Rocketfest is a youth film festival for public high school students across Philadelphia organized by SLA Center City students. Rocketfest was created to showcase Philadelphia Public Highschool film talent, all in one place, together.

Through working on this capstone we got to see how SLA’s core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection work in the real world. This capstone was not only challenging but also rewarding.

Copy and paste this link to view a slide deck explaining Rocketfest 2023 with some behind-the-scenes: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DaU5e_cws_QH856kl0b0H8PX-UJx0JYoKH5N2Gp64Co/edit?usp=sharing

Secure the Wastes

For my capstone project, I created my own tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) called Secure the Wastes. This was a primarily creative project, so after doing my initial research into how to make a TTRPG, the bulk of the process was thinking of fun and interesting game mechanics and balancing said mechanics. For anyone who doesn’t know, a TTRPG is a game in which most of the players take on the role of characters in a fictional world and play through a story set up by another player, the game master. The game works on a 2d6 system, meaning that whenever you want to accomplish a difficult task, you have to roll two six-sided dice and use the result to see how successful you were. A lot of the time spent on this project involved playing the game with friends and refining the existing mechanics after seeing what worked and what didn’t, so a huge thanks to everyone who helped with reading over the rules and playing the game. I’m extremely happy with how the game turned out, especially the combat system, which I consider to be the most interesting and creatively made part of the game. I learned a lot during this project, mostly concerning what makes fun and balanced game mechanics, but also things relating to statistics and document editing. Overall making this project was fun experienced which I really enjoyed, and I hope people enjoy my game!

The game rules can be found here.

And the Bibliography here.

For my capstone, I along with Nick Reed, another senior, created five murals in the SLA commons representing the five core values. The first four core values, inquiry, research, collaboration, and presentation, are represented on the four support columns and designed in collaboration with freshmen in the mini-course we ran. Reflection was designed and painted, primarily by me, on the wall alongside the steps leading up to the rest of the SLA building. Unlike the others reflection is intended to be continued by every future senior class. In order to complete this project Nick and I spent the first half of the year researching. We pitched to Braskem and received full funding. We ran a quarter-long mini-course. We spent the last quarter of the year completing what we began during the mini-course with a dedicated team of freshmen and a handful of volunteers. Through this project, I thought myself how to make murals and teach an art class two things I had never done before. I learned how to work very closely with someone equally passionate but with different ideas about what we were doing and how we should do it. I learned that even after the chaos of my high school experience I can still make a positive change to my community, and more importantly I taught the next generation of SLA students the same.