up and down looking at the steps, the Google Home replaces it by just reading to you when you want the next step you say “next step.” The Chromebook helps kids with school work. The Chromebook is very helpful in schools because it helps kids prepare for jobs, it has unlimited uses in education, it helps students become more open by allowing them to interact with other peers, and it’s very helpful for schools to have because they’re inexpensive and green. The average school in the U.S. uses over 75 trees in paper with there being 98,817 schools in the U.S. The amount of trees used is 7,114,824 a year for the amount of time. How does Google change our daily life? There are many ways to answer this question but before Google most people use Yahoo, The difference between Yahoo and Google are major. Google’s intention as a company was to create a company that has true, easy to find information. So far they have achieved that goal. Google’s goal has yet expanded to products such as the Google home, Chromebook, etc. All that Google is looking for are designs and ideas to make their company more successful. The questions that built up my main inquiry question are: How does the Google Home affect our homes, how do Chromebooks affect school children’s work, how does Google Drive change online work, what are the ways Google can harm us, and finally how does Google Drive affect people’s daily live

 

How does the Google home affect our homes?

 

You may be wondering, what is Google Home? Google Home is just like Apple’s siri but more intelligent and it is a speaker and not trapped inside a phone. The Google Home and Amazon Alexa are very similar.  They both are very intelligent AI (artificial intelligence) speakers and  they both have endless capabilities from doing your homework to making calls and sending texts. But they both have advantages over the other.  One example is the Google Home can reach higher sound capabilities than the Amazon Alexa even when the Google Home has a smaller speaker. Almost everyone knows what Google is but not many people know they have products specifically the Google Home. They are many helpful and creepy factors of The Google home. The Google Home can and does change living in the average home. One positive example of the Google Home is you can do your homework while you are swimming in your pool.  One of the creepy factors of the Google Home it’s always listening if you don’t know what that means, it means even if the speaker is off and it’s unplugged it will still hear you. One example is let’s say I’m talking about buying a TV around it. The next day I will get a bunch of emails of ads of TVs. This statement may sound fake but I have tested it and it is very true.

 

How do Chromebooks affect school children’s work?

 

Many people may know that technology is advancing in schools, but what many people don’t know is how it is advancing. A big role in technology in schools are Chromebooks. They are strong, affordable, and easy to use laptops. While the traditional laptop may cost over $1000 the Chromebook ranges from $100-$200! The Chromebook helps kids for way more than school work. It helps them prepare for careers like computer engineers, system administrators, technology coordinators, data scientists, and other STEM professions by allowing students to develop the higher order skills of critical thinking, analysis, and scientific inquiry through frequent interaction and connecting to the real world. Chromebooks help close the achievement gap from “high performing” to “at risk.” Up to 20% of low income households in the U.S. don’t have internet access therefore not able to afford an device for their child to learn on like a laptop but with the Chromebook being inexpensive children will be able to access the resources they need. Additionally,  Chromebooks require very little money to upkeep. No paper is required and therefore Chromebooks are environmentally friendly. From the long 8 hour battery life to the amazing virus protection it’s the perfect online notebook.

 

What are the ways Google can harm us?

 

Google may seem like an innocent search engine but it is vulnerable place to stand while cyber bullies and Internet predators are ready to attack. Since Google is a very open website connected to online dating sites which is a site where most sexual predators live ready to harass the victim. Cyber bullying is also a very big problem.  Most victims of cyberbullies are too afraid to report the situation so it gets worse and in some extreme cases it has led to suicide. The most common places where cyberbullying occurs is in email, social media, web portals, etc.

 

 

How does Google Drive change online work?

 

Google Drive is a part of Google with amazing possibilities. It affects work in thousands of different ways.  It has the ability to share images, automatically save files, share files with different people or groups (with or without editing privileges). It also allows you to pull up files from any computer that has Google. All you need is a simple username and password.  You can also import documents and upload media from your phone directly to Google Drive.  Google Drive has an efficient built in search engine which allows you to find content easily with a keyword search. Google Drive and Google Docs are complementary programs that let you create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online. And best of all, the program is free!

How does Google Drive affect people’s daily lives?

 

Most working individuals use Google Drive. Some think it’s the holy grail of of a work space while some people think it’s a waste of time and hard to use. Few people spend hours on it and most people spend 20-30 minutes. About 50% of users of Google drive would rate it 5 stars while 1 or 2 percent would rate it a 1 or a 2. What most people find most helpful about Google Drive is all of the files are in one place and easy to access. While many people have different opinions on Google Drive most people think Google Drive was a big success and a great help from Google. Team Drive is a great new feature from Google Drive. Isn’t it sometimes annoying when you doing a group project and you have to share your documents all the time but now you don’t have to with Team Drive.  In Team Drive, you are all the owners. It’s just like normal drive but with multiple people.

 

 

Google Drive User Survey

Please take my survey. This survey is for a project that our school has done for many years called Capstone. For my Capstone project I am researching Google, Part of my project is to have sub questions. One of my sub-questions would be almost impossible to research but a poll would answer it in a vary of ways.

Thank you!

Capstone #4 Interview

 

The person I interviewed was… Amir Lazarovich, but before him I was planning to interview Sergey Brin or Larry Page because they are the co owners of Google but soon after that I realized that was not possible. I mean why can’t you give up 5 minutes of your life to help some random little kid (A.K.A. me) to answer 11 simple questions. So… after that I asked my dad if he knew anyone from Google. If  you didn’t know my dad (and mom kinda) they are both plastic surgeons and basically know everyone and the response he gave me enlightened me “Oh yeah I just did surgery on (he or she will remain nameless because it is illegal to say)  who is very high at Google.” But what he said after was terrifying “But I’m not going to let you see him because he is a **** (In other words, he is not very nice).” After that,  I lost all hope but then my dad said “But my intern has a very good friend that is very powerful at Google.” From then on I spent days sending emails OK not days, I spent minutes sending emails. Then the next day I saw an email back. This was the email, “I would love to to help you with this “Capstone Project.” A few days later we went to the Google office in NYC and I had a very deep 30 minutes long Interview with Amir Lazarovich. The responses he gave were very long and helpful. I found the most helpful questions were about the Google home because the response he gave me was long but simple but the other answer he gave me were hard to understand and sophisticated. I learned the designers and coding of the products lead them to become. I also learned something very creepy Google is designing a robot that can teach itself but if it gets hacked or gets a virus it could catastrophic.

 

 

 

 

Capstone #3 Site Visit

Once I found out that I had an interview, I was pretty psyched! BUT after I found out I had a site visit, all hell broke out. I spent about 20 seconds looking for sites. Then I came across the holy grail. The Google office in New York City. I never thought I would make it there though. Though in the end we did end up making it there.  It was not what you would expect a normal office to be like. The employees traveled around by scooters.  You can choose your work hours as long as you get your work done.  There is a full time masseuse where you can earn massage points to earn longer massages.  Within 300 feet of every work space, there was something called a micro kitchen.  It had healthy snacks out for grabs and unhealthy snacks hidden for those desperate days. There was a wall called the lego wall where you could build anything, put it up and no one could disturb it.  They had about 90 giant Brookstone massage chairs which will put you into a deep sleep.  They had a game room with VR (virtual reality) headsets.  It was like Disney World for adults.

Capstone #2 Main Inquiry Question

The main inquiry question I chose was, how does google affect our daily lives? I had a lot of trouble choosing my main inquiry question.  At first, I thought that we just needed the topic. Google is such a broad topic that it was hard to narrow it down.  I did not know where to stop. Once we had our main inquiry question, I thought we were done BUT no.  It turns out we needed five sub-questions to go under our main inquiry question.  At the beginning of the process of selecting and writing my sub-questions, we made a random document on google drive.  We first had to come up with sub-questions.  We were required to have two or three but I wrote seven.  I brought them up to my teacher and she said that she liked all of them except for, Has google lived up to its promises? My teacher thought that was simply a yes or no question but I respectfully disagree because you could support that questions with examples to prove or disprove your yes or no question. I found choosing the sub question easier than choosing a main inquiry question but when I came to the conclusion that 3 of my sub questions are either an opinion question or is too broad. Once I found this out coming up with 3 more sub questions was very difficult but when I was typing on my Google Chromebook in Google Drive I realized right there are 2 more sub questions. The overall experience of choosing subquestions was a long and hard process but I pulled through and I am excited to move on to a new step in capstone

Capstone #1- Choosing a Topic

The topic I chose was Google. I chose this topic because for my birthday I got a Google home and a Google day dream view (VR set). I also chose this topic because Google is something that is related to almost everybody’s daily life.  As a matter of fact, I am using Google right now.
At first, I was going to go with Apple as my topic but after I found out that Steve Jobs was a horrible person, I did not want to dedicate my time to that.  After that, I took more thought and I decided on Google. Later on, I found out that I needed a backup topic. As my backup topic I chose Facebook which I am going to use to find someone to interview from Google!

Rube Goldberg #6

On January 21, 2017 our Rube Goldberg group met up at my house at 41 Sheldrake Road. We were worried that we would not finish this project in time so we agreed not one of us would quit before it was completed. Our first idea for our project was to knock over a king chess piece but on that morning we changed the goal to putting out a lit candle.

Bora and Justin arrived at my house at 11:15 am and they seemed ready energetic and ready to work. We went up to the attic and looked at our Rube Goldberg, which was a mess. We realized we would have to work harder than usual. First we looked for a candle and I found my moms favorite yoga candle but at that moment we didn’t care and made it the last piece of the Rube Goldberg puzzle. Over the next 3 hours we planned, designed, and built our Rube Goldberg. At this point we were starving and cranky boys. The meeting we ordered BBQ wings and we wanted to keep it a tradition but we had to first complete our mission. We expected our Rube Goldberg to take 20-30 tries before succeeding but a miracle happened. As our stomachs grumbled we witnessed our Rube Goldberg being completed on its first attempt. Lunch was ordered.

 

Rube Goldberg #5

Our first idea for our machine was very different than our current idea. At first we did not incorporate gravity but right now gravity is our best friend. We are including slopes, inclined planes as well as some drops in our design. We decided to do this because my dad said, “The best machines have to do with gravity”. I think including gravity is in some ways a good idea and in some ways bad.

The reason it is a good idea is because gravity is like a free piece of equipment that is all around us. I think we should use gravity to pull the cups down from the shelves and pull the pipes down from the chairs after hit with force. This would help because the falling object would collide with another object and cause it to move. The reason I think this could be a bad idea is that using gravity is like using a knife, if you don’t use it correctly, something could go wrong. For example, something could fall and land in the wrong place and ruin the project.