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Coming into this project, as a group, we had a bunch of ideas. We never discussed who a leader was, so together the work was distributed and done equally. We started with disagreements, and ended with a well collaborative project that we all put effort into. Collaboration, (one of our core values) is the main reason we were successful during this project.

Even though we didn't officially choose a leader for the project, it was clear that Jackie too that role in being a leader by putting together everyones ideas for the project, and distributing amongst ourselves. Responsibility and communication are both strong components that we all carried during the project. If someone was missing the day something was due, we'd contact each other, and find away to get our part of the project in class, as well as not using absences, be the reason for not having work done.  

The easy part about this project was working in groups. This helped me because it allowed me improve on my collaboration skills and sharing new ideas as well as listen to them as well. Overall, I think my group worked well together and performed our work well. We also was on time with our work. Communicating with our group was a major part that was to be played simply because we had to record a PSA talking about the importance of HIV/AIDS. 

The challenging part of this project was that there were days when some of the members (including myself) were not in school due to illness. For me, it was hard to communicate to my group because I was really sick. However, when I finally got a chance to reach out to them, they were responsive and got back to me about the things that I missed. That was helpful because since I was home, I was able to get the work done from home.

In conclusion, this project was a very fun project to do. My favorite part of it all was making a PSA. It was funny, yet informative so I think it captured the audience attention especially since we were mainly trying to target the 13-21 age range. 

Michael Hall                                    Process Paper                                                            3-20-13

            My groups topic was housing infrastructure. Housing infrastructure is basically just talking about how a community is set up effects a cities all around economy and growth. My group members were Korah, Tsion, and Anthony. In general we all worked well together and agreed on a lot that we talked about. The first things we had talked about was the way we can present this to people in the public and have it actually work the way we want. In the end we had came up with five different ways to present this and they were a website, video,  poster, letter, and a birdhouse display that would represent our idea. The birdhouse would be about 5 to 6 birdhouses lined up and one of the birdhouses would be in bad condition and that would symbolize how one abandoned house can mess up a whole city block.

            After we had came up with the ideas it was time to spilt the work up. I got the the video part, Korah got the website, and Tsion and Anthony worked on the poster, letter, and birdhouse display. At the time the project still seemed like it could happen because none of the components we had came up with really seemed to be trouble except the birdhouse thing. Time passed and things were running well, it wasn’t that the project took to much time but it was because it didn’t take up enough time is probably why a lot of things got done a little bit more later than earlier. More time passed and then the thing that I kind of foresaw happening happened. It was about a week before the last working period and we still had no birdhouse display. It wasn’t that they just refused to do it but more or less the magnitude of the idea was more of a project all itself than a component for another project.

            In the end the display was never made and what I learned form this is that over planning can lead to bad consequences. What went well was the fact that we never argued about things and always agreed as a group about the ideas. My group did do some work even though it wasn’t what we had agreed upon and the day the project was due we did have something to present. 

My group members and I worked very well together. We were able to communicate our ideas and listen to each other. Everyone’s ideas were put into the final product, and we all were able to talk about the things we didn’t believed work with out arguing like most group members do when it comes to working on a benchmark. At first we had a bit of difficulty figuring out what was best for this project but once we had an outline it all came together and worked perfect. We all seemed to agree a lot on what we wanted for this project which is what made it flow so easily. After we decided what to do we got straight to putting it into action. I recorded and edited in 3 days and by sunday night the PSA was posted on youtube, and by Monday my other group members had the website and the Facebook done. This gave us the ability to have more people view our PSA and tell us what they thought. 

I’m very proud of what my group and I were able to accomplish. After completing this project I realized that I’m capable of doing much more than what I give myself credit for. 

 Growing up is never the easiest for anyone, especially if you're different. Kids are unintentionally cruel. Imagine coming from another country, not knowing anything about its culture. Well , here with me now is Richard Yoeun, who moved to America with his parents when he was only 2. He had a few years before school started to learn english, but his parents did not teach it to him that well. They still wanted their native culture to stick to their son. When school started for him, things were more difficult than he expected. This is Richards story on belonging to one culture, but having to fit into a new culture as well.

Originally from Cambodia, Richard immigrated to The United States at the age of two with his parents, who wanted a better life. A few years went by, and his family was doing pretty good for an newly immigrated family, at least financially. Socially, his family was an outcast. "They couldn't speak very good english, so they couldn't even teach me", he said.  Time went by and next thing you know, Richard had to go to school. He still knew very little english, so he had to learn in school ,when all the other kids already knew it. Just like his family, he was an outcast, and had to steadily learn the American Culture while keeping his Cambodian culture. to 

As Richard continued to learn the American culture, he surpassed his parents' "American culture knowledge". He began teaching them everything he learned, yet he still wasn't as fluent in the language as he could be.  As he entered middle school, he was bullied for not being "normal" , whatever that is . He couldn't say each and every word like the rest of the kids could. Kids aren't used to variety, so being different could lead to bullying. He wasn't able to even practice english at home unless he was teaching his parents. He was in a "No English" household. Just because he was learning one culture didn't mean he could forget the other and his parents made sure that he didn't.  He home was a traditional Cambodian home, where he would speak Khmer, not english. And through all of this, he was still bullied for years in middle school although he was trying his hardest to fit in.

Has Richard's constant years of struggling with two cultures put him to same of one of them? or maybe even both?

"I love having two cultures," Richard says, " It makes me different." Instead of trying to fit in now, he's embraced it. He's at his expected level of english and khmer as well. He still continues to live in a "No English" household and keeps both of his cultures close to him.

Being double cultured has its ups and downs. Adjusting to new cultures can be difficult. Home, school, being social. These are all adaptations that take time to get used to. Richard's struggle was in school and although he was given hell for having two cultures, he is not ashamed of it. He's 16 now , so he doesn't have to deal with immature kids teasing him because he is Cambodian. Older and slightly wiser , he accepts both of his cultures and wishes to continue to pass both down to his children .

Working with my group wasn't as hard as i thought it would be. Everyone pretty much did the part that each of us  agreed on what needed to be done. My part was maily trying to do the website and getting the images to work. it loads up at time from time by then it doesn't. After working on some parts of the website next was fixing the edits that had to be made on the google doc like our purpose of our campaign and why it was import an for everyone to get healthcare. The only hard part about finding information on it was finding jobs that didn't offer health care.Most websites tried not to bring up the topic saying other benefits  that can give you worked here.The last thing i can that i offered to my group was helping phoenix place the ar codes all over our school to get people to come to our website.The whole point of putting the codes over was not only for our website, it was also like a little test that we did on people to see what gets their attention. Thats we  desired that a video is the best to get people to looks at our website.. I even made a little jingle that i try to get stuck in people head when they watch the video. But just not  our school but  as i was walking i placed a few ar codes and our webiste link around my neighborhood.Over all i think  me and my group did a pretty good job  in doing this project. My only  problem with our video is  if our editing skills where better we could have made it more funny with  sounds affect and other stuff.

The moment I read who was in my group I was excited. Everyone in my group works very well together. We understood each other and never lost our temper. The day after got out projects, Ms. Pahomov told us to write down our strengths and weaknesses and share them with the group. The strength that I shared was that I do all my work early. The other people in my group are the same way and we connected on that. We all have worked in terrible groups before. This lead us to our weakness. Most of us said that we tend to just do all of the work. Doing all the work yourself and knowing that it correct is easier than trusting others to do your work. That was something that we all had to work on. 

When we were dividing the work we tried to make it as even as possible. We eventually came to the conclusion that we were all going to do anything together and truly collaborate. This was a big step for us, individually, within doing group work. We all stepped out of our comfort zone and trusted each other. This helped us to grow as a group. 

With the actual project, we decided to make a blogger because we could track the traffic that we got on the blog. We also created a QR code. We put that QR code everywhere. Above the QR code we had the phrase “ Free Money! Scan Me! Although it is technically false advertising we got more views this way. ALso, I followed up with some of the people who viewed the blog. Our goal with this project was to change the way teenagers view homeless people and homelessness. One of the viewers on the blog told me that she had a new perspective. She doesn’t just think of homeless people as addicts but as people who don’t have the money to support themselves. Knowing that we changed the mindset of at least one person was the greatest reward.

Our plan was to create awareness about how school district budget cuts are going to affect students in the future, but in a way that will urge people to act against it. We came up with a couple ideas for a few components that we could use and then split them up. One of the components was to make a PSA and I chose that because I had a whole bunch of ideas that could’ve been easily implemented into one.  The one I chose was derived from belief I found on the Internet that really had me worried for the future; school being a burden to people. By that I came up with the idea of having a PSA showing how school is really going to suck in the future without sports, extracurricular activities, still using outdated technology, having bigger classrooms, possibly having robots for teachers, and etc.

My perceived challenges in the beginning were getting the PSA seen, as well as making the PSA effective instead of cheesy. I know my current PSA might sound cheesy now, but there’s factual information in there, and could really do the job of spreading the awareness because I don’t think parents remember all that well about how school was, or how it is currently for this generation, but it will give them a good perspective of how bad it could get.  So in a way, it’s a success. However, another challenge came up through the process of everything, my group started at a slow start, which brought us behind so I had to pick up the weight before it got really bad. 

1. How does this project relate to the real world? This project relates to the real world in many ways. For one, if you need to paint your walls, or hang wallpaper up, you need to know the height of your wall. You could use the mirror method or one of the other methods to help you. Also, maybe in your career later in life you will need to find the height of objects that are too big to measure by hand.
2. What was the most exciting portion of this project and why? What was the least exciting portion of this project and why? The most exciting portion of this project was getting it turned in! This project was the most stressful benchmark I've ever had. Other than that, I liked drawing and coloring the blueprint and making it my own. The least exciting portion to this project was the stress of working in a group you didn't choose to work with. I've never worked with these people before so it was hard for me to get stuff done with them. Other than that, I guess going outside and getting the measurements wasn't very exciting. It was freezing.
3. What did you learn from completing this project? I learned that you have to be patient with your group mates. Also, its every man for himself in this type of situation. When in a group project, but doing individual parts, you have to focus on getting your own work done. I also learned that using your eyes to estimate is crucial in architecture. Since there was no way to actually measure by hand the height of my building myself, I had to take all the measurements I had and guess which one was right based on what it looked like.

What was the most exciting portion of this project and why? What was the least exciting portion to this project and why?

  Once we realized that we wanted to make our campaign something that teens would want to mimic we decided to make our campaign something catchy and rememberable. Since our target audience were teenagers we looked for the things and places that teens get most of their inspiration from. Our result was the internet, we realized that most of the new teen related trends had been developed through social networks like Youtube and Facebook. With this result we decided to make a video that came of as encouraging to stop violence. 

After we developed our plan we created a video that looked cool and also was attention grabbing to teens. We prevented the approach of of coming off as if we were preaching to the teens by including other teens in the video just speaking about situations they thought were not acceptable to use violence in. Once we had a video that people thought was good we decided that it was time to put our campaign to test. We promoted our campaign throughout the school and on social networks. We received lots of feed back and some teens even pledged not to endure in violence for reasons other than self defense.This positive feed back showed us that our campaign was effective and that it made a change maybe big or small but it still made a change. This project was a very eye opening project. 

Another thing we have is the survey, the survey asked important questions. asking if you know some one who dropped out or if you did drop out what grade where you in. the survey I believe made a big impact because i sent it to every one in my gmail list and I posted a link on Facebook, twitter, and I made sure people saw it. I also posted a link to the website on those sites i've just mentioned. The survey was well organized, there wasn't any spelling errors, the design wasn't too bland or too popping, it was a standard design nothing too spacial about it.

The slogan is what i made i made a couple of them than i picked the one i liked the best witch is "If you drop out of school, you're dropping of your future" I like this one because it's inspirational and i thought it was more thought out than the others, and it makes sense. The quote is in one of the interactive flyers at the top of the page, in a nice font that is big and noticeable at the top of the page, so it catches your eyes. it's long and short i have to say it looks kind of skinny but besides that, it looks good, there are no misspellings on any of the flyers, and there isn't any spacing errors either. 

What I learned during this project is that most of the people who drop out of high school, usually are 9th graders, I don't know what it might be because of a big change, meeting new people harder work, it all depends on the person. and not a lot of people drop out there senior year it's the most early and the least late.

Originally I was afraid that my group wouldn’t work well together and therefore wouldn’t get done. I was surprised to see that in most classes most of my group was actually working. I took point on the website and had Markietra take point on the posters. 

The website, while good in theory, wasn’t successful. As of now we only have 8 viewers. I don’t understand why though. We have put posters up at SEPTA stops and a few in the school. People just aren’t interested in this site. The process went well. Everything was done on time and to completion. I was the main one who came up with ways to actually change SEPTA. I didn’t really get help from my group. That part of the site is what the message really is.

We started wanting to do a PSA but there was no way to count how many people saw it or if people reacted to it, so that failed. The website was the only way we saw to get a number for the people who saw it. The website came out looking nice but again didn’t get many viewers.

Overall I think that with some more time the website will accumulate views. I hope that eventually it will become guidelines for people on SEPTA. The fact is people just don’t care. When SEPTA becomes bad enough people will find the website and will start to follow the rules.

Throughout this project, my group and I have been thrown about by our own sense of creativity and naive decision making skills.  We started out this project with a completely different target audience than we ended up with, and our individual pieces have grown beyond what we could have hoped for them.  When we started, we intended to market our idea of having teen friendly places to business owners and others like them, but as we went, we realized how hopeless that truly was.  We came to the conclusion that those business owners probably didn’t care enough to even look at our advertisements, so we shifted our lens of focus.  We decided to target the teens that this movement would affect the most, and changed our approach.  Originally, we were trying to get the business owners to change their entire way of business, now we’re more focused on bringing the focus to the business’ that already do this.  This allows us to cast a broader net and pull in a larger audience for our movement.

My component of our campaign was to make video advertisements that would help pull attention to our website, which Lexi was in charge of.  I tried to make the ad’s short and entertaining, while still getting the point of our campaign across.  I managed to do this by using a catch phrase, “maybe you should get out more”, and making sure to advertise our website with every video.  This strategy worked well with the posters that Gabby made, because together they targeted a large audience of teens that will undoubtedly, at some point, get bored.

This project let my group delve into our inner creativeness, and maximize the effectiveness of our advertisements.  We made sure our posters and videos were entertaining and kept the attention of our audiences, which will ensure that people will inevitably flock towards our campaign.  This surety comes from knowing that we chose the most effective market in which to advertise our website, as well as knowing that we got our message across in an effective way and a clear manner.

This process was quite challenging. I was happy to find that I received my first choice, however I did not realize how hard that task at hand was. With healthcare as our topic I thought it would be simple enough that we just write a few facts about healthcare, explain why  everyone needs healthcare. When our group came to the conclusion that we needed to have a focus target we were in a bit of a pinch. We felt sure, we can target the healthcare CEO's but we then thought why would these people care remotely about the problem. We can already assume that these people recognize the issue at hand but don't really care. They were taken off our hit list.

I made one of the posters for my group. I thought that it was hard to do because I wanted to find pictures that people could relate to, but also make it a little humorous. I found a picture of people pushing each other to get on the bus. It was a picture many people could relate to so I went with that one. I also wanted a good slogan to catch peoples attention. I always see the sign on the SEPTA that says please no eating, drinking or smoking. Underneath those words were it’s common courtesy and It’s the law. I copied that for my poster because everyone knows that sign. Matthew and April made a QR code for me to put on the poster, so that people can use their phones to get to our website.

After finishing my poster I printed them and posted them onto every SEPTA stop that I could . I gave some to my aunt because she works at King of Prussia. She posted the posters near the bus stop. I thought that would be a very good place for them to be because King of Prussia is very popular, and many people catch the bus to get there.

The most struggling part was getting people to view our website. I posted the posters around, but the next day it was raining. I think that many of the posters were ruined and that messed up how many views we could have gotten on our website. 

My group’s topic was about the Philadelphia School District closing down Philadelphia public schools in order to save money. When we were given our topic we had to decide what audience we wanted to target, so we decided to target students since they were mainly the people being affected by the school closings. Once we had our audience that we were targeting we then had to choose how we wanted to get the word out and aware people of what was going on. As a group we split up what was going to be done, Tamatha was making a YouTube video, Jamekea was making a FaceBook page, Roger and I made a website. 

As a group we wanted to show students what the purpose of our campaign was about and how it was going to be established. Each day in class we set out goals about what was going to be needed by the end of the day. On Monday March 18, 2013, we wanted our campaign’s project to be done so we made sure that the YouTube video was done, the FaceBook page was made, and the website had all of the information needed for the audience to understand what we were trying to establish and help them understand.

On our website’s front page we wanted the audience to know what we were proposing in our campaign, the problem that was occurring, and what our campaign was about. We then wanted to give the audience information about what the main reason was that the school district was closing down schools. We showed our gallery of of video from news channels where they talked about what was going on in the Philadelphia School District and how students, teachers, and parents felt about the change that was occurring. Last but not least we represented our sources of our information that was provided. As  a group we worked hard to establish information and how we were going to get the word out about our campaign to students, this way they’ll be aware of what ways they can help save their school from being such down such as fundraising, parents helping out, and much more.

For the most part, I really liked this project because it was fun and I had a lot of wiggle room. I was allowed to promote and spread my word, something I never got to do before. I always wanted to show the world what I care about in life. What I think is important and I got the chance to do that with this project. I got the chance to promote my own work, something that I helped put together and that was great.

But I’m not going to make it seem as though it was a easy thing to do. There was days that I stressed out about whether people would like our page, videos and view our website. I was worried that my friends would ignore it because they thought it was spam or that I was being weird. I guess I’m always that one person who worries about what other people have to say about me. By me stressing out about that, I started to feel as though I was bringing my group down because I didn’t have any faith.

If I would have been more supportive and had positive thoughts, I might could’ve been able to promote our stuff even more. Another thing I did was set our campaign on a pedestal and when we failed to reach, I felt bad. My expectations were way too high and I didn’t realize that until we got results. But the results are still good whether we reached my expectations or not.

Overall, I managed to get our campaign out there to people who I know will help promote it. And by me doing that, it raised my spirits as well as my group mates. Now I know what that big numbers and views doesn’t happen over night. And that it takes more than two weeks to get a campaign well known. But this was a great project because it taught me patience is key and not to get big headed with things. We all was able to set goals and reach them. And I think we as a group did a spectacular good with our campaign.

This project has had many ups and downs which created a lot of difficulty. Some parts of the project went very smoothly and turned out great. Other parts took a lot of time and we wound up scrapping it anyway. 

One big difficulty that we had, was to find an audience that would be reached by the different things that we made. We started thinking and we believe that the number one audience that we could reach would be the parents of the children. This is because they are the people who are ultimately responsible for the health of their child, and they are the ones to blame if their child is obese. 

Another problem that we ran into was with the website. We originally created a google site. This would have worked well since multiple people can edit it at the same time without creating any issues, but we came to the conclusion that it looked dull and would not grab anyone’s attention like we wanted. We decided to change to a wix.com site. This looks really nice and works very smoothly. The drawback to this however is that only one person can edit the website at a time. This slowed down the production of the website, but in the end made it look better.

Among these issue with the web site we ran into a problem with our “live demonstration” that were planning on doing. We had originally decided to do it as a group, but as time went on, we figured that no one actually had 3 or 4 hours to spend on a week day when we are all already in center city, to stand around and hand out flyers. We all had to be home by a certain time and we couldn’t come to a consensus on a time that could work for everyone. This eventually led to us scrapping the entire idea and just to focus on the website and the other aspects of the project. 

Throughout the entire project, many things have gone wrong and been very difficult. Overall after all that, I think that we created a very good project that we can be proud of. Especially if it is successful and gets to some people. 

  This project wasn’t hard, but instead complex, we had one topic and each group member had to figure out what they’ll do that’s different and affective. At first I wanted to make a poster with different things and words that represented obesity. I then procrastinated for a couple days thinking that making poster wouldn’t be something that would actually inform people. Putting a bunch of words on a poster and paragraphs would be something that no one would stand there and read.  I began to think about what would be something that was flashy but at the same time informed people. I ended up wanting to create a website, that informed people about the beginning stages of obesity. I didn’t start on the website right away, because I didn’t know exactly what I would write about that would catch people attention and at the same time not make the ones who are reading bored after the first sentence. After about a day I thought that maybe just having bullet points about the  different topics that have to deal with obesity would be something informative but short.

 The different topics I focused on that deals with obesity was. who is the factor, who or what is setting the child up for obesity, which are the parents. The parents are the ones that set their children up for obesity because of their eating habits.  topics that I focused on was how to prevent obesity and set  good example for children in order for the children to begin to eat healthy, and become comfortable and use to healthy foods. Children have grown into preteens and teenagers who are obese, and recently there has been different things that has been promoting how to stay fit. I incorporate how the show “The Biggest Loser” has began to have teenagers/preteens who are obese and show them the ways to become fit and stay that way, it’s somewhat of a mini biggest loser but for kids. It wasn’t just the child's fault, but instead the household, that when children grow up they become fond of fattening foods, that they don’t really notice how bad it is for them until they get a reality check. I’ve noticed that children have no choice but eat what their parents feed them but once they become older they have the choice to eat healthy or to continue and eat unhealthy. After a while it’s in the persons hand whether to eat healthy or become so use to eating unhealthy that he/she just doesn’t have the time or the energy to do what they can to prevent their obesity to go any further. Other

    The challenges during this project was that I didn’t have an idea that was final until a couple days later. Other challenges that I faced was that I wanted the website to look full and not so empty, I wanted to have tons of information that gave people insight on the stages of obesity. A couple of other challenges I faced was figuring out clever things that I could incorporate in the website, I didn’t want something that was just scratching the surface about obesity but instead things that explain to the ones who are reading that their is a bright side to obesity. My challenge was finishing the website on time, yes...I procrastinated a bit in the beginning of the project, about a week before it was due I knew what I was doing and wasn’t in a total rush to finish it, until a couple of days before it was due, I began to feel pressure to hurry and finish it. Throughout this project I’ve learned to put myself in the person’s position who’s looking at my project, if I saw a page full of facts and opinions “would I really want to read it?” or would I want to read something that’s simple but interesting?.  I’m a regular teenager who doesn’t want to read something way too long and boring, but instead something that had a bunch of bullet point facts about obesity and the different stages and things that’s within that topic.