Gabriela’s Blog

Learning about boxed cakes and cakes made from scratch was hard at many points in time. While I did struggle, I also had many points in time when I knew this was the perfect image or the best line I could write. These periods in time were what made my TedTalk good. Why I did a TedTalk, the process of researching, and many other things are important to talk about, so I will talk about it.

Some of the biggest struggles I faced when creating my capstone project was researching and memorizing. All the sources I got had one or two tiny bits of info that I could use. I had to look over my sources countless times to find one new sentence that helped me a lot or just a little. Memorizing was another big struggle, as mentioned previously. I had one or two weeks to memorize five full pages of my script and the sixth page which was not full. I spent lots of time just reading my script over and over again to memorize my script.

There are two reasons I did a TedTalk for my capstone presentation. The biggest reason of the two was because Ignites were too hard and hearing my movie is terrible (for me). While this may make it seem like I don’t like making TedTalks, I do. My second reason I chose to do a TedTalk is because I like public speaking. I don’t get stage fright, therefore making the presenting part easy for me. Sometimes I got nervous, but most times I was fine, and after presenting I ended up being happy with what I had done.

Overall, while making this project I learn so many things. I memorized, wrote scripts and essays, and all of these things made my capstone be as good as it could be. I learned how to do these things, and also all about my topic, boxed cakes and cakes made from scratch.

Capstone is a super fun project that lets you expand upon your interests while doing a school project. You can choose your own topic that you are interested in. First, make a main inquiry question and then come up with five sub questions.

I chose the topic baking because I recently developed an interest in baking cakes and other sweet treats for my family and myself. I came up with this topic by narrowing down some of my most favorite activities.  

I came up with my main inquiry question, compare and contrast the attributes of boxed cakes to home made cakes to determine which makes the best cake, after a long process. First, I had to come up with multiple  ideas for possible questions that I could expand upon. I tried things in multiple categories, but settled on the question previously mentioned. Sometimes, there were no questions for that topic so it was tricky to come up with questions. Aside from that, coming up with questions was easy.

I came up with my sub questions by thinking of many different aspects of baking and thinking of different ways to turn them into interesting questions that I could do research on. A few challenges that I came across were coming up with the perfect balance of narrow and wide questions. I did include some sub questions based on appearance, such as how do you decorate a cake and are there any things to consider when decorating cakes? Or something like What is the difference in ingredients between boxed cakes and homemade cakes?

In conclusion, capstone is a project that builds on your interests but also acts as a school project.

Our capstone interviews served one main purpose, research. I felt like I would be able to get lots of information because the person I was interviewing was a professional in my topic, baking, as she is a baker. I also felt like it would be easy talking to her because she is my mom’s friend, so she quickly agreed to do the interview. This made me feel like I would be able to get lots of information because she accepted quickly, making me think she knew what she was talking about.

Figuring out who to interview was easy because I knew that my parents knew a baker that would be happy to help me with my project. As soon as capstone started, I asked my mom if she could get an interview with the baker. On the other hand, writing problems was hard. I had to figure out a way to balance out my questions so they would answer my questions but also be able to be answered by the person I was interviewing. I also had to come up with questions that were not too broad or too narrow. This along with the other requirements made me feel unsure about some of the questions I wrote. But in the end, my questions were good.

Conducting the interview was hard because sometimes the answers were really long, and that was unexpected. But other than these long answers, the interview went as planned. From the interview, I learned about different utensils, some that I had never heard about and some that I did know about. I also learned about different baking pans, the shapes and sizes, and even about some measurements.

In conclusion, my capstone interview went smoothly and I learned lots about baking.