Capstone Exploration Reflection

Interview questions.
I asked Liz Crichlow about her capstone and what she did was an internship at KENRA as tech support since last week of July.
1. What has this week been like for you?
A. It's been stressful because she has also been doing finals.
2. If you could change anything in how you did your capstone, what would it be?
A. She would chage the daily experiences that she had on her poster because she just gabbed them out of her journal.
3. How close is the final outcome to what you originally thought it would be?
A. She would have liked more experience with servers and networks.
4. If you had one more month to work on the project what would you do?
A. Nothing, she said everything went well.
5. What advice do you have for me about working on my capstone?
A. Do an internship and do not procrastinate.

Reflection of Capstone
1. Address the efficacy of the approach we took in this class.
I learned some things about capstone by having the guest speakers and going to the capstones. It also helped that we had to start thinking about it early and get mentors.
2. Discuss whether or not the breakdown of the project development was advantageous.
Its nice to have a breakdown of the project but it doesn't help when you don't follow the schedule because you have other things to do.
3. Discuss the advanges and/or disadvantages of the student guest speakers for forming your own approach to capstone.
The thing I got out of the guest speakers is that it would have been much better to have know what capstones were sooner and had an idea earlier. The bad thing that I got from them is that basically if you have not started on you capstone like a year prior then your capstone will be just OK.
4. Were there any assignments that you thought were particularly helpful? Please elaborate.
Making us get a mentor was a great idea because it would have been really hard to get one at the last minute.
5. Were there any assignments that you thought were particularly useless? Please elaborate.
In a way the secondary mentor thing was pointless for some people because there was no need in my case.

Capstone r

Project Development Issues

Time management issues: I'm bad at it so I have to come up with a hard schedule. I will base it on a weekly to do list.

Skills needed: The skills I'm looking at that I need for this is web development, flash, php, and game story line development. I might also need to know how to use javascript. The good thing about those skills is that I have a base for all of them.

Resources needed: The resources I need are available to me free of charge for the most part. I will need resources on how to do some things with the various languages so I can use Linda a source for that and my mentor will know about the languages also.

Budget: I don't see this project as really costing money unless I need to pay to put my work online for people to see. Otherwise my budget will be about $500.

Team issues: I don't foresee any issues with any team that I have as of now.

Other issues: One of the issues I'm having is coming up with a way to have the game that is not incredibly imposing as the user navigates the site. But I don't want it to be easy either. The other issue is the content on the page but I can wait to cover that because my main purpose is to get the point across for a new way of browsing the web.

Secondary Mentor

For secondary mentor I was thinking of two people outside of the New Media faculty. Those people are Michele Roberts and Andy Harris. I have had classes with both of them and they are really familier with the programming languages that I will be using such as PHP and JavaScript. It will also be helpful to have secondary mentors out side of New Media to get a different point of view on my Capstone.

Mentor for Capstone

For my Capstone project I will be making a website that is a game in itself. In order to get to other pages you have to beat parts of the website to unlock other section of the site. The thing I have to figure out is how I will make that work. Flash could be one method to do this or maybe using PHP and JavaScript. The other issue is what I want the user to be able to unlock, I was thinking it could be either a portfolio or an actual game story. It could even be both.

Key Things I need in a mentor:

Flash, Web Programming, Gaming, and maybe PHP.

Potential Mentors:

Matt Powers, Joseph Defazio, Todd Shelton.

Matt Powers area of expertise is gaming and that will be an aspect of what I'm doing. His acspectation would be to have a game design document. I know this because I'm taking one of his classes in gaming. I don't think he will be very available due to his already booked schedule with students.

Joseph Defazio are of expertise is flash. The way I think my project will work is by using flash to make the website into a more interactive game. He will have room for me to be his mentor.
Todd Shelton are of expertise is also flash and web development. That is more of the combo I will need for this. He will likely be available as long as I can snag him first.

Capstone Category

The capstone I am doing will be an animation about bullying. This would put this in the category of video. As of right now I only have a basis of what it will be like. I was kind of thinking of having animation and live video.

Class Discussion

What I got out of the discussion was confusion about what we can and can't do but hopefully the meeting will clarify that. Something good I got from the discussion is why we do the Capstone project and that's to show case to the real world what we've got. The big thing that came out of the discussion was an idea for my capstone. It is to build a website that is a game itself. I was thinking that you would have to do some kind of thing on the page in order to access the other pages. I have not seen anyone do that before so I would be interested on how that would work.

Ideas for Capstone

An idea I had was to make a video on bullying. I came up with that idea when one of the guys in class was talking about helping out at risk female teens.

Another idea would be to make a game using php, not sure what kind of game yet. One game that I saw someone create was hangman.

I don't have to many other ideas but I will keep thinking until I'm ready to stick to one of them.

What's a Capstone?

What I think Capstone is, is a project that shows what you have learned over the years of college. What would make it a real capstone is if its not something that you would do for a class project but something you would do for a real job. What I hope to get out of this is a project that shows that I didn't waste my time going to school. The school probably wants us to work on our capstone so we don't wait to the last minute doing it and come up with a lame capstone.