Abstract

This was more a learning and growing experience for myself and the young teenagers involved than a project. Over the duration of the time I spent mentoring the kids, I forgot about the fact that I was doing a project for a grade. I felt more like I was doing something that was helping me become a better person. At the shelter, I helped the young kids deal with their hard life situations by writing. Over the time,  I also chimed in on helping them better understand basic every day mannerisms, like being respectful, grateful and polite. In the beginning, everything didn’t start off as lovely as it ended. The kids were very unkind to me and they would clearly express that they did not want to be in my “program”. They would openly express their dislike for what I was trying to teach them. I thought that they didn’t respect me because we were only 4 or 5 years apart in age but soon I realized what it actually was that disinterested the kids. I realized that the kids were being rude for 2 reasons. Reason one was that they didn’t have much discipline in their lives, which explained why they were so rude and they also, like all other teenagers, didn’t  want to sit and write and listen to someone talk for an hour. After this realization. I decided to take a different route into getting them to like what we were doing, which was use active games instead of writing exercise  to start off with. They enjoyed that after a long day of school, then they didn’t mind the writing as much. In the end every went well and I just hope that the kids took a lot from this experience. 

Student Name:
 Mathew Walker

In school mentor’s name:
 Mark Miles

Topic Summary:

 The goal of this project was to help me develop a better understanding of my future major, and also to show my current knowledge on the topic of computer science to see where I am going to be when I enter college. What I did was I created a game via the program processing which is a coding program that codes on java. What I learned during this process is that it is not always easy to stick to your original idea. As I went through the project I was learning a bunch of new coding material that I did not know and trying to take all that and apply all in one year was a little difficult. So I created a game that was not like my original idea but I did this because the game that I was able to produce in the end took some of the new knowledge that I learned and apply it. My original idea was to make a side scrolling adventure game such as the game Zelda but a lot of things such as drawing the maps and writing different coding functions for changing the map were slightly difficult. So in my end product, which was a maze, I was able to take the drawing maps and apply it. I also learned that you do not need fancy graphics to make a game fun because when I let my friends test it out everybody surrounded my computer trying to beat the game, which I am proud of.

and Processing

Ruben Burenstein

Mentor: 

Mark Bey

Summary:

The goal of this project is to provide extra help for students who seemed to be having trouble in a Spanish 2 class. 

Abstract

 I was inspired to make this my capstone because wavering interest in education. Since I started learning Spanish I liked it, and decided that if I were to teach a subject it would be Spanish. During freshman and sophomore year I thought that I wanted to be a teacher, but then during junior year my opinion changed. After finding out that I would be the SAT for a Spanish 2 class I thought that this would be a good opportunity to see what teaching a small group of kids would be like. I soon realized that I would not just help the students on their work, but also help reinforce their core understanding. To do this I had to re acquaint myself with the topics that they were learning, as well as research teaching techniques. For the project I did small activities, and created worksheets with the intent of improving the understanding of the Spanish language. Researching how to be an effective teacher has given be a better understanding of what I should do in teaching situations, and given me methods on how to clearly display information to students.