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We were assigned the Philadelphia's issue of the school closings, and how this is a problem in the community. The Save Our School Campaign we, was directly designed and produced to inform the teen's over social networks about Philadelphia's School District closures. My group and I took the approach of creating knowledge based social networking campaign.   

The campaign was in some ways a success and sometime lack a few small components that could have made a difference. Producing a campaign isn't hard than it may seem as our Campaign, got it's views, but were they the targeted viewers? Getting the campaign's information out there was the hardest part. I felt if my group and I focused on way that teen are attracted too, we could have had our focus audience and had more of a productive campaign. 

The campaign was a success, and with a few small components changed, it could have made the difference that it was supposed to make. Our group did a great job portraying the website YouTube video and Facebook like page. We took in the fact that we may have not reached all our goals, but we can and are able to find the flaws of our project. Overall, I enjoyed working with my group and felt like we used the most productive way to reach and spread information on the school district closings, by using social networks. 

Putting together the project was a group effort and I think because there was successful collaboration and idea support our final product was clear and comprehensive. That being said, we very few problems in our attempt to convey the risks, factors, and general facts of teen pregnancy. Group participation, teacher approval, and a clear message were all things that were needed to be coalesced, and in the end we created a solid project.

I had wanted to use some form of social media to present a good portion of the project. I felt, in today's teenage mind, the use of social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has become the fundamental means of communication between teens. My group and I chose Twitter, because of the many similar pages on teen pregnancy. Facebook would have been harder to use because a page's post is only properly represented if that person has a myriad of friends. Similarly, for a person on Twitter to be heard, that tweeter needs to have a large amount of followers, but the level of prevalence of a Twitter post was found to be much higher than that of Facebook.

Once our Twitter was customized and we had a good number of tweets, we moved on the next main part of the meat of the project. My group had the great idea of putting up posters with quick facts and catchy slogans to catch a reader's eye. We put up the posters which are only about 2 square feet, in the stairwells and hallways, because we thought we could have them be seen by the most people. On all of the posters, my group included a QR code linked directly to a teen pregnancy website. This website was full of reasons why it is best to wait until marriage to have sex. We felt it was good to choose the website because it provided factual information as well as humorous descriptions of what might happen to an unwed teen who has sex. 

Lastly, we wanted to figure out a way of calculating how well our project was received to the public. We thought about ways to count the number of visitors on the QR code linked website, or just record the number of followers we have on twitter. I feel the best way we examined how well our project was received was our in-class presentation. The class had questions, which to me, is a result of curiosity of the topic, which was our goal. 

As a whole my group members Helen, Mike, Kieara, and Shannon, all created a project that presented what teen pregnancy can do. When we took initiative to give each other jobs and make sure everyone stays on task, our objective was always in sight and we finished in a timely fashion. I would definitely do this project again with the same group. 

The process of designing my part of the project was actually one of the more successful parts of my duty to the group, I felt that my shirt design was simplistic and a great way to get the important information out and than if people wanted to know more they could as me about it. I also played one of the biggest roles in the design of how we would present ad pull all of our parts together, I feel that also the design and flow of this presentation was also a above average. Even those these parts were very successful in my opinion the design of both had some problems, a couple of the slides on the presentation were boring and bland for the first and second draft but on the third draft I had finally gotten it just right. The design of the shirt was also flawed because it was mainly designed in a box which made it hard to transfer to a t-shirt. 

The production of my product wasn't difficult but rather tedious, I had ordered the customized t-shirt that hadn't come in the mail which was a real disappointment because I was excited to see peoples thoughts on it. 

Finally the implementation of my product into the overall project was simple considering it was just showing the designs on the shirt in a slide show presentation, but a challenge of presenting to like this I think was the loss of a wow factor throughout the presentation.

Through the process of this project I learned to use my strengths to my own ability. In the beginning Taylor, Raeven, Nuri and I did some quality research that already went hand in hand with the research that I had done from the previous project that Raeven and I had done. From the research that we did we planned what we would be doing as a part of our campaign. My individual portion was to complete and edit the video and work on the discussion that we would be having in another class. We all took the chance to do what we were good at in order to make a good campaign. 

For my individual portion where I edited the video, I implemented another one of the group members portions which was the Ad that was made for the campaign. For the video, I tried to only use what I thought was crucial for the audience to see. For example, when I edited out certain parts of the video I made sure to keep the parts that were crucial for the audience to pay attention while not being led astray by boredom. We all collectively decided that the message we were trying to get to our audience of teenagers, which is to get tested. 

I think that process wise, we were off because we had so much other work to do individually so we really tried to get everything done in a short space of time. Though we did use our time wisely by creatively making an advertisement, PSA, Twitter page and having a group discussion with another class; it could have been of higher quality had we tried to actually plan everything out according to one another’s personal schedules. 

I personally had a lot of fund doing this project. I think that it’s because of my personal opinion towards the topic I chose. My set interest is what really made this project a lot of fun. I also thought that from doing this project I was able to learn more about the importance of taking care of yourself and people around you while learning more about the community I live in. 

  Process Paper

At the start, Korah, Michael, Tsion and I all had a pretty clear understanding of what was to be accomplished by each person and when we really cared that we had it done by. We hadn’t really strayed too far off task from the main point and showed this by checking up every now and then. Overall I feel as though our group is doing a fair enough job with getting the project done while understanding the limitations and priorities of one-another. A good example of this was the concern with other benchmarks going on at the time. Michael and Korah both have their pre-calculus benchmarks to work on and it was a lot of work for them, so it was better and easier to just let them work on their bits when they could rather than forcing them to abandon their math benchmarks.

This project isn’t difficult in terms of tasks and work. The only real things that make it difficult are the tedious tasks of getting physically involved with your subject and making due with what restrictions you have. For instance, the first goal that our group had in mind was the idea to use birdhouses to represent how one broken birdhouse can ruin the others as a whole. Sadly, our group figured out that birdhouses cost a fair amount of money and that if we wanted to complete this project we would have to dish out about $60 in supplies, which nobody in our group was capable or willing to do. With that we quickly stopped thinking about that aspect of the project and went on with what we were doing. We tried thinking of several ways to replace the birdhouse idea and came close to it, but overall we couldn’t think of something that we were as happy with when we had the bird house.

Our group’s topic was teen entertainment. We started out brainstorming ideas for PSAs, posters, websites, etc. Our original take on this topic was looking at it on a serious level and targeting business owners to drop age restrictions and encourage the creation of new teen-friendly places and events. As we were sitting there working on a dry, boring campaign, we realized that we missed out on a huge thing: a teen entertainment campaign should be entertaining! From there sparked so many ideas from each of us. 

The first thing I suggested was calling our campaign “enterteenment,” which my group members thought was absolutely corny, but I didn’t care and it stuck! Without really trying to, I took over team leader. I totally didn’t mind taking on this role and wanted to bring everything together. To do this, I created a wordpress blog. This became our website and the medium that brought all of the components together. 

Since enterteenmentcampaign.wordpress.com because my baby, I could do anything I really wanted with it. My goal was to create a place where teens could find cheaper concerts, upcoming events, teen-friendly places, cool videos, and maybe some interesting news articles. I wasn’t very concerned with the appearance of the site, more of how user-friendly it was and how easy it is to navigate through the site. To do this, I set up a homepage where every single post would be located, starting with the newest. I included a search bar in case a viewer was looking for something specific. 

I made categories, which are located on the side, so that viewers could break down the posts into smaller groups. From March to July, each month received its own category page where upcoming events were posted. You can mostly find concerts within these sections. I also posted a link to a song by the artist, ticket price, a link to buy tickets at, the venue it was going to be at, and the date and time. Another category is dedicated to teen-friendly places in Philly. Each post is about a different location in the city and why that place is ideal. I even included some suggested activities, stores, and food places to check out. The last category was videos you should watch, which is where the videos Willie made lived. I also was hoping to include other cool videos, but only wound up putting up one. The posters that Gabby created can also be found on the blog. 

Although Willie, Gabby, and I took over three different components of this campaign, we worked very close with one another; constantly suggesting and tweaking each other’s work. Willie and I decided that our slogan was going to be “Maybe you should get out more.” Gabby and I worked on some poster ideas. They also both helped me make final decisions on the blog. 

There are many more things and ideas I have that I wish I could have implemented. After discussing it with others and mulling it over in my head, I’ve decided to continue this campaign and website. Hopefully, it will expand and I’ll be able to use it as part of my capstone! 

This was honestly one of my favorite projects of this year so far. I say this because it was on a topic that I am passionate about in a way I guess. HIV/AIDS is something that I believe is a serious problem not only in Philadelphia, but in the world. So making an informative video to educate my peers on it was something that I truly enjoyed doing. We wanted to create a video and ads to help get the message across to teenagers that getting tested is very important, and that the disease itself is nothing to play around with. But as far as the actual process of doing the paper, it was not always the best for me.

So I can start by talking about the challenges that this project presented to me. Well as said above my group wanted to do a PSA video about the topic. So once we decided on the exact theme for the PSA we wanted to film the actual video. But with this we needed costumes and a script written. But the problem came up that everybody in my group (including myself) was busy with other work. So what wound up happening is that we waited until last minute to get everything situated and thoroughly planned out. Even with the plan on how we were going to present to our class. So I believed that if we were to invest more time into the project earlier it would have been a lot better than what it is.

Even though there were some challenges there was also a lot of success that came with and eventually from this project. Even though my group waited last minute to do a lot of the work, when we did come together to collaborate it was good. We would work hard together and make sure that whatever needed to be done got done. As well as we all did a good job at making sure everybody had their individual components completed. Which to me was important because everybody in my group usually has a passive attitude for when it comes to telling people to do their parts. Also we all work very well together just in general. So being in a group with people that I get along with was something that really helped with this project.

So in the end I can say that the successes of this project outweighed the failures. In every project there will always be problems. Not everything will be perfect. There will be disagreements, not everybody doing their part, and things like that. But for this project I have so say that it went good. It did not stress me out as much as group projects usually do. And as said above I can honestly say that this was one of the funnest projects I had this year so far.

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.