Category Archives: Capstone

Capstone Blog Post #3

We are done with Capstone. These last few days we have been presenting in front of the class to practice for the real presenting day. I was really terrified of sharing in front of the class but when I was done it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be.

After all those weeks of researching, interviewing, writing scripts, and working on my slideshows I am FINALLY done with this project. I am really proud of myself for finishing all of the steps in time and not going over the due dates. I’m also proud of all the hard work I’ve done.

The first few steps were picking your topic, picking your main and sub-questions, and researching a whole lot. I already talked about picking my topic and main and sub-questions in my first blog post so this leaves me to just talk about the researching part. When I say it was a lot of researching I mean it. I thought it was going to just be a little more than normal researching but the researching step was long and scary.

I’ve had a lot of ups and downs during this project. For example, the interview part of this project was really stressful and hard for me and once I was done I was really relieved. After I interviewed my interviewee (Tania Sole) I realized I was worrying for nothing.  One of the ups I’ve had in this project is writing my script. Once I finished my introduction the rest was easy. After I was done I asked some of my friends to read it and they gave me great opinions to make my script better. Some of my friends also helped me time my script.

When Mr. Casal our tech teacher gave us the three choices which were: ted talk, ignite, or movie I thought I was definitely doing a movie because I was really scared of memorizing and talking in front of the screen, but then I thought about it more and I started to change my mind to ted talk because I thought making a slideshow was easier than making a movie. In the end, I picked a ted talk and I am happy with my choice.

We presented our capstone and we got separated into two different rooms. I was in the ar t room. I brought my flashcards because I was scared that I would just forget it and I recited it during art. When it was my groups turn to go to the computer lab to record I was so terrified. I was scared I was going to forget. I was going to go second but when I went on the screen I was shaking because of nervousness. I started my introduction but than  my slides started going by themselves I panicked and I froze. Thankfully, Mr. Casal let me start over again. But the same thing happened again! Mr. Casal finally figured out the problem and it was that my hair was touching the smart board and It went to the next slide because of that! I just had the worst luck ever today!!!  Than I started again and I froze. At this time I was really regretting my choice that I didn’t do a movie. At the end, I had to go last so I could recite it. Finally, when I was actually presenting I did it. The only thing I wasn’t happy with was that I had messed up the ending and forgot a slide because of my nervousness! Im also really scared to present in front of the parents because I can’t redo if i mess up and I will be even more nervous.

In the end, this was a really terrifiiying and a bit fun project but I’m glad I’m over with presenting.

 

 

 

 

Capstone Blog Post #2

In school, we are still working on Capstone. In my last blog post, I was talking about what Capstone is and my topic. In this blog post, I will be talking about the interview process for this project.

The first thing we had to do in the interview process was to write a request and find an expert to interview. This was the most challenging part for me. I started looking at some articles on air pollution to see if they mentioned any experts about air pollution but I didn’t find anything.  So I asked Mrs. Boyer for some help and she called a site about air pollution. When we got the phone number we tried to call it but nobody picked up. The next day we called again but it was the same. So we called that same site again and they gave us another person’s number. We called this new number and nobody picked up. I felt really frustrated because I thought it was going to be easy to get an interviewee, but it was actually really hard. When I went home that day I asked my parents if they knew someone related to air pollution. And my dad said that he knew someone named Tania Sole. When I heard this my stress lessened and I was thrilled.

Once we got Tania’s email, I sent my interview request. I didn’t waste a single second. I just wanted to be done with the interview to get on to the next step. Once Tania replied back we set up a date and she said that Fridays were generally good for her. So we set it up on Friday at 11:30. But on Friday I was at home and I got nervous because I thought we had to cancel it. But to my relief, the zoom worked! When I was done I got most of the answers to my questions. Only 4 or 5 weren’t answered. I think that my interview went great and I got the answers I was looking for!

The interview step to Capstone was fun but a little stressful too. I’m kind of glad I am done with it because now I don’t have to worry about this!

Blog Post #1 Capstone

We started a new project a few days ago. This project is a really big one. It is the biggest one we ever did this year!  It has a lot of steps to complete it. It’s called Capstone. All of the 5th-grade students in all the schools in the District are working on it. Capstone is when we have to choose a topic and spend a lot of time researching it. We also have to conduct an interview like the last project we did. We need 15 interview questions, 5 sub-questions, and 1 main question. The first thing we did for Capstone was to make a Curriculum Wheel we had to put our topic in the middle and come up with questions, related to our topic. I knew that Capstone was a very big project but I didn’t expect it to have that many steps. When Mrs. Boyer introduced the project to us I was a bit nervous because I didn’t know a lot about it and my friends seemed to know more about this project. At first, I thought that Mrs. Boyer would pick our topics for us but when she announced that we got to pick our own I started liking this project a bit more.

Coming up with a topic was the hardest thing to do for me. I had no idea what to do my capstone on so, I watched some of the other students so that I could get inspired. I changed my topic a lot of times The first one I came up with was ocean pollution because one of my other friends had done that. But then I didn’t want to copy them so I tried to find another great topic. A few days later, I found another topic which was Disneyland. I got this idea from a student that made a presentation on this. But I wasn’t really interested in it so I was on another mission to find another topic again! My next idea I  got inspired when my mom suggested that I could do Paris or the Eiffel Tower. This gave me my third idea: landmarks! I didn’t do this topic because I had to choose one landmark and I didn’t know which one. Finally, I chose a topic that I actually stayed on and one that I liked. It was air pollution. I chose this topic because I was really interested in it, I also wanted other people to know about it and how we could help before it gets worse. Honestly, picking a topic was the most hardest step for me to do so far. 

Before we started researching we needed a research question, but Mrs. Boyer told us that we could come up with our question while we were researching and the purpose of this was to get inspired by the articles and the books. I figured out my research question thanks to the articles I read. When I was reading my 4th article I noticed that all the articles I’d read all talked about two similar things. The cause and effect of air pollution. While I was thinking about this my research question just came to me!  It was, how does air pollution affect our daily life?  I figured that it would have a lot of information about it because all of the articles about air pollution would talk about how it affects us and our daily life. Honestly, finding the main question was not as hard as I thought it was going to be, and I didn’t face any challenges in finding one.

Coming up with sub-questions was harder than coming up with the main question. It was harder for me because I had a lot of them and it was hard to decide which ones I should pick. I really liked all of my choices, and when I asked Mrs. Boyer how many sub-questions we could have she said 5. I was surprised because I was expecting more and 5 didn’t seem a lot.  Once I came up with all my sub-questions, all I had to do was to pick my 5 sub-questions. I picked the ones that were the best and the ones that I could answer with research. One of my sub-questions are what is the cause of air pollution? I picked this because these were one of my two choices for my main question and a lot of articles talked about this. One of my other sub-questions are, how can we help and what are some solutions to solve air pollution? I really like my main question and I’m glad that I could decide on my sub-questions.

Capstone is the end of the year project and I was really scared about starting it. But the farther we go in the project I get more comfortable with it. I can’t wait to finish Capstone!