Category Archives: Technology

My Capstone Experience

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Have you ever done research on a topic you are passionate about, or did a deep dive on anything you like? I did a project called Capstone that is just that. My Capstone was about the Manhattan Project. I came up with a main question, What was the creation of the atomic bomb, and how did atomic spies help to save America. I had smaller questions to break this down, such as what the research and materials were, who the scientists were, who the atomic spies were and what they did, and what missions people went on. The process to create my presentation had a lot of parts, but overall, it was really fun!

When I was doing research to learn more about my topic, it was a lot more difficult than I thought. I had to go to individual websites to answer each of my sub-questions. I found many books that helped me along the way as well. When I was doing research for my first sub-question, I remembered that I had read a book called Bomb, by Steve Sheinkin, and I remember how it talked about how the atomic bomb was made physics wise. I got a lot of research out of that book. In my second sub-question, I used Norwich University’s website, and it gave me information on all the scientists individually! For my third sub-question, I found websites about some of the most important atomic spies. The websites gave me information on their betrayal, and all the information they stole from the Americans. I learned that the atomic spies were working for the Soviet Union, and were forced to gather classified American information on weaponry. Lastly, in my fourth sub-question, all the information I got about missions was in Bomb. Research was difficult, but when I found the right sources, it made life easier.

When I was doing my Capstone Essay, as shown here, I used all the research I had, and made my research into an intro, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. I had around two pages of research for each sub-question, so you can imagine how long my essay might be. In my opinion, the essay was the hardest part of the process. It was not easy to plug research in an essay. When I had finished my essay, I realized that after I timed it, it was way too long. I had a fifth sub-question, and I had to delete it, because it would make my essay shorter, and make it sound better. My essay was different from what I thought it would be. I thought that the essay was going to be pretty short. I was very wrong. After my first body paragraph, I was already over a page. Even though the end result of my essay was very long, I still was able to manage.

My script, as shown here, was a long process. Using some techniques from an immigration script, I was in good shape. First, I needed to choose a TED Talk, or a WeVideo/Movie. I chose a TED Talk, because I thought that it would suit me, and my topic better. I felt that there would be more, and better pictures on Google Slides, than on WeVideo. Choosing a TED Talk infinitely made me feel better about the script making. I started with my script by copying and pasting my introduction from my essay, to the template. While I was doing this process, I had to make some changes because of the time limit I had. I copied and pasted, then re-adjusted the wording of my slide. I also had to figure out what pictures I thought might match what I am saying. Because my essay was so long, I had to cut it down to fit the time frame. After I finished each part of the script, I timed it. Then, when I was finished, I had a time of 5:45, which was perfect.

When I was making my slideshow, it was decently nerve-racking. I knew that everything would have to be perfect, and centered, and precise, and professional. I made my slideshow pretty quick, so I could be really prepared, and completely memorized, come the day of CapCon. The way I practiced was by doing one slide at a time. Once I felt like I completely memorized that slide, I practiced how I would really do it ten times. This made me feel really prepared. When I had finished doing this, I practiced doing ten slides at a time. Finally, I did the entire thing thirty-eight times before I felt completely ready. The week before CapCon, I practiced doing it at home every night. I felt very ready.

Overall, my Capstone experience was not as difficult as I thought. I was able to complete everything at a good time, and I never felt rushed, or upset because I wasn’t ready. I think that this was a great project for me, because it helped me a lot, with time-management, and much more!

 

 

Here Is My Capstone

 

Immigration Video Blog Post

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I have had a really cool experience doing my Wevideo assignment. I had some things that stopped me momentarily but I still managed to do a really good job. This project had a lot of problem solving that was needed to complete it, but luckily, I maintained those qualities. I had a really fun time working on my video, and I am very proud of myself. 

When I was starting this, I thought it wasn’t going to be that hard but when I started, my first block took a minute. I was really surprised and I didn’t think that I could finish this within its due date. I was scared at first but as I started working on it more, I began getting further, and further along with the project. I was beginning to feel more confident until I hit a roadblock. I didn’t have some of the pictures I needed. I ended up persuading myself to work on the project a ton at home. I was now moving very quickly and was having a lot of fun doing it! 

As a result of the project, I learned that to complete something important, I needed to maintain my time very wisely. I found that doing this project improved my work ethic. I managed to do the project very well, while taking in the facts I learned about my interviewee. I learned a lot of things that I hadn’t known before. The thing was, even when things went wrong, I figured out a way to fix it. I’m very happy with myself for doing that because I improved my problem solving abilities as well. I think that this project was a very good experience for me. 

I think that this assignment has helped me grow as a person. I learned new skills that helped me be the best I can. I’m very happy with the result.

Immigrant Interview

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Have you ever interviewed someone and learned something about them? In the immigration project that I did, I interviewed Aura, a Colombian immigrant. I think this project is really cool because it taught me a lot more about immigration than I thought I knew. I’m very happy I did it, because I learned so much about Aura and the process of her coming here. If you have any free time, try this too!

When I was preparing for the interview, I had to figure out what questions I wanted to ask Aura. Since she is my babysitter, it was kind of easy to come up with open-ended questions that I didn’t already know the answer to. The limit was 11-15 questions and I managed to get fourteen. I am very proud of myself because my questions were really good and I had a great amount. I also made an organizer to prepare myself for the interview. I made a grid in a google doc and it was really efficient for me to know where everything would go. The questions went on one side of the grid, and the answers to the questions went on the other side. I put the questions in order of: Before you left, when you arrived, and life now. I did this so I knew the order of the questions I am asking. I think this part of the process was really fun. 

My experience of doing the interview was pretty great. It took a really long time but I got a ton of information out of it. Aura’s answers were very thorough and she gave me as much information as possible. She helped me so much and I’m very happy. The interview was done in the basement of my house, because we wanted to limit all noise and things that could get us distracted. My parents were out that night so it was pretty easy to get done. Since her answers were so awesome, it took an hour and a half but it was still worth it. Since it was in person, I had as much time as I wanted so that helped too. I learned that conducting an interview takes time and there is a process before the interview itself, but after you do your first one you realize it’s so fun! I learned so much about Aura but the thing I thought was most interesting was that she is a very dependent person. Now, I see her as independent but before she immigrated, she was dependent. She thought it was going to be hard when she was alone but it wasn’t. She always had people supporting her. I think overall, the interview was really great.

In conclusion, I think the process of the interview and questions was super awesome. I’m really happy I learned so much about Aura that I didn’t know before. This was a really cool thing and if you’ve never done an interview, I recommend you to try it!

Feature Article Reflection

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My feature article was really difficult but also really fun. There was a long process and I had the most amount of writing in the class. It was fun and hard but the final result looked really awesome.

From the beginning, I knew what my topic was going to be. I knew all the rules and statistics. My topic was football and at the beginning I had ten categories. The reasoning behind this was the fact that I had too many categories that were possible to add. I was able to narrow it down to five. I got all my writing in over a long process. I started out with how to play, and then positions, rules, teams, and the Super Bowl. I had some things that I wanted to include But I didn’t know where I would put them because they did not fit with any of my categories. Luckily Mrs. Cooper showed us that our writing would be formatted with space for pictures, vocabulary boxes, and fun facts.

Formatting was my favorite part. Since I had a lot of writing, I needed to be flexible with ideas for formatting. At first, my article was ten slides long. I worked some things out and narrowed it to six. I had a lot of vocabulary and pictures I wanted to include. That took time to think about as well. At the end of formatting, I had one issue. My conclusion was the only writing that I had left and It couldn’t fill up my Super Bowl page. My conclusion was tiny and I did not want to have an entire slide of pictures. I asked Mrs. Cooper and she said I could make a fun fact page. It ended up looking super cool and it threw in new ideas. Since it was on my last page, it made the article look even better. 

In conclusion, the feature article was really cool and I loved working and playing around with it. There were so many suggestions of what I could do to make my article as good as possible. I had all of the suggestions I needed and turned them into a cool and awesome feature article. 

 

 

 

Ignite

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The day I was getting my weather group, I was super excited. I had Jason, Jenna, and Willow in my group. The first thing we did was figure out our subtopics. I chose effects, Jenna chose causes, Jason chose how they are measured and Willow chose prevention and safety.

We started researching our topics for 20 minutes after we figured out our subtopics. I was not doing very well. I didn’t have that much research. It was stressful for me but I realized that it was only the first day that we were researching. The second day was better. I got 2 full pages of research. I felt great. I was doing a pretty good job in terms of what I had. It was also good for my script because I had a bunch of sentences that I knew I was probably going to use. By the third day of research I was using epic for info and I didn’t get as much as I expected. Then, I tried Kiddle and got a ton of stuff. It was like gold. It was really cool to learn all of this information that I didn’t know. I had learned about how roads could lift all the way to cities collapsing. By the fourth I had tons of research and was still building up. I had 5 pages and there were so many websites still to be looked at. By the fifth day I had 7 pages and still going. I used Pebble go Next and got 2 full pages of research. I realized that 9 pages was more than enough so for the entire second, (and last) week of researching, I helped other people in my group.

After research, we worked on our narrative with Mr. Casal. My narrative started out very short. I only had 3 sentences. But I built up. I used tons of research and put it into my narrative. I had a ton of research and I realized that I would have to cut a ton of that out of my script. I had to cut out a lot of important stuff but I still put the most important stuff in. There was a lot of waiting and thinking involved in the process and I thought I was running out of time. I realized I wasn’t when I finished my narrative and asked if there was enough time, Mrs. Rickard told me I had more than enough time to finish my script. I had thought that my narrative was perfect but it turned out that there was still a ton of punctuation and technological stuff that needed to be finished. I still had plenty of time for my script even after all of the extra stuff was done.

When I started my script I wasn’t nervous because I had already gone through the process of doing it before with my Wevideo. It was a little different this time because I only had 2 slides. Each of my slides was 15 seconds so I had to cut out a lot of words from my narrative to make a reasonable amount of time for me to say my words. My script work was harder than I expected because I only had 2 slides to fit my most important sentences. I had to cut out so much stuff so I was really mad. I still pushed through and figured out the best way to make my words make sense. Once my script was done I had to start figuring out the timing part.

My timing was super off at first, it was 38 seconds in total. When I tried to do just one slide, it was 26 seconds alone. I was super angry but I realized it was part of the process.  I took a lot more out after that and I was very surprised that it still made sense. I was happy too so I tried to time myself again and it was 14.95 seconds for one slide and 15.06 for the other slide. I was so relieved because I could finally make my personal slideshow. Once I made my personal slideshow, I had to start practicing using auto-play for 15 seconds on my personal slideshow. It was pretty decent on that but I had only memorized a couple of sentences. The next day I memorized an entire slide but I was still stumbling on my words so the timing was very off because of my stumbling. By the time I stopped stumbling on my words, I was mumbling. No one could understand what I was saying. Once I fixed that problem I realized that I still had a whole other slide to do. I finished a couple of slides and I was doing great. I was super happy because by the time I finished memorizing my entire script, I still had a week and a half to help other people in my group.

Now I was in the timing process with my personal slideshow. Since I had memorized everything I was going to say, I got to practice without having a second tab on my screen that had my script on it. I was doing well but I still had to help people when I was finished timing myself on my personal slideshow. I was finished with timing myself on my slideshow so I took the time I had,  which was a week and a half to help the other people in my group.

We went back to the computer lab and Mr. Casal had to make a slideshow for my entire group to combine all of our stuff. Before we did that, we put pictures in our personal slideshow. They had to be Put in our slideshow in a specific way, luckily it was easy enough. We started practicing as a group once we had our group slideshow and we put our pictures in. We did that for a couple of days and it started out very rough. We weren’t doing that well, but luckily we progressed after a few days. After about 3 days, Mrs. Rickard said that individual groups should start practicing with the group slideshows on the smart-board. We weren’t great but we all made an improvement since we started practicing on my chrome-book. The days passed and we were getting better and better. After about 3 and a half weeks since the project started we went to the computer lab for the 4th time. We practiced in front of Mr. Casal with a tripod and he said that we were amazing. We went back to the classroom and practiced again. This time, Mrs. Rickard said we were awesome and that we just had a couple more things we had to perfect. The week went by and then another. By the day of the real Ignite I was super excited and very confident. All of the group slideshows had been turned into a slideshow with everyone’s stuff combined. We walked to the new multi-purpose room and the parents walked in a couple of minutes after we did. We started the presentation a couple minutes later. Everything went perfect. Every group was awesome. It was really cool. The best part about it was that I did not feel any pressure and I loved it. It was easy all the way. I thought the overall project was very fun. I would not change anything in the process.