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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.  

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. 

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. 

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.

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 9^th 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.

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. 

     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. 

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.

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:

 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.

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.

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.

      My group’s project was on Teen Pregnancy for this project we needed to start a campaign. However we had to do so on a budget of $0 and also set it into action. The people in my group were Jeff, Michael, Helen, and Keyaira. Together we came up with plans and ideas on how to get the word out about teen pregnancy.

        I was the person who decided that we should do posters. While it was my idea we all chipped in and put up plans. For one of the posters it was my idea to use a baby doll rather then a real baby. I helped write out the words on one of our posters. It doesn’t seem as though I did a lot, but as a group we did so much more. There were some things that I came up with that we didn’t need. Like where to place the posters to get the best reaction. I suggested that we put some in the bathrooms for some kind of reaction. I’m not sure if that plan fell through if it was just decided to not be done. While working on this project Helen and Keyaira did an amazing job on posting the posters up everywhere.

       The only difficulty would have been communication. It was hard to stay in touch outside of class. I was very out of the loop at times and felt that even though it seemed ok I should have tried harder. I am proud of the results our project got even if they weren’t too serious. One of the reasons that it wasn’t taken too seriously could be the website we were using. We found it amusing, but it could have caused a loss of urgency that we wanted. The posters themselves could have done it. Over all, however, the project came out great.     

 2. Going outside and measuring the buildings and calculating the math was the most exciting part of the project. It was the most exciting because we got to actually use the methods to our advantage in the real world. This unit connected with the real world. Most of the things done in geometry I can’t connect to the real world. The least exciting portion of the project was drawling. It was least exciting because I am not good at drawling and I didn’t want to mess up the blueprint. It was also the least exciting because there was a lot of detail to draw and some of the information wasn’t required until we had to draw the blueprint. 

3. I learned how to use the mirror method better and google earth. Also I learned how to do portions better and get the correct answer. This project helped me to realize how much geometry is used in the world. Geometry is needed for architecture, especially when blueprints are needed. Also contractors need to know how to do proportions off the top of their head instead of needing a piece of paper to write it down. Lastly, I learned how to use similar units to figure out how tall a building is. 

If I were to become a construction builder, I would I have to do this as a living, in order to do that I have to measure the length and width of the block to build a new building. 

The least exciting part of this benchmark must be the amount of work we had to do. It seemed to drag on and on. The most exciting part of this benchmark is the going outside and measuring part.

That there is more to just measuring buildings with a measuring tape. It is a really long process that requires time and effort. I also learned the different methods to measuring the height of a building with different items and methods.