Benchmark Reflection

How does this project relate to the real world?

- This project relates to the real world because you are measuring buildings in the city and putting the height in to google map maker, and that helps people get more accurate heights.

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

- The most exciting portion of this project was getting to go outside because we don't ever do that in this class. The least exciting portion of this project was drawing the buildings because getting the scale could've been wrong.

What did you learn from completing this project? 

-I learned the building heights around my school and I learned how to use the mirror method better.

Process Paper: Septa

My group members, Matthew Marshall, April Woodburn, and Aidan Rios, and I made a campaign for SEPTA. Everyone had at least one bad experience on SEPTA, and we wanted to change that. Our goal was to make people understand that SEPTA could be a much more safe and a more peaceful ride if everyone would be considerate towards each other. To send out our message, we decided to make a website and promote it by making posters and posting them around SEPTA stops. Matthew and April worked on the website, and Aidan and I worked on the posters and promoting our website and campaign.

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. 

Process Paper: School district Closing

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.

School District Closing - Process Paper

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.

Obesity in Philadelphia Process Paper

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. 

Obesity Process Paper.



  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.


Process Paper - Homelessness

We all started with a few silent cheers, we all knew how we worked, we all knew that we worked hard, and we all knew that we would be abel to work well with each other.  Our project was focused around the problem of homelessness in Philadelphia, not for any particular age group just in general.  After we had gotten our weaknesses out in the open, and all tried to come up with ways that we could try and keep them from happening, the most successful of which was doing a large amount of the work in class where we could all support each other and keep our selves on track, we started brainstorming ways that we could tell the public about our problem.  

The components that we decided to use were a blog/website, a QR code to get people to that website and some announcements on twitter by Drue.  Of all the components I think that obviously the blog is the most informational but of the other two which were used for getting people to go to the blog the QR code was the most successful, although slightly less so than I had expected.  I thought that it might be able to get us a slow, but steady, stream of people maybe like 10 a day but instead it got somewhere around 60-80 people the first day or two and then almost no one.  I think this was caused by the advertisement of the QR code, we had put in big letters, “FREE MONE, SCAN ME”, then at the bottom, it said “Not really free money but thanks for view our website”, once people started to find out that it wasn’t really what it claimed to be I don’t think it drew in as many people as it could have.  We all contributed to the blog, especially Owen and I we put a lot of the posts on to there along with Dejah.  We posted a lot of the information that we had found on our previous project because we already had the information.  

We ended up with about 253 views to the blog by the end of the recording time although a couple were from when we were testing the QR codes and making sure that it worked. Overall we did pretty well with the project I think, we met all of our deadlines, and we did our best that we could do for advertising with a budget of absolutely zero money.  

Obesity in Philadelphia (Vannary, Ethan, Aaron, Ayoola, and Teige)

For my part of the project, I designed a brochure. The brochure were designed to reach out to the public, specifically the children’s parents and many other adults about childhood obesity. I demonstrated the brochure in a creative and informative key factors of obesity. The brochure advertises ways that can risk the chance of children’s becoming obesity in their early age and resources that can inform the public (parents and adults) to take part in their children’s and/or kids to live in a better and healthier lifestyles. I included a short general background information about childhood obesity, the causes of obesity, prevention tips, treatment/solutions, and a public program in Philadelphia that children’s can get involved to stay active and learn about nutrition values. The effectiveness of this will be determined by the amount of people; teachers and students who catches the attention by the brochure in the hallways. More importantly, since Ms. Martin is now teaching her health classes about fitness and nutritions, I decided to reach out to her and ask if she can share the brochure to her students.


Overall, the process of this project went very well. Every person in the group knew their roles and what they needed to do in order to complete the project. Ethan came up with the idea of creating a tee-shirt with a candy bar in the front side of the shirt that says "Obesity" and along with the nutrition fact label on the back of the shirt. Aaron decided to produced his own song about obesity, and his part in the process was surprisingly impressive to me. Ayoola and Teige were the only ones who I was worried about the most. They switches their idea about the website many times and I was worried that it wouldn’t be completed on time. Eventually they did finished. Overall, the process of the project was very good and well done. My strength and weaknesses has reached upon my weariness. My weaknesses about group projects were communications. Although we had some lack of communication, everyone did what they were supposed to do.

Process paper on College drop out rates

My experience with this project was ok because when we tried to first take about the project my group didn’t know what we were going to do. Then we looked at regular campaigns and we tried to find components that helped contribute to their campaign. Me and my group decided to do a PSA because most campaigns have a PSA that explains what their mission is and what affects or outcomes can come out of their campaign. Our PSA showed two different outcomes of two people who went to college. We showed how someone who stays in college will succeed in the long wrong and we visualized the outcome for the student who dropped out of college.

 Twitter is well know for twitting thoughts, so we decided to make a twitter page to inspire people to stay in college. All of our tweets are inspirational and were motivating to keep college students from dropping out. Last time we check our twitter page for this campaign we had seventeen followers which was good because that meant people were listening to what we had to say or enjoyed the facts that we posted up on our twitter page. 

For our two other components we wanted to make it visual so we made a poster and a flyer. I was in charger of making the flyer. I wanted to make a flyer that was factual and was appealing in the eyes of others. I also wanted to promote my groups twitter page by posting the link at the bottom of the posted. A challenge that I came across when handing out the flyers at Drexel campus was that most college students weren’t interested in taking the flyer. Probably because they had stuff to do or maybe because when we handed the flyers out most people were just trying to get to class or get lunch. The flyer component didn’t really get across to the college students. 








Rosemary Flite

Teen Drug Abuse 

Creating this add campaign as our benchmark was a really interesting experience. This was something that I never have imagined doing so when it was assigned to us, I wasn’t really sure what we were supposed to do. It was hard for me to get the whole idea of what this project was going to be through my head, so me and my group members just decided to try to dive right into it.

We did well with getting our message across. Although our website only had a small amount of views I feel like we were successful because we worked well together. We intended to create posters, which we did but then we added a QR code that sent people to our website. This was the main way that we got our message out to the public. I believe it was a very useful way to do so because at any point theres about 500 people in SLA at a time, the majority of them having smartphones so if our poster interested someone they could scan our code to get more information on our campaign.

We also added another part to our campaign that we did not originally think of. I asked a handful of people for a statement about how teenage drug abuse has impacted their relationships with others. That is my favorite part of our entire project because I feel like it is a really creative idea to show experiences that people in Philadelphia have had with teenage drug abuse since we could not find statistics on just Philadelphia.

The biggest challenge we came across was the PSA that we created. When we were filming it we believed that it was a brilliant idea! When Jermel started to edit it he started to notice that the length was not what we expected. We wanted it to be one minute at the most but by the time editing was done it was three. This started to cause some anxiety with us. We started to think about how it may be too long for people’s attention span or that theres too much dialog. We ended up trying to take out some parts of the video that were not important to our campaign to get a quality video. 

Process Paper

It all began with a mini project that Ms. Pahomov assigned to the class. We were split up into groups of 2 and given the choice to chose a topic to touch on about problems in Philadelphia. After every group presented their project, we voted on the top problems and then each of us were give a topic that we liked the most. The people that chose the same topic, were in the same group and within the group our job was to create a campaign to spread awareness.My group chose the topic of high school dropouts, and our campaign was to spread awareness that the dropout rate in high and increasing as we know. Also that staying in school benefits your future.


My group first decide on the audience we wanted to target which was teenagers because those are the people high schools consists of. We all decided on components that we should use that will get our message out, a website, a survey, youtube video, flyers , QR codes, and a catchy slogan. I worked on the website which at first seemed easy but I began to put ti together  I had to think of things to actually post to the page. I started to post things like “Our mission” and pictures but the blog still seemed empty so I decided to post quotes that students wrote from the form that I created. I had to also make the blog creative and by that I mean the our all design of it. Making the blog eye catching was very important to me because that is what grabs peoples attention and makes them want to actually read it and learn more. As the blog started to come together we got views everyday, and even exceeded our goal, which made my part successful

The survey/form was also my idea but I don’t think that was success at all. My goal was to get at least 100 responses but instead we only got 26. I posted the link on social networks and even asked my group members to send the link out. But it winded up not being as effective as I planned. 


I  had the idea of creating QR codes for the flyers so that it would be easier for people to get to the website and the form. The codes were placed on the flyers and put around school. I don’t think the QR codes were that successful because I didn’t see people scanning them with their phone. Maybe if the flyers with the codes were placed outside of school, people would had scanned them, making this component more successful.


Overall I enjoyed this project and had fun with it. I just think if other in my group had worked harder and had things done on the deadline we assigned, the campaign could have been more successful. 

Process paper: Teen Drug Abuse

The process of this producing this project wasn't really a challenge. The project was fairly easy. Now I know we had control over how hard or easy we could have made the project but with all the thing we had done, I thought it would have already seem that way. Teen drug abuse is a large topic that we had to narrow down a lot. We had a large amount of trial and errors. We was going to do a Facebook but that failed then we was going to change our video then that got mixed up. But after all of the mixed up work we came together at the end and had a pretty good final project. 

My part of the project was the video. I wrote the script and Nicholas wrote some of it too. But the video was my own vision. I was the director, one of the actor’s, and I edited the video. Our first script was a fail. The idea’s was mixed up and confusing. I ended up to make up a scene one the spot. Without a script just a idea. It ended up to come out pretty good but still it could have been better. After making the video we was going to delete all of it, then change it completely but rose told us “No”. I ended up to like the video a lot. It could have still be better but for how we did it, it came out pretty good. This was my part in the project. I was the script writer, the director, actor, and editor. My team did just as much work so i have no complaints. Very fun and well done project.

Process Paper

At first I didn’t know if I wanted to vote for this topic again since I already did a mini project on it, but then I thought to my self that I still like this topic and with the benchmark I knew I can improve on how I can represent this topic and how I can actually make people aware of this problem. After knowing a lot of your friends and family that dropped out of high school, it makes me want to show people that this situation is just as serious as a disease.

 

As me and my group sat down and discussed on the components that should be apart of out campaign, the number one thing that was on our minds were “Who would want to look at this”. We needed to target teenagers and since we are teenagers we knew how to do that. Everything we put out was for teenagers to be aware because the highest dropout rates are mostly from 9th graders.

 

We choose to do a couple components to really get people to pay attention. We choose to do a PSA, questionnaire, create flyers, websites, QR codes, and a slogan. I was in charge of doing the flyers. In the beginning when Ms. Pahomov made us do the activity to show our weakness and strength, I got to be in my strength, which was designing. I thought to myself that this was going to be easy but after two flyers I got stuck. I tried to make flyers that we see on social media because most of those happen to catch people’s eyes. But as I was creating them I noticed that, what is in the big words are what makes people want to read them. I created these flyers based of being information and to represent what we want people to see. We want teenagers to know that the four years in high school are worth it and that they are almost finish after being in school for eight years.

 

            Designing the flyers was fun because I got to utilize my strength in this project but once I was done, the next step into creating flyers was to actually catch people in the act of looking at it. One of my flyers I had cut slips of papers that people can detach off of the flyers if they support our campaign. Majorities of the flyer are basically ripped up because a lot of people ripped of the slips and some are still alive with a couple of slips ripped out. We had a lot more people that supported our campaign then people who didn’t. In side the boys bathroom I had posted a flyer on the back wall but then the next couple of days it ended up in the urinal. I still count that as supporting our campaign because they had the choice to rip it off the wall and throw it away but instead they stuck it in a place where a lot of guys go.



 The first day my group had posted the flyers we had a lot of people reading it and ripping of the slips so that was the perfect time for us to actually document that people are reading what we put out. To document this we took pictures of the ripped paper and just someone standing in front of the flyers actually reading it. Of course we were happy because not everyone will read flyers that are posted around the school unless it concerns them. For them to read our flyers was a success in our campaign because now we know that there are people with the same mindset as us and know that high school dropouts are a problem.

 

Children of Philly (School Budget Cuts): Poster Designing

For my part of the project, I designed the posters. The posters were a idea we came up with as a way to let people know about the campaign and spread the word. I knew that the posters would need to catch, as well as hold, people’s attention. For the posters, my goal was not to give people information, but to direct them to it. I only wanted to make people interested enough to bring them to the website via the QR code that I would put on the posters. For these reasons, I decided to make the posters rather simple and plain, along with very little text. I wanted to make three to four posters using photoshop. I ended up making three simple posters that were very different from each other. 

I spent a lot of time planning out exactly which photos to use, the colors in each, the placement of the words, and the font. I ended up using the same font for each poster, connecting them in some way. I made each one very simple, using only one photo, and very little text. The hardest part was probably putting on the text. This is because I had to decide how big I wanted it to be, and where to put/fit it on the poster. The other challenge was getting the coloring how I wanted it on the robot poster. I wanted the posters to each be minimalistic, so I looked up a photoshop minimal poster tutorial. I followed this for the poster, but it was still challenging. 

Overall, I am happy with how the posters turned out to be.  To make them effective and to put them in action, I hung them up in different places around the school. Because each one had a QR code leading to our website, I wanted to hang them up in places where people go the most often. That way more people will see the poster, and are more likely to scan it. I put them in the stairwell, as well as on some of the most popular walls, and most used doors. I tried to put about one of each poster design on each floor. While hanging them up, I had a few teachers comment on them and tell me that it catches their eye, and some even asked me more about the project and campaign. Mr. Lehman also retweeted one of the posters on twitter, which helped to get the word out. These were some of the ways that I knew the posters were effective. 

Process Paper

     When my group first got together, we discussed how we would design this campaign. My group decided that we wanted to target teenagers because we are talking about teen pregnancy and that is more a problem among the teen crowd. Also we discovered that if a teen hears something interesting, their more likely to to tell their parents. Then we decided that we were going to use the most popular social media sites to spread the world about our campaign. We created pages on Facebook and twitter. We wanted to use these sites to monitor how many people like the page. We wanted to see how many people actually cared enough to see our campaign and if we got the message across.


Finding the information for this campaign was fairly easy. Sterling and I were assigned this issue when we were partners so we used the information we collected for our presentation. We wanted to put on our web pages statistic that we didn't know until we researched it. But one thing my group wanted to be careful of is that we didn't want to present a bunch of boring statistics that no one cared to read or even look at. So we updated the twitter and Facebook everyday with one new statistic, just like positing a daily status. 


I was in charge of the Facebook site. I was proud because it got many likes and people actually liked the post. This was surprising because even though Facebook is used, it isn't used as much as it was used to so I didn't expect a lot of people to like the site. The twitter page was shocking to me. I was surprised because almost every teenager has a twitter, but the page only has 10 followers. I was shocked because I thought we get more attention on twitter then Facebook. But now I understand teens just don't follow random sites on twitter. Also the thing that hurt us is that we have a video but we never shared it. The video is good but the fact we didn't promote it, I think it hurt us the most. 


But overall this campaign was good but not a success. We got people to have an interest in our campaign and that is the most important of all. Even though things weren't smooth at times but we got everything done. 


"Lemony Babies" Process Paper

Our project was to slow down the rate of teen pregnancy in Philadelphia. We know we can not stop it completely, but we want to get the message through that although babies are blessings, most teens can not handle a child. We decided that teens would be our main focus, so we made a twitter account to tweet information about teen pregnancy, a QR code of a funny fact website, posters with our twitter name on it and the QR code. 
The QR code we found on the second day of working together, as soon as we found it we knew it had to be included somehow. We thought it would lighten up the situation and not just make it "abstinence is cool". The website is a parody or extreme of reasons why most people think that you should wait to have sex. It is not meant to be taken seriously, and that was our intension. 
We decided to hang the posters around our high school to see how they affected people. The posters consisted of pictures, slogans, and information. We had smaller posters and hung them in emptier locations for more impact. We put the QR code on all of the bigger posters and the twitter link on all of the posters. 
The twitter was created to put out messages that show that teen pregnancy isn't bad, but isn't a wise choice. We tried to make sure that in no way to promote abortions, just think before you have sex. The twitter basically lets young women and men know how to protect themselves and just lets young adults and teenagers know what they should expect if coming into parenthood or prevention to not get pregnant. 
Overall I think we worked well as a group and had our goals accomplished. ALthough in our original idea had a PSA in it, we decided to go a modern way and make a twitter. We knew we wanted the posters and I think they were a success. We all had separate parts but came together and collaborated on others. I worked mostly on the posters and the twitter, and I just made sure everything was flowing smoothly. 

Process Paper

My group made 3 components to our campaign which was a website, Facebook page, and Youtube video. In this project, I was in charge of the Youtube video. When I first visioned, the video, I wanted it to stick out and to reach out to people’s mind. Producing the video though wasn’t that difficult but wasn’t easy either. Since I knew what my other group members was doing and what they was putting in they’re components, it was easy for me to know how I was going to form my video. But when I was putting my video together, I was kind of working backwards. I put together the ending and the middle pieces before working on the beginning because I knew actually what I wanted to do with the end, so I thought that I would get that out of the way. The only thing that I’ll say that went wrong was my idea that I had for my video.

At first I was having difficulties trying to find an idea on what to do with the video. My original layout for the video was to have pictures that I took with the “Do Not Cross” tape in front of schools. Then I was going to have the students give their views and have slides that says what was happening with the school closings and how the students could save their schools from closing. However, things don’t always go according to plan. It was difficult trying to get students to say what they thought because those who me and my group knew didn’t want to participate and cooperate with us. They said that they didn’t care about the fact that their schools were closing. With this I had to come with another plan, I then decided to just have voice overs with the schools that was going to close. I just took people who were at SLA and asked them if they could just say “Save my school” and recorded that. Another challenge was trying to get my hands on some “do not cross tape”. I wasn’t sure where to get a roll from other than a police officer. Instead I took some pictures that was on google that showed schools with “do not cross” tape. In all I don’t think that the process of designing that bad as I had thought but it could have been way better if I was able to get all my ideas in the video. 

After I had made the video and put it on Youtube, I was wondering how was people would know that it exist. I decided that I would post the link of the Youtube video on our Facebook page so that those who liked the page could go and watch it. I also decided to email people saying to check the video out. The challenge though was actually getting people to actually look at the video. So I would sometimes tell those who had kids that looking at the video can benefit both them and their kids. And for teens I would tell them that they wouldn’t lose their schools and wouldn’t have to go find another one. 

Working on this video was both interesting and time consuming because one, I got to see how many people actually took their time to look and like my video even though it did take time to complete it. I think that taking the time to actually plan out the video and see what could work and what couldn’t was the most challenging through the whole process. And it would be nice to know if some people actually took the advice.

Process Paper: School District Funding

So with this project I feel as though my group got off to a slow start. We didn't really know what angle we wanted to tackle this from or who our target audience should be and how we would set everything up. We decided it was best to focus on the lack of resources in public schools and where those resources are getting sent to. We realized that a lot of money that would have gone to Public Schools is getting sent to Charter Schools, and we also realized that the state of PA doesn't get as much money as another state such as Wyoming. I know that I am capable of working very well with a lot of technical things so that is the aspect I took in my approach to helping my group get this done. I handled the twitter page and the website. I designed the website to have Philly's colors because I thought it was patriotic and it worked well. I think that Roberto started to take the lead in the beginning because I know I needed a few days to get on board because I didn't fully understand the assignment at first and because I am a bit of a procrastinator. Sarah Charlotte took a role of our artist and worked well with photoshop and was able to express our theme well. Roberto also came up with the majority of the script for the video. I assisted him with filming it. I had difficulty getting followers for the Twitter page because many people that I tried to follow wouldn't follow back and also because its hard to get a new name out there. Robert actually told me about a site that will help me get my name out there and get followers so that people will learn about the what we have to say. Khari continually said he was going to make fact cards, but after three classes he only had about 5 or 6. I was hoping that I would be able to put the fact cards onto the twitter page so that I could spread some knowledge but I don't really have enough to go down that lane. The website went pretty well I didn't have any problems with making it and the setup and design. I think I should have shown more initiative in this project because I could have helped Roberto with more things. Roberto and I were kind of the back bones for this project. Him more than me however.

Process Paper:College Dropouts

My group’s campaign topic is  College Dropout rates in Philadelphia and what we planed to do was first raise awareness that this is a growing problem in Philadelphia, while also pointing out different solutions to fix it. So Devante, Joshua, Aazimah and I decided that we were going to create a poster, flyers, a PSA and a twitter page to present this problem to our target audience. Our target audience was college students in Philadelphia so we would host most of are campaigning downtown near Penn and Drexel Campuses.

My roles in this project were to create the twitter page, find places for us to post and hand out our flyers and work on the group PSA component. Each of these component to me had their own advantages and disadvantages, such as how I may have found a place where college students do come past but when we went to that location during lunch hours their was no one to hang out the flyers too. But overall I think I made some good progress on my components of the project such as networking on twitter. My groups’ account is now sending our message out to 70+ followers which considering that it has only been active for a week that is a rapid approval rating. This also shows some success to the flyers and posters made by other group members because the username to the twitter page is posted on each component.

 

Reflection Questions

Reflection Questions:

 How does this project relate to the real world?

- This project relates to the real world in many ways. Architects as they design and creating the building around the world. We were using different buildings around the center city area and measuring them trying to find the height of the different buildings. We also then made a blueprint of the buildings on the block that we were assign like architects do to sketch the buildings they designing.

     

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

- The most exciting portion of this project was measuring the different parts of the house. Also another most exciting was actually using the mirror method to find the height of the house. Measuring the different parts of the house was exciting because it was different and something I never done. The least exciting was actual drawling the buildings on the blueprint because my groups block was so long and had so many houses on it.


 What did you learn from completing this project?

I learn how to difficult it is to figure out the exact measurements by using different methods. I learn how to use different methods to find the actual height of the building you were assign to. I learn how to solve a proportion with the different methods for the buildings.

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Screen Shot 2013-03-15 at 10.08.41 AM

Education VS Economics- A choice no parent should be forced to make.

We discussed some differences between public and private education, and the challenges of trying to cross this boundary when one is surrounded by peers from different backgrounds, and trying to find a home among them. A set of twins who had to cross the judgmental line of cultural wealth interfering in educations and relationships. They’ve had the same experiences until the transition to colleges where they finally branched away.

We will be discussing the transitions and coping methods it takes to be subjected into a culture of education that is focused upon religion and riches. Two topics that this family has always struggled with.  

My brothers Asa and Tucker are identical and fraternal twins. They are now 19 years old and they are freshmen in college, the first school they’ve ever been apart from. Tucker attends Georgetown University for a biochemistry major. Asa currently attends Virginia Commonwealth University for computer engineering. They went through elementary and middle school in every class together, then to a private high school in Philadelphia. They were given full scholarships to Saint Joseph’s Preparatory School. Here they were set into a very religious brotherhood community, boundaries more focused on the practice of religion rather than the focus on financial complications that needed to be crossed for success.

When I asked my siblings about their experience with the initial change into a private school, they explained their feelings about how it may have been more work than they had been used to, but this community was so closely knit that they hardly noticed it. The educational boundary that seems to frequently interfere with financial issues was also apart of my own childhood.

At the same year that my siblings had to move into a private school, I had done the same. I attended William Penn Charter School for my sixth grade year. This was an extremely difficult change to bear. I had only recently lost my mother to cancer and starting at a new school made life much more difficult. The work was incredibly more challenging than I had ever had to experience before. I cried every night, but still stayed awake doing homework until two a.m. I had transferred from a public school just two days into the school year. The principal of my middle school had to persuade another girl to take me around for a few days since we had all the same classes. This girl was my opposite.

I knew from a glance at the school that I wouldn’t fit in. My family has always had to be really careful with money. None of the other students I saw in the grade could possibly be on a scholarship like I was. This school didn’t first focus on intelligence. They focused on a bank account. Not one that I could try to compare with. 

Lucky for my siblings, they’ve always been smarter than the rest of us. Saint Joseph’s has a very specific dress code of a suit and tie. Every young boy there must have their hair cut above the shoulders, shaved facial hair. Making them each look the same. With no room for judgement on appearance. 

I asked the question of whether Asa or Tucker had ever hoped they were more rich just to fit in with students at the school, with a modest answer, they each said that it hadn’t crossed their minds. They have the intelligence of the richest man in the world, so this didn’t change their experience in high school.

After getting over the basics about their experiences with transitioning into private high school, I changed the questions for college. Tucker, going to school at Georgetown, a very prestigious Ivy league school, spoke about the financial and educational ties. Georgetown is an extremely expensive school to go to. He has been blessed with a great amount of scholarship, grant, and financial aid money. Asa has also. Tucker’s current cost for each semester is a mere $700. Georgetown is very much still focused on the financial issues of their students. Regardless of the amount of money they make as an institution, most of their profit is given to financial aid to help under privileged, extremely intelligent students, get the greater education they deserve.

The educational and economical boundary that has been crossed by these boys has changed the type of man they’ve begun growing up to be. They know what it is to lose their mother, and adapt to a new world where they believe they will be invisible and forgotten no matter the brains. These boys have been through more than many adults have, and they still have been able to make their family proud, and keep their faith. We have all known the burdens of keeping secrets to fit in, some are blurted out because the truth is too painfully obvious, some are dug deep, to hide from cruelty. This judgement could just be all in our heads though.

Philadelphia Housing Infrastructure

Running a champaign is an emotional roller coster rode by multiple people. My group was given Philadelphia Housing Infrastructure. The first step we took was acknowledging the problem. The group who first presented this obstacle proposed that there were two many abandon houses in Philadelphia, around 40,500 estimated. We decided we could take this a step further then that. Philadelphia has about 4,000 homeless people. These numbers, to us, made no sense. We noticed we had an abundance of vacant houses and thousands of people who were in need of homes, so we put the two together. We figured Philadelphia could simply solve our abandoned house problem by filling them with people who need homes, sounded so easy.   


Well, the first thing we discussed was how we were just going to go about giving random people homes. We know that many people struggle with difficulties and are actually trying to advance in life. However, we are also aware of people who would take advantage of this initiative, so we decided to create a binding contract. People would be assigned homes which are vacant and would be expected to care for them to the best of their ability. That means picking up trash around it and also cleaning it out on their own. This would not only give homeless people motivation to have something they owned but also slowly decrease the amount of liter in Philadelphia. Once they showed care for a home over a certain time period we planned on the government helping to fund construction of the homes. That was until we sent a letter to the mayors office and got no response.         


This is when we knew what we wanted from the general public. The point of our champaign was to try to get people to donate funds and materials to our initiative. We created posters which we posted around the center city area which lead people back to our website. The point of the posters were to grab people’s attention and promote our champaign at the same time. We also set up a QR code so viewers with smart phones could be lead directly to our website and social networking sites. So our champaign consist of 6 components: 


-Letter to the Mayor’s office 

-PSA 

-Posters 

-Website 

-QR code 

-Twitter  


For a group of 17 year olds I think we did pretty well trying to publicly push an initiative we built from the ground up. However, our champaign was not a cake walk. We had many grand ideas which we completely dropped when it was time to implicate them. For instance, we wanted to promote our champaign through a physical sculpture. This sculpture consisted of four nice bird houses and one broken down bird house. We were planing on writing “even birds wouldn't live here” on the sculpture and placing a simple QR code to our website. This,we thought, would grab people’s attention because it was odd and mysterious. However, our designated birdhouse hunter Tsion, found it very hard to find bird houses for sale in the city. She went to multiple art stores and was left empty handed. We could have ordered them off line, but it was unknown when we would receive them, so we trashed the idea. Ideas which we could not implicate in real life left us with more lessons learned rather then disappointment. When everything was said and done, we realized ideas blossomed when they were thought of outside of the box but we had to watch our physical limitations. Running a champaign is an emotional roller coster rode by multiple people, one of which my group and I rode happily, successfully, and learned many lessons from.

Benchmark Reflection



This project relates to the real world because when building a building you need to know all of the measurements. You have to make sure that all the math is right so that the building doesn't turn out with problems with the structure. Another way that I think this project relates back to the real world is if you want to do a job with building this is a good way to get a understanding of the math behind it. You have to know how to do proportions and measure properly. 

I think the most exciting part of this project was going outside and measuring the buildings. I thought that it was very hands on. I was able to get more of an understanding of what exactly we were supposed to be done. Standing next to the building you are measuring is way different than looking at it on google earth. I say that my least favorite part was some of the math a the drawing. I say this because at times the math could be a little tricky cause you wanted to make sure you got around the same numbers for each method. Also the drawing I say this because I want things to be perfect when it comes to drawing and we only had a short time do so. 

I learned how to measure buildings, I learned how to use different methods such as the mirror method and stick method. I also learned that through using google earth you can find the height of a building. To do that you move your mouse all the way to the top of the building and then you mine 16 from the height that is given. I learned that at times you may not get the same measurements as you did for one of the methods, but you just have to go back over your work and check for any mistakes that you may have made. 




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Screen Shot 2013-03-20 at 4.40.55 PM

Benchmark Reflection

This project relates to the real world because people need to make a blueprint before they make a building. To do this you need to have some background knowledge in proportions. Proportions allow you to make scale drawings of bigger things that can help in many ways. With a scale drawing you could make numerous edits to something without having to worry about messing up on the real thing. This could save time and money depending on what the project is. Also since scale drawings are smaller you can share it with other people without having to make people go to a set location.


The most exciting part about this project was going outside and measuring the buildings. This was the most exciting part because we got to go outside and actually try to measure a building using different methods, which I thought was kinda cool because most people don’t get to say I measured a building today. However, the I didn’t like doing the proportions to try and get the height of the building because there were were many issues that occurred that made us have to go out and do our measurements again, which was a pain.


I learned that there are a few different ways to measure a building and that you need proportions to do so. For example there are 3 methods you could use to help find the height of a building: the mirror method, shadow method and the stick method. They all have their ups and downs but can be very helpful for making scale drawings. I also learned that google earth has tools that allow you to measure a building’s width and height. Before I just thought it was an application that people used to look at cool places they wanted to visit if they ever got out of the country, but now I see that it’s not just for that.


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