The Final Day

            Today marks the final official day of senior projects! Check out my Final Reflection to hear more about the book and my thoughts on the project. Overall, I am incredibly excited about completing this project. I spent the day working on my presenting skills and organizing the various elements of the project - I can’t wait to share it with all of you!

Reflection Paper: Complete

            As I explained in my last blog post, my final thoughts on the project are posted in the Final Reflection tab. Check it out to find out my overall takeaways from the project. Today, I finished the paper for your viewing and organized all of my daily reflections as well! Happy reading :) 

Goodbye Blog Posts, Hello Reflection Paper!

            After reviewing mechanics for the AP Physics C exam, I began writing my final reflection paper. When I first heard that we had to write a final paper about the project, I admit that I was less than pleased. I did not really understand the expectations for the paper since our final product was whatever we had spent the month creating – a book, a movie, a painting, etc. So, I spent much of this time preparing for the paper reading past senior project final reflections. Reading many different types of different lengths, I soon realized that the paper was not like a traditional paper that I had imagined. Rather, it is more of a simple reflection about what I have learned throughout the senior project. It really just seemed like a longer blog post that combined all of the different smaller lessons that I learned from completing the project.

            So, my next few blog posts will really just refer you to read my Reflection Paper on the tab over. Thank you so much for keeping up with my blog thus far! I hope to share my presentation with you, the reader, in either the Upper School Senior Project Assembly or my Senior Project Defense Panel Presentation!

Keynote and Speech/Debate Problems

            Today I finished my presentation for the Upper School! Since I did most of the work on it yesterday, I just spent thirty minutes finishing the final slides and reading it over a few more times. Although the presentation seems to not have much in it initially, I tried to leave lots of space for elaboration within the actual presentation. Honestly, the hardest part about creating my presentation today was definitely trying to figure out how to save the new Keynote presentations! Before the latest update, it was incredibly easy to save presentations and send over Keynote. However, now it is nearly impossible to do so without running into trouble. When I tried sending the Keynote to a friend over the Lovett email server, I received error messages that not all components were saved within the email. Luckily, I was able to save the presentation as a zip file that can be attached to a jump drive and shared easily (I am also pretty sure that it is fairly simple to save the zip file as an email attachment using Google Drive).

When I got home from school, I showed the presentation to my parents and practiced a version of what I might say to the student body. When I gave the mock presentation to my parents, I realized that I spent twenty minutes going through the slides and talking about my experiences! I will definitely bring my phone on stage with me for the actual presentation to gage my time. I also deleted some unnecessary slides about Siempre Verde history because most Lovett students already know the basics of our history and involvement with the Santa Rosa community. Overall, I am feeling really excited about presenting my senior project. I am glad that I gave myself to create the presentation because I am not sure if I would have been able to complete it this weekend with AP exams coming just around the corner. I also cannot wait to hear the presentations of my peers who are also completing senior projects! It will be cool to see how others spent their extra free time outside of formal classes (I am especially looking forward to seeing the documentaries that people created because I love watching movies and short films in my free time).

Beginnings of the Presentation

            I am really excited that I will be able to slow down the workload this week. Since my actual book is complete, I can spend time working on all of the “extra” projects that come with working on a senior project. After lunch today, I began working on the PowerPoint presentation for the Upper School. Everyone cites this presentation as the reason why they would not like to do a senior project. Coming from many years of Speech and Debate, I am actually incredibly excited about sharing my project with the Upper School. The most difficult part about the presentation will definitely be trying to limit my speech to five minutes. Although this may seem like a pretty long time, five minutes can actually go by incredibly quickly (especially when trying to recap a full month of hard work). I started my creation of the presentation by thinking about the various aspects of my project that I hope to speak about the most. I really want to try to mix up the order of the presentation because I remember feeling like all of the senior project presentations got incredibly repetitive. After watching a TedTalk about the best order to present information, I decided to follow the “why, how, what” model. First, I will speak about why Siempre Verde is so important to me, then about how I can increase support for the program at Lovett, and finally what I ultimately created to achieve this goal.

            I created my presentation on Keynote because I am most comfortable with this application. I tried to think about the aspects of senior project presentations that I really liked and really did not like from the past. For example, I remembered really not liking presentations where the seniors would simply read text off of the screen. So, I limited myself to simply a few words on each slide so that I would not feel tempted to continually be looking at the screen. I also tried to add as many images as I could to give people visuals throughout the presentation. Although I was not able to complete the whole presentation today, I really like how it is coming together and cannot wait to finish it tomorrow.

Puzzle Complete

            Since I worked for so long on my project yesterday, I really did not have much work to do today finishing up the book. I continued placing images and text in each page, making sure that all of the important elements were within the “Print Safe” area. I also added other elements to the book, including a dedication page and a title page. I ultimately decided to dedicate the book to the Siempre Verde Sophomore Trip of 2013 because I had the best time getting to be at the lodge for such a long time. The fall trip is so unique because students get to spend over a week hanging out in the cloud forest while taking classes. I also added a short title page because I saw that most of the children’s books at my house included a similar page with the name of the book and the author’s name.

            Looking at the book, I am really pleased with the way that it turned out. I stopped by Mr. Reynolds room to show him the different pages and the looks of the illustrations. Although I could have ordered the book today, I decided to wait and look it over for the weekend. I often find the simplest mistakes on my one hundredth read-through of a paper or long assignment. Also, I really wanted my parents to read through the book and offer any last minute criticism over the weekend. Overall, I am incredibly pleased with the final product of the book. I love the simplicity of the images and text and how it all looks on the page. In my free time, I started looking at different types of sizes of books that I could order. I think that I am going to order the classic paper book size; however, I will splurge on the glossy paper (I remember loving books with glossy paper when I was younger – I was also the kid who loved office supplies for Christmas, though, so my opinion might not hold true for other children).  Since I will probably not receive my book by the time of the senior project assembly, I plan on spending as much time as I can reading the book and showing it to others before I press the final “Submit and Print” button on the Blurb software.

Putting the Pieces Together

            After math class, I continued putting all of my images and text into the Blurb software. Initially, I imagined having one image cover the whole page and have text overlapping the image. However, I ended up changing the format so that the image covered most of the page with the text appearing underneath the image. I also formatted the fonts so that they would all be different colors matching their respective illustrations. As I briefly spoke about yesterday, the hardest part about putting the images and text into Blurb was reformatting the font to fit the “Print Safe” lines on each page. For each letter, I wrote approximately four sentences about the item, place, custom, etc. Once I started copying the text into the book, I realized that each letter required a different about of text. For example, the shorter words like “Java” required a lot more text than longer words like “Zero Degrees Latitude.”  I had to make these adjustments on the go as I formatted each page.

            I also had a lot of trouble with image resolution quality. Blurb would often give me a warning that some of my photos did not have the desirable resolution quality for a printed book. These messages scared me the most because I did not know how to improve the resolution without losing the watercolor effects. Luckily, I found an online review of Sketcher that showed that the photos could be saved in different size formats. When I went back to my photo files, I found that the automatic download size was not the largest size possible. Once I changed the file size to a much larger format, the warnings about image resolution disappeared! This was such a relief for me because I do not know what I would have done if my images from Sketcher did not work. When I was panicking, I did talk to some of my friends about the possibility of just using raw images to illustrate the book. They thought that this was a great idea, and many of my friends actually talked about how some of their favorite children’s books used photographs instead of traditional illustrations. Regardless, I was able to fix the problem and am finally seeing the book come together!

Writer's Stress

            Today I worked longer than I ever have on my senior project! Over the weekend, I found out that I received the Stamps President’s Scholarship at Georgia Tech. I thought that it would be best to attend the last accepted student reception at UVA to get a final feel for the school before making my decision between UVA and Georgia Tech. Since I was in Charlottesville for the past few days, I was unable to work on my project on Monday or Tuesday.  So, I had to spend every second that I could today trying to make up for this lost time (along with trying to balance a new class in my schedule). I spent the 30 minutes between my English class and lunch break reading through the commentaries that I had written for my first ten pages. I am really glad that I got the time to look through these because I realized that I had made a few simple mistakes in my writing. I also realized that there were some letters where I had completely forgotten to write commentaries! I filled in these gaps during this time and made final revisions to each letter.

            After lunch, I spent around three hours looking at the rest of my commentaries for each letter. I continued to catch simple mistakes in my writing, and I found letters that needed more elaboration to improve clarity. I also had my parents read through each blurb of text to get their feedback on the details that I chose to focus on. The hardest part about writing the text of the book was definitely trying to decide what must be included and what could be left out. For example, the flora and fauna page could have so many details about different types of species found in Ecuador. However, it was impossible to talk about them all in less than four sentences. I spent the next four hours of my day trying to start piecing the images and text together within the Blurb software. This was my new favorite part of the process – getting to see the book finally take the form of a real children’s book. The hardest part was reformatting the text to fit the “Print Safe” lines on each page. I cannot wait to see how it all looks when it is done (hopefully by the end of this week).

UVA Campus Visit

            UVA Campus Visit – 0 Hours

UVA Campus Visit

           UVA Campus Visit – 0 Hours

Family in Town (No School)

            Family in Town (No School) – 0 Hours  

Eureka!

            My research last night paid off! After cleaning up my laptop and quitting out of old applications, the Sketcher program worked astronomically faster. Since the conversion time for each photo was cut down to around two minutes, I was able to do so many more photos in a much smaller amount of time. In fact, I actually completed all of the photos on my laptop in less than an hour! I spent the rest of the hour converting photos that I found using Flickr Creative Commons Image Search. We used the tool in eighth grade to find usable photos for our Eighth Grade Final English Projects. It was fun getting acquainted with the search engine again and finding other individual’s really awesome photos of Ecuador. Although I initially wanted to keep the photos strictly from the Lovett community, I ultimately decided that the illustration quality would be better if I had an assortment of photos from different people around the world.

            One of the things that most surprised me about this search was the sheer number of individuals who have visited and photographed the same places as me when I have visited Ecuador. Sometimes I forget that Lovett is not the only group of people who gets to experiences the wonders of the Otavalo market or the farms in Pucará. After downloading a variety of photos from the Flickr Creative Commons site, I began to convert them to illustrations. Again, it is simply incredible how quickly this process went compared to yesterday’s process.  I ended up converting even more photos in a fourth of the time! However, I am still skeptical of my ambitious goal to order the book next week. There still seems to be lots of work editing and filling in the blanks for my book to be completely finished. I am also pretty scared about ordering the book next week because I will actually be picking back up my English class next week. Also, since I have family coming in town tomorrow morning I will not be able to work on my project much this weekend. Between family, college decisions, and impending AP exams, I am going to have to become a master of organization to finish this book!

Technology Problems

Finishing my AP Physics C class at 10:35, I went straight to the library to start converting my own photographs to illustrations. I decided that the easiest photos to convert would be the landscapes since there are not many details in these photos. Initially, I really liked the look of the pencil sketches as illustrations. However, I ended up falling in love with the watercolor look on a photo of a sunset at the lodge. So, I kept the theme consistent and converted the other pencil sketches to watercolor pieces. I also learned today that the watercolor effect does not look great with photos of people since there are so many details. I had to go through all of my photos from Ecuador and remove up-close photos of people from my Senior Project Illustrations folder. Having only an hour between class and lunch, I really just spent this time experimenting with different styles and effects.

            After lunch, I spent the rest of my day trying to apply the watercolor effect to my collection of photographs. Although this seems like a very easy process, it was actually the hardest task of my senior project thus far. Sketcher is a great application; however, I found out after converting at least ten photos that the program slowed down after each use. For each photograph, the program would take around ten minutes to apply all of the effects to the image. So, if I did not like the effects on the image, I would have to restart the ten-minute process to achieve the desired look of the illustration. Once I completed an illustration, I saved it in the Blurb software archive of photos to use for later. Since it took around twenty minutes total for each photograph, I only completed around twelve of my photographs today. After learning about how slow the process would be for converting all of my photographs, I begun to get a bit scared about the timeline of the senior projects. I had initially planned to order my book by the third week of April; however, I realized that this might be too ambitious of a task. I spent the rest of the night researching ways to speed up the Sketcher program – deleting unnecessary files, closing out applications, etc. Hopefully these tips will make tomorrow’s photo conversions much easier!

Photography Meets Children's Books

            Today I began looking through my photos of Siempre Verde from my last two trips. It was really difficult to find my photos from the Middle School Trip since they were on my mom’s old laptop. I had to hunt down a computer charger for her computer and begin the process of transferring photos to a new hard drive. I really loved looking through these photos because they brought back the best memories of my summer going into eighth grade. My favorite photo was one of all of the girls in the bunkroom at the lodge. After the very long conversion process, I got all of the photos on my school laptop and began sorting through them. Not pleased with the quality of these photos, I downloaded all of the photos from my most recent trip to Siempre Verde in October of 2013. Since I loved everyone on this particular trip so much, I decided that I would dedicate my book to the group of individuals on the trip.

            Starting at around 10:30 am, I finished the downloading process and began sorting out the photos for each of the pages. I was surprised by how many photos I had that could be used for each of the pages. I had photos of the gazebo, countryside, clouds, flowers, animals, etc. There were, however, many photos that I did not have to complete my book. For example, we never ended up going to the hot springs for my sophomore year trip. So, I would have to ask Mr. Reynolds or Karey to see if they had any that I could use. After school, I looked for photos that could work for the last half of my book. Ideally, I would like to have all of the illustrations be of photos taken by actual members of the Lovett community. This would not only save me time on a bibliography, but also it would show the readers that they can see all of the illustrations in real life if they take a trip to Siempre Verde. By the end of the day, I had a full folder of images that could be used to portray the different words in my book. It is going to be really fun starting to piece the book together and combine the illustrations with the text.

Thoughts on Illustrations

            After a morning of MatLab programming in math class, I was incredibly excited to leave school and go to Binders and Michaels for illustration inspiration. Although I have not taken a traditional painting or drawing class since my freshman year, I am actually a pretty good artist. On the weekends, I love painting different pieces to hang in my room. So, I went to these art stores to really get inspired by the different mediums that I could use to illustrate my book.  Last week, I was toying with the idea of using a computer program to convert photographs of Siempre Verde to illustrations. I still think that this could be really cool; however, I thought that it might be a good idea to see what other materials were out there.  Looking around the stores, I really loved the pastels the most. The store employees let me try them out on a few different types of paper. I ended up buying the set of pastels in case I decided to use them for my illustrations. If not, I would still have a cool set of pastels for my own use!

             Later in the day, I went to Karey’s room to talk about the possibility of using photographs to illustrate my book. She thought that I could use just the photos to illustrate the pages. However, she also brought up the possibility of converting them using a photo application from the Apple App Store. I really liked this idea because I have so many cool pictures from Siempre Verde that I have not used yet. When I got home from school, I started researching different types of applications. The most challenging part about this process was finding software that was compatible with our school laptops. After many hours of research, I found a program called Sketcher. The application allows users to convert photographs to pencil sketcher, watercolors, pastels, etc. The reviews of the program were astounding; so, I bought the application and started playing around with some of the features. One of the coolest parts about the application is that it has different levels for saturation, details, brightness, and strength of the effect. Overall, I really love the program and cannot wait to try it out with my own photos!

GT President's Scholarship Weekend

  President’s Scholarship Weekend – 0 Hours

Playing With Technology

            Today I converted all of my ideas on paper to the computer. I created a storyboard on Pages by making small boxes to represent each page of the book. In each box, I typed the featured letter in the corner and wrote out my small blurb for the letter. I also wrote a bulleted list of illustration ideas in each box so that I could refer to them in the future when I start creating my illustrations. I really liked this part of the project because I could finally see my ideas coming together to form the story. Looking at the different boxes together, I could easily decide which words should go under broader categories. For example, I decided that I could talk about the hammocks under the “Gazebo” page because the illustration I plan to use will have the hammocks in it. I feel so much better after creating this online layout because it allows me to see how much work I am going to need to do for each page in the next few weeks. I can also see how many pages my book will approximately be (e.g. how much my book will cost to publish).

            The most fun part of today was starting to play with the Blurb software! In eighth grade, I wrote a children’s book with Charlotte Lee. We used Blurb to publish the book and were incredibly happy with the results. Blurb is a really cool program because it enables the user to have lots of flexibility with the page layouts. For my book, I hoped to have text overlapping the illustrations. However, once I started to really play with the program, I realized that it was very difficult to see the text over the illustrations. Although I really like the flexibility of Blurb’s software, it would be even better if users could create shapes where text could be seen over images (much like in Pages). After realizing how difficult it would be to have all of my text overlap illustrations, I decided to choose a layout where the text resides below the images. This will allow me to use different colors and fonts for the text.

Writing, Writing, and More Writing

            Since I will be out of school on Friday, I decided that I would work today on my project instead. After thinking about my writing strategy last night, I decided that it would be best for me to write an “A-Z” book about Siempre Verde. Although the book might not be an action-packed thriller, it would be the best way to organize all of the different things that I love about Siempre Verde. I started the writing process by listing out all of the different words I could think of when I thought about Siempre Verde – Arriba trail, hot springs, hammocks, Intag, etc. Then, I organized them in a list and looked at the letters where I had multiple items listed. For example, in my list for “S,” I had Santa Rosa, Siempre Verde, soccer, sugar cane, and Spanish in the same category. I tried to combine ideas where I might be able to overlap information. For example, I moved soccer to my category for the kids at the school because we play games with them whenever we visit.

            Though my list was pretty rough up to this point, I started to write commentaries for each of the letters to serve as the text for each of the pages. I wrote multiple commentaries for letters where I had more than one word to see which idea I liked explaining better. For example, I started writing about exclusively birds in the “B” category and decided that it might be better to put all animals and plants together in a flora/fauna category of “F.” I cranked out the first 10 letters pretty easily during my first hour of sit down work. After lunch, I spent two extra hours working on the last 17 letters and a few pages with extra information about Siempre Verde. I was surprised by how quickly I wrote a rough draft for these pages. However, after a brief read through, I knew that these pages would need A LOT of work in the coming days. I also needed to decide which words to focus on in the story and which words to leave out, or perhaps add to similar categories. Overall, I had an incredibly productive day today and cannot wait to show my work to my project advisors tomorrow!

Once Upon a Time...

            In order to start thinking about the story of my book, I had to research the history of Lovett’s involvement with Siempre Verde. In 1990, Bob Braddy, a Lovett science teacher, and his wife, Connie, traveled to Ecuador to study cloud forest ecology. While traveling through the Andean cloud forests, they came across a town called Santa Rosa. In the village, they found the local school in desperate need of repair. Coming home from their trip in Ecuador, Bob and Connie Braddy worked tirelessly to raise funds to rebuild the school. After helping the cloud forest community through the financial support of the school, Lovett purchased several hundred acres of primary cloud forest to create a protected preserve and establish a research center focused on conservation education. Reading through the history of this special place, I decided that I definitely want to include this history in my story. Since Bob Braddy played such an integral role in the establishment of Siempre Verde, I plan on portraying his character in my story. I also read a plethora of articles about Siempre Verde online and learned more about past students who visited the station.

            After my AP Physics C class, I sat down with pencil and started trying to get my ideas for the story on paper. I thought about all of the characters that I want to be in my book – Bob Braddy, Mr. Reynolds, Nelson and Mari, Dean, students, etc. I also toyed with the idea of having one main character to “lead” the reader around the station to show them the full “Siempre Verde experience.” If I wrote this type of a story, I would probably make my main character Nelson since he really runs the show at Siempre Verde. Although I spent a lot of time trying to come up with characters for the book, I spent the bulk of my time coming up with the overall storyline. I am finding that it is incredibly difficult to write a nonfiction children’s book that can both inform and captivate the reader. I am stuck between two storylines that I feel could work effectively to achieve both of these goals. First, I could write a story from the perspective of Nelson and show him leading a group of students around the lodge. This would probably be a more interesting story since I could make it more of a narrative rather than a fact book. Second, I could write an “A-Z” book for Siempre Verde and include all of the different things that have made my Siempre Verde experience so memorable. I am going to have a tough decision coming ahead!

Wait, How Do You Write a Children's Book?

            Today marks the beginning of the senior projects! I am so excited to start this process and begin working on writing my children’s book. At around ten o’clock this morning, I went to the DeKalb County Public Library to look at different types of children’s books. Before starting this process, I never realized that there was such a wide genre of children’s books! There were picture books, picture storybooks, fairy tales, historical fiction books, poetry books, and many other types. I want my story to be a nonfiction book about Siempre Verde; so, I checked out some of the few nonfiction picture books that I could find. I really liked Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down by Andrea Davis Pinkney. The book talked about the complex issues behind Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in from the 1960s. I especially liked how the language was incredibly simple to understand (which made the racial issues easier to understand for a younger audience). While at the library, I also looked at some of my old favorite books to remind myself what I liked about them.

            After looking at books at the library and taking a quick trip to Barnes and Noble, I started my online research where I checked out various children’s book author blogs. One blog (KidLit) delved into the issues of rhyming in children’s literature today. Unfortunately, many authors feel like it is not important to establish an overall rhythm of the poem when using rhyming couplets. The blogger highly suggests not using this strategy, offering advice to prospective writers to make sure that syllables are consistent across a couplet. I was not really considering doing a rhyming book before; however, this blog post made me interested to try it out and see how rhyming might make my story more compelling to a younger audience. Also, I learned through my research the importance of selecting an appropriate age audience for your book. I want for my book to be read in the Lower School at Lovett; so, I will probably choose an age group of around the third grade to reach the most students. Overall, today I got a lot accomplished and cannot wait to start writing my book!