Capstone Blog Post 3
This project was really long and I had a lot of fun while I was making this project because I liked learning more about the topic. I feel like I learned so much that even if I forgot my entire script I would still be able to do the full 3-5 minutes because of how much I learned.
I was really excited to learn about every aspect of the Space Race from the political part to the science behind the rockets. Then when I realized that the space was much, much bigger than it seemed at first glance, I knew that I would have trouble fitting everything into my capstone. After I did my interview I was able to understand what was important and what needed to be in the final project.
I was shocked to learn that America was at a disadvantage for a lot of the Space Race and completed some goals second. When I started all I knew about the Space Race was that Apollo was important and it was part of the Cold War. But then I learned that it started when the Soviet Union got Sputnik in orbit and I was thinking, “I thought America would have done that before The Soviet Union did but it’s fine just a rough start for America.” Then the first rocket America launched blew up and I was starting to see that America was behind in the start. Then after America’s first success, The Soviet Union made contact with the Moon. I was thinking this is crazy America is losing and then Yuri was in orbit and returned safely. Then Kennedy gave the speech and America completed the goal. I realized that the reason that I didn’t learn about America’s failures and losing some goals before was that as Winston Churchill said history is told by the winners.
I was very confident that I was super ready for the presentation but before that we did a practice that would be on Youtube. I got nervous and I forgot to move to the second slide during the practice and at the end I saw that I didn’t have the QR code for my blog on the slideshow that was being shown on the screen. I was glad I practiced and saw that before my parents saw it. I got to redo the Youtube one and I didn’t mess up so it was alright in the end.
Capstone Blog Post 2
This is a blog post that is meant to be about my interview but the problem is that I can’t find an interview! As I am writing this I don’t know why this is as hard as it is because everyone else in my class now has an interview.
First I tried interviewing the head historian of the office of defense but the number I got from a government website was the wrong number! After that failure my teacher contacted 3 other people but none of them responded. I was thinking what on Earth is going on and then I remembered the Ted Talk resource so I checked there. I found an article and it said the author but when I looked them up I realized that more than one person has the name! This was a solution that could be solved by my teacher using face book. I was thinking to my self great but then they never wrote back.
After this and my teacher contacting some other people she (somehow) found failing, my tech teacher recommended the Air and Space Museum. This seemed perfect and when I told my parents, my dad said that he knew someone who worked at the Air and Space Museum. So I sent them an email and they told me that they recently met someone (over zoom) who would be a great interview. They are an expert on Russian Space Race history and the resources were mostly about what America was doing during the space race. While on that topic most of my resources were about America. The articles would talk all about America’s successful rockets and the one that blew up then have about one paragraph of what Russia did.
Cap Stone Blog Post
Capstone is the 5th grade end of the year project where everyone chooses their own topic and then gives a presentation on it. When I first heard about it, I was trying to think of what I would do.
My tech teacher Mr. Casal recommended that we do something we don’t know a lot about and my favorite Greek god was Apollo and I know a lot about the sun. This led me to choose the Moon but literally and figuratively the Moon is huge so I had to narrow it down. First I thought about mythology so I went to the Wikipedia article on Lunar deities and there were way too many and I couldn’t read most of their names so that was not going to work. Then I thought about getting to the Moon and what was Apollo’s story but I wasn’t sure what part of Apollo. I was listening to a podcast on the moon and I realized that the reason America went to the moon was so we could beat Russia there. So that is how I choose the space race.
The process of coming up with my main inquiry question was very easy once I found my topic because I had narrowed it down so much. I actually had to check if the Space Race had ended or not to decided whether I would do what is or what was. My research changed my main inquiry question a little because I didn’t know that the Space Race lasted multiple decades and that it didn’t end until the Soviet Union collapsed. This changed my question from what was the Space Race to what was the story of the space race.
The process of coming up with my sub questions was trying to ask questions as an alien learning about Earth’s history. This helped to prevent the questions only being about America. An example is “what did Russian and American Leaders think about the space race?” I also wanted people to understand how it started and why. For example, “how did the race start and was there a prize for the winner?”
These are the resources I have used.