Capstone is a huge project Scarsdale schools do for 5th grade, close to the end of the year. During the Capstone project, we have to pick a topic we are interested in but never really learned about it. My topic is hacking. After that, we have to come up with a main inquiry question and 5-6 sub-questions. The sub-questions are questions that lead up to your main question. They break your main question down. You also need to find someone to interview. After that, you research the sub-questions. After you get all that information you can choose to do a WeVideo (movie) or an Ignite (presentation, slides present every 15 seconds), or a Ted Talk (presentation).

When you come up with your topic, you have to find something that you’re interested in but you don’t know much about. I came up with a couple of topics: tennis, video games, hacking, babies, and the brain. I narrowed it down to three topics: video games, hacking, and babies. I ended up choosing hacking. I chose it because I was interested in it, I knew nothing about it, and I knew who I was going to interview.

After picking your topic, you had to come up with the main inquiry question. My inquiry question is, how does hacking impact the global economy, and what’s being done to minimize hacking? One challenge was coming up with the main inquiry questions because it was hard to find one that wasn’t too broad but not too narrow.

After you came up with the main inquiry question you had to come up with sub-questions. Sub-questions are questions that lead up to your main inquiry question. Two of my sub-questions are, how has hacking impacted global stock markets? And, how should you prevent hacking? A challenge was finding five sub-questions to use because you needed to break up the main inquiry question into sub-questions.

Overall, the Capstone project has been fun.