You’re presenting the final project of elementary school in a presentation called CapCon! and your hands are sweating, your knees are weak at the thought of the audience. And then you wonder, how did I even get here? When I was presenting at CapCon! ‘24 I was like that, except a little less nervous. While this project took weeks of research, and weeks of writing essays, and weeks of memorizing a script was hard, the end result was even better. I ended up with a project on black holes that I will remember forever. By the end of Capstone I had an essay, pages of research, a full slideshow, a pamphlet, and most importantly a memory that will last forever.
Have you ever had to research a topic? Capstone started with coming up with an idea, after that you would start research. During research I was scared I would not have enough. The biggest challenge was probably the repetitiveness of facts from website to website. But in the end I had a lot of research. The best part of research was probably how much I learned. I love science and space and I know a lot about it. But, this research taught me so much more. For example, I learned that black holes spread materials like gold and platinum, or more importantly oxygen and carbon which are key for life. Isn’t that cool? The part that went well the most was probably how I wrote my research already in essay form. It set me up for my essay and my script, which is what I said in the actual presentation. All in all research was very enjoyable even though it was hard to do at times.
Black holes are wonders of the universe that are also quite dangerous. Even though these phenomenons may be dangerous they are also super important. They are laboratories for all of our theories and are also possible links to other worlds. All in all, I know black holes don’t deserve the killer description as they do more than just swallow things whole. I also learned that black holes are the key to understanding the universe because they can connect most things like GR all the way to quantum mechanics. That’s how black holes are the key to understanding our universe. (link to essay)
When I had to choose to do a TED Talk or a WeVideo movie I chose TED Talk because I wanted to feel the pressure of actually presenting in front of an audience. I also chose TED Talk because when my brother presented he chose TED Talk so I wanted to do TED Talk. The script was really fun because it was simple and you had the sort of feeling that you were almost done with all of it. The biggest challenge was probably cutting down my script even though it was still pretty easy. (link to my script)
Completing the final steps (slideshow and memorization) were fairly simple. For the slideshow I was able to complete a rough draft fairly quickly, but the one flaw in the slide show was that I did not have enough slides. After I added more slides my teachers said it looked fine. The final touches were some animation for the slides and a qr code that leads to my blog. Memorization was super simple. While you might think it took me a while to memorize, I was able to memorize all of my Capstone in just one run through. I think it was because of how many times I had read my script. I enjoyed making my slideshow the most because I thought it was fun to make what the audience will see. The hardest part was probably getting the slideshow to be perfect.
While it’s sad that the project is over, I’m happy our school and teachers gave us the chance to explore a topic we have barely learned about. Since I have been at this school K-5 I have always dreamed of Capstone, and now that I finished it I wish I would’ve thought even earlier about Capstone. If you would like to take the extra, extra step to learn more about black holes, I have made a printable brochure with more info. Here it is. If you would like to view it digitally here it is. I have also made a citations list, if you would like to see it here it is. If you would like to view my actual capstone here it is