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For my capstone, I volunteered to host a blood drive. As a blood drive coordinator, my job was to work with the American Red Cross to organize the blood drive. I had to make a recruitment plan and schedule all of the donors for the drive. Although this may seem like an easy task to do, it is not very easy to get teenagers to give blood. Some don’t know that importance of donating blood so besides just organizing; I also had to do a lot of educating.

     For my senior capstone project I wanted to better myself for the future. I wanted to become a healthier person and learn about different nutrition diets. I had to come up with an exercise method and try to go on a diet. There was a website that I used which helped me keep track of what I ate. I also set up different dates and time that I went to work out. I tried to work out at least 3 times a week and I would switch up my routine in my work out every two-weeks. I switched up my routine because if I was to keep the same workout my body would get used to the work out and I wouldn’t be doing anything to it. I also had to cut back on the fast food, it wasn’t easy but I did very well cutting back on Chinese food, McDonalds, Burger King, and even pizza.

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The question I had inquired for my Capstone was “Are you able to experience culture, simply throughout food?’ In future plans, I want to become a baker therefore making me want to take this aspect of cooking and add it to my Capstone. I’ve researched the seven continents looking for recipes that would best fit and it turned out that I had successfully found cookies/biscuits for each continent that also held history to each continent as well. With each continent some how, and someway I was able to finance the supply to make each from scratch. I have learned that you actually can experience culture throughout food and I’ve been able to do this just by making cookies/biscuits originated from each of the seven continents. 

​Taking the ANZAC Biscuit dough out of the mixer and placing them on the baking sheet.

 

 

 

​Me placing the almonds on the Chinese Almond Cookies. 

​ Sledging Biscuits!

​Lehmann supporting my Capstone!

​Ms. Thompson trying out the Alfajores and other cookies from around the world.

​Me explaining my Capstone to Mr. Miles.

For my capstone I took a mini class with the Jefferson Awards people for them to teach me how to start a new program like this in my school. So a former student and I of SLA took what we learned from this class and fought a way for us to go about doing this in SLA. The Jefferson Award presents an award to a student every month or so who does something outstanding in community service. My first steps were to get a group of voices to start a committee. And get the word out to SLA about this new program.

My benchmark is here! :)

I had a great time with this project. It was very educational and I really enjoyed going in deep with the different things that are evidence of globalization. The most challenging thing about this project was actually thinking of the different evidence of globalization. It took a while to really think of the different signs of globalization, but after that, it got relatively easy and I just splattered my thoughts into the keynote. The first thing I did for the benchmark was find out the different evidence, write about why they are evidence of globalization in Philadelphia and more, and then finally I went to take the photos of what I had chosen. Most of the pictures were relatively easy to take because they were right in the center city area like the Red Cross and the flags on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The image that is definitely my favorite is the one with Trade and clothing because it is pretty unique how I took the photo. I literally went and grabbed Daniel Mambu's shirt and took a picture of the tag while he was still wearing it, which gave some great authenticity to it and really showed the true background to how clothing is definitely an example of globalization in not only Philadelphia but all around the world. The evidence of globalization in Philadelphia is very prevalent. Surprisingly enough, most of the evidence is very common and is a clear example of the effects globalization has had on the world. As for Philadelphia in specific, I would say it is more prevalent here compared to other places because of the trends we have and the fashion trends especially. Globalization really has had a surprisingly strong effect. As for the learning aspect of the benchmark, I learned so much. I would never have really realized the true effect of globalization on the world without this benchmark because in today's world that isn't really thought of that often. I also learned that globalization isn't always a good thing, because there are many negative effects globalization has had as well. Overall on the benchmark, I enjoyed it very much and it was a fantastic learning experience.

​For my senior capstone I took a journey into the life of a performer. Many people do not understand that performers are people too, on and off of the stage. Many people who consider themselves performers are usually passionate and dedicated to what they do. 

First I had to choose a topic that I felt best reflected me as an individual student at SLA and something that interested me. Next I had to figure out how I could portray all of it in not only a presentation, but in a way that shows it's importance to me. I had to also get a mentor and doing plenty of research.  One obstacle I ran into was that the show I helped make the choreography for kept changing. The date kept changing because the acts that were in the show weren't prepared. Eventually Ashley and I came up with a schedule that worked for everyone.  Another obstacle that I ran into was that I kept changing how I wanted to portray my project. At first I was going to show a simple slide show but I knew just having a slide show wouldn't be as appealing to the audience. I decided to create videos and gather extra footage that would help the audience members feel more intact with my presentation and more entertained.

 Website: www.youtube.com/TheOfficialSekai

I ran a shoe drive here at SLA. The people who actually hosted the shoe drive was Teenshop Incorporated which is an organization for girls with goals that I am actually apart of. The event “Shoes for Life” was held on Saturday May 19th 2012 at (_____) where we actually gave the shoes away. My reasoning for choosing this project is mostly because the poverty rate is growing here in Philadelphia meaning that whatever income people do get, more than likely, it is spent on paying bills and buying food, the essential needs.  That leaves less money for people to pay for other things such as shoes. Besides poverty, personally, I enjoy giving and catering to those who are in great need and this project gave me the opportunity to do so.

By: Gilberto Gonzalez Jr

Mentor: Gilberto Gonzalez Sr

This project is a story written and drawn by Gilberto Gonzalez Jr

Abstract: In this project I wrote and drew a comic book. In the process of making the final product. Some of the things I learned are different drawing techniques, how to write a consistent story. Those are two important factors because my drawing skills at the time I started this capstone weren't on par with my current level of drawing, same could be said with my ability to create an original story.

“Shinobi”

There are more pages that will be in the comic but i’d like to save them for the presentation.

​The purpose of this capstone work closely with Keystone Mercy Health Plan and to lean the basics of health care. As a student I was given an opportunity to shadow an implementation team as they create, develop and implement health promotions programs for the low income community.

 

 

​ For my capstone I wanted to show that  HIV has brought me very far in a positive way so I put together an HIV event bringing different organizations out to help talk about HIV and testing also care for HIV. I chose this project because being around people with HIV has had some positive and negative impacts in my life over the last few years. I have seen people older and in the medical field so unaware of HIV its sad so I wanted to educated the 9^th and 10^th. I felt like if I can start them out early in educating them then they will know what HIV is and will not have a lot stigma towards it. They will know how important getting tested is and getting care is. I wanted them to know that safe sex is really important now days because of all the STD’s that is in the world today also HIV is so big among 13-21 year olds. They needed to know how serious this issue was. It was important to me to talk the 9th and 10th grades about this because we are all around the same age group and I know they will be better off listing to me then just some stranger so that is really why I made it my place to have this event and bring the people out that I did. 

Abstract:

For my capstone I worked with 3 of my friends to create a student interactive T.V show called “The Good Friends”. Since I worked with a group, each of us had to focus on one main aspect of the show. So I mainly focused on the film aspect of it. I was in charge of being the producer, so I filmed the different episodes as well as edited each one. Through a collaborative effort we were able to successfully create “The Good Friends”.

Artifact:  This is the link to our youtube page, which has all of our episodes on it.

Link: www.youtube.com/user/TheGoodFriends1

​Here is my wordpress.

In doing this project, I feel more connected to Philadelphia. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to convey different topics of globalization in a picture. The most challenging part was finding the best shots. I also had trouble finding relevant articles that fit with the topic and Philadelphia. But the final result is very rewarding. My particular favorite is of the woman waiting for the train. It was on one of the days that I could come in late, the train was pulling up and I just photographed what I saw, it made itself. I was also nervous about how I could connect Public Transportation to globalization, but the picture inspired me to try my hardest. 

Globalization in Philly is as prevalent as it is in other big cities. This is becuase big cities are made with the same factors. In the United States, immigrants came from all over to live together. I think that the global community is very linked by globalization, making them similar on a basic level. In this benchmark, I got to apply the topics of globalization to the real-world. It was exciting to understand what I've been learning on a deeper level.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yyQwk9t8KURfgraf-P4Wz_nJZLIJh9zGZWM9PhHmSHM/edit

​Summary: 

For my capstone I went around collecting reading books, school supplies, and soccer equipment for school kids in liberia.

 Abstract:

For my capstone I decided to collect reading books, school supplies, and soccer equipment for school kids in liberia. I came up with the idea after being introduced to a man name James Wisseh. James traveled to liberia a few years back and saw that there was a huge problem. Sense the war Liberia has been struggling to get back up. Many of the Kids that was active in the war now have nothing to and many of the kids in school are lacking books. The kids who have nothing to do and are not interested in schools are really good soccer players. Jame's are using them to help give out books to school. By doing that the kids came start feeling comfortable around schools where still playing soccer and the schools gets the books. James mad it his job to collect books and take it back but he has had trouble getting his idea out there. That's where i came in at. I've mad posters and passed them out to churches, sports store, and schools to get it out. By doing that i have collected a pretty good amount of books and soccer equipments and money to buy a few other needed things. While doing this project i have learn that fundraising is a lot of work. You have to be on top of everything or the fondrising will die. I also learned that you can’t just reach out to one group in a fundraiser and that you can’t expect everyone to want to contribute. This also helped me grow as a person and a speaker. I had to make announcements in church and put away the shyness to talk to store owner. It also help me gain better organizing skills. 

Hello Science Leadership Academy Family,

My name is Alexis Beckton and my capstone was S.L.A’s first prom king and queen. When I designed my project I thought it would be interesting to observe what would happen if traditional high school practices such as prom king and queen were conducted in a setting like S.L.A.  I had my initially predictions of how my project would go and I assumed everyone would rally behind the idea of trying something new but as my project progressed I formed new opinions. 

In the end I'm very proud of my capstone and what I have learned as a result of my process. For more information check out my capstone presentation on Monday June 4th, 2012 in room 313 at 1:40 pm. 

The Good Friends is a collaborative web show created by Markia Johnson, Shelby Harcher, Anna Roman, and myself. This web show acted as our capstone, including discussions, interviews, skits, extra videos, and segments. Each of us had a different job to do for the show, and my job was to act as researcher. Shelby acted as scriptwriter, Anna as camerawoman and editor, and Markia had health segments. We were all also to be hosts on the show. Once we all knew what responsibilities we were each to have and had a general description for our show, we released two promotional videos to get awareness. From there, we began brainstorming ideas for episodes. My first task was to reach out to the students of SLA and ask what they would like to see in our web show so that we can incorporate these ideas into our brainstorming. We definitely wanted our audience to be involved in our process, and, as researcher, I was the link between us four and the audience. I went out to collect interviews from students both on and off camera, did research on upcoming and passed events in the school, and created surveys and questionnaires. I worked on twitter and by going around the school to raise awareness of our show and get more and more students involved in interviews and surveys. This information I collected served to either influence what we chose to do in our episodes, such as with music videos, or were relevant to topics discussed in our episodes. Once I had what I needed, I delivered the results to both Shelby and Anna to incorporate in the scripts and videos. With all that done, it would then be time to take on my dual role as co-host on the web show along with my three partners. As frequently as our schedule allowed, we four would come together to create the actual The Good Friends episodes. Many of our episodes also included skits, music videos, and segments, which we would get together to create as well. These extras would be connected or incorporated into our videos in some way, and they were very popular with our audience. So, with the four of us working together on different aspects of our capstone, we were able to create this web show over the course of our senior year.

Link to Promo 1

Link to Promo 2

Link to Episode 1

Link to Episode 2

Link to Randomness Episode

Link to Episode 3

Link to Episode 4 

Link to Episode 5

*Episode 6 Pending*

​For my quarter 4 benchmark, I choice to speak about the connection between Globalization and Philadelphia. This was a task which we were to take ten images in Philadelphia that represent the city and the relationship each photos has with globalization. This is one of the most interesting topic to take on since I can personally relate Philadelphia to one of the book that we read earlier in class called Collapse. 

Most of the photos that I took are either from places that I visited daily or the environment that I am confortable around. In my opinion, every single places and symbol in Philadelphia represent globalization in one way or another. However, there are ten photos that stood out to me and define the connection with globalization. 

In my opinion, Globalization is present everyday and everywhere. 

Click here to view the photos and the relationship of Globalization in Philadelphia 

Citations 

Summary:  

My capstone entails using dredged material to better our environment and plant trees in the Northeast Area. It also entails helping Science Leadership Academy and using dredged material to better the school’s community garden.

 Abstract: 

My capstone, as stated above, entailed the use of dredged material, or excavated soil from the bottom of rivers/lakes that has mineral/organic properties, to better the environment. Dredged material is seen to be a very dirty, useless substance that is contaminated and is inefficient. That is why so much dredged material is dumped in landfills and other areas to just sit there, and that hurts the environment. The truth is dredged material is actually very beneficial for many things such as aquaculture, wetland restoration, planting, and much more. It even has research studies to prove it to be so. Since I have ties with the EPA, I wanted to get this dredged material that is being ignored and neglected and put it to good use by using the material to plant trees in my Northeast Area and to better the community garden of SLA. Throughout the process, it gave me amazing insight on dredged material and also the process of actually getting an initiative like this one to happen. 

The question I had inquired for my Capstone was “Are you able to experience culture, simply throughout food?’ In future plans, I want to become a baker therefore making me want to take this aspect of cooking and add it to my Capstone. I’ve researched the seven continents looking for recipes that would best fit and it turned out that I had successfully found cookies/biscuits for each continent that also held history to each continent as well. With each continent some how, and someway I was able to finance the supply to make each from scratch. I have learned that you actually can experience culture throughout food and I’ve been able to do this just by making cookies/biscuits originated from each of the seven continents. 

Taking the ANZAC Biscuit dough out of the mixer and placing them on the baking sheet.

Me placing the almonds on the Chinese Almond Cookie. 

Sledging Biscuits!

 

Lehmann supporting my Capstone!

 

Ms. Thompson trying out the Alfajores and other cookies from around the world.

 

 

Me explaining my Capstone to Mr. Miles.

For my Quarter 4 benchmark, I chose to report on abandoned buildings in Philadelphia and the process of building restoration in the same. The most challenging part about this project was figuring out where I was going to find my information. I knew what I wanted to touch on in my project; I wanted to address different historic buildings and I wanted explain the process of getting an abandoned house demolished, but I didn’t know where to look for this information.  Despite my confusion,  I kept working and came across many online newspaper blog posts concerning the themes that I wanted to include in my Benchmark. When I started to look at these posts, I found this information. I also went to government websites to verify that the information that I found in the articles was true. 

I had already begun a project similar to this one my Junior year of high school when I was asked to do a project about a historic building in my neighborhood. This was when I first gained full awareness of the Old Edison across the street from my grandmother’s house. As I dug into its history, I only became more and more fascinated with this neglected building. This had to have been one of the greatest projects that I completed during my high school career, therefore, I decided to piggy back its idea in this benchmark. Moreover, I have always held a fascination towards abandoned historic houses in Philadelphia, but they never seemed to be given much attention. I also wanted to address the problem that we have with abandoned buildings and neighborhoods in general.  In my articles, I wanted to raise these issues which not many people pay attention to. Restoration and preservation of not only historic houses in Philadelphia, but also Philadelphia neighborhood houses could increase its attraction factor and build the character of communities. 

I feel like many times this issue goes disregarded because most people feel like it does not immediately affect Philadelphia communities. They think that jobs and economy are priority issues that we must handle in order to get us back on a good foot. What they fail to recognize is that all of these things are interlaced. The more houses that we fix, the more jobs we will have,  and the more income we will receive because of the increased attraction factor that our sites and homes hold. Restoration of buildings will in fact push us to fix issues that hold priority in our city. I do think that this issue will get more attention in the future because more and more people are beginning to realize that not only do abandoned buildings pose a threat to surrounding houses, but they also hurting our economy.  

Through this project I learned that there are laws that protect certain historic buildings at state level and at a national level. I also learned why abandoned houses in Philadelphia aren’t just  knocked down. There is a whole process that the Philadelphia Department of License and Registration must follow in order to give permission for the house to be destroyed. I also learned of alternative methods that we could adopt to increase house restoration in Philadelphia.

To see my articles, click here.

Samuel Kabangai

Giving Hope To Children (GHTC) is an organization dedicated to helping children in Sierra Leone with their educational and everyday needs. This organization was founded by two students who believed that giving back to their community is very important to humanity.

These are children that have either lost their parents or live with single parent, who just have families that are too poor to fund their educational needs like paying for their school fees, buying their uniforms, school supplies or sometimes even have enough to eat.  

·       What did you find most challenging about this project?
One thing that I found challenging about the project is finding different organizations in Philadelphia that do the same work GHTC is doing.

·       How did you go about finding this story?
This story was easy because the founders of GHTC are my sisters. I have been looking at them step by stem and I fell like this project was a good way to applaud them of what they are doing and hopefully get them noticed by people around the world. 

·       Why do you think this story does not receive more attention?
The only reason I can think of is that, the organization is not well known. Sierra Leone itself does not get noticed as much, so a project that is still rising will be hard to get noticed. 

·       Do you think this story will get more attention over the next
 few months?  Why?  Why not?
Yes, because my goal and dream is that from this project, GHTC will get noticed and broadcasted to a bigger, diverse and broader audience. 

·       What did you learn?
I learned that in order to make change in a nation or country, you have to take a step that will make a different regardless if you get help or not. I want this project to be my first but not last step that I take to create change and better my country and others.

The topic that I did for my capstone is Web Development. This project will enabled me to not only prepare a digital portfolio for my intended major in college but also give me work experience by designing multiple websites for several organizations and I produced a career related project in order to achieve my goal.

This process has been a long journey that started well before this year but I’m very proud I was able to create such a masterpiece and share it with everyone. The name of my company is called Starks Incorporated; it is a web design company specializing in WordPress, Flash, and multimedia as well as social networking. Over the past year I have been able to build a small list of clientele, which include different non-profit organizations as well as privately owned businesses as well. 

Early in 2011, I was informed about a non-profit in need of a digital makeover and I was chosen to redesign the site. The end result was great and I enjoyed making it. Other non-profits include SLA’s very own RoughCut Productions, Global Youth United, MpazaK, and Secret.org. I learned a lot more about web design in terms of different languages, improved my knowledge of different applications such as Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator, and read really interesting reference books for my work.

Overall I had a great time designing and creating this project and if I could do it all over again I would get the word out maybe a little more about my company but for the most part I’d keep things the same.

by. Jenny, Sammy, and Gabby
  


Final (Video on blog)
http://the-truth-about-barbie.tumblr.com/