For my capstone, I created a few videos for a social media account talking about stocks. I chose to talk about stocks because I found it interesting that you can get money from a company just by investing in them when I just started getting into stocks. I originally invested roughly 900 when I first started going in my Junior year which gave me the idea to do this as a capstone. I had a ton of trial-and-error moments where I lost a good chunk of money but with the problems I had it would be telling people how to avoid my previous issues. I wanted everyone to have a building block for investing in the do’s and don’ts of what to do and to have a better financial future. Each episode took like 3 hours to make with the ever so much changing stock market and along with script writing to try and cover most in a certain time limit.

Over the past year Zivia and I have been planning our a mini course that we taught to the freshman at SLA, showing them how properly to create a mural from start to finish. The full class lasted 8 weeks, where the students were learning and working to create a set of murals that reflected the SLA student body as well as the 5 core values at SLA: Inquiry, Research, Collaboration, Presentation, & Reflection. We began at the beginning of 2023, after researching and preparing for several months, by teaching the students the basics on sketching and color theory to make sure they understood how to design and create a mural. We touched topics such as simplifying forms, movement, texture, and Layers. We worked together to come up with designs that fit our space and painted them on the 4 columns in the SLA common area. The final Mural that sits along the short staircase at the entrance of the school displays a road map of the current SLA seniors and all the bumps in the road that affect each and everyone of us. On each column is roughly a 4x4 ft design that reflects the SLA core values.

Over the past school year, I have made a video game podcast. The number of episodes I have produced is twenty videos, each ten to twenty-five minutes long. The reason why I chose this podcast was that I was inspired by a previous capstone last year on a student who made a Batman podcast. The reason why I like doing this style of project is because I know a lot about video games and I felt as though this medium would be the best outlet of choice. When making this capstone I went through a lot of trial and error with my first idea involving my love of comic books but after much thought, I wanted to talk about a topic that more general people knew about. Despite the base idea of having a video game podcast sounds easy at a glance I put a lot of effort into all of my videos. Some episodes took hours of research and finding time to record and edit was hard due to scheduling mishaps. That being said I still had fun with my podcast and I learned a lot through myself and made sure it envisioned SLA core values and made me happy.

(Link to playlist) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOdwi7XiJ9ZHi5nvfZOG6I-ifns8aMXJA L

( Annotated Bibliography ) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gNVFczFOl-68xD4iRF8X3EYKizqJyhrBA7D0I5PZ_18/edit?usp=sharing

For my capstone, I worked on and created a “Freshman’s Guide to SLA”. To do this, I collected input from other seniors about information they wanted to share with the freshman. After that, I started drafting the written part of the book. I had to figure out how to make the information as helpful as possible without making it too overwhelming and content heavy. Then I finalized my writing and transferred it over to the Procreate app to format it as a book. In Procreate, I illustrated the cover page and added drawings throughout the guide to make it more fun and engaging. I learned a lot throughout the creation process of this capstone. I had to really put myself back into the shoes of a freshman, and consider what would have been helpful for me to know as a freshman. My overall goal of this project was to help new SLA students make the most of their freshman year, and I believe I was able to achieve that.

Bibliography

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F0JIoe3bZG6RIZHkUVVdrFTOhXLTIn66hJ9lqYz5VrE/edit?usp=sharing

Over the course of the year I started, maintained, and developed a small school library for SLA with a grant from the Laura Bush Foundation. Our small library aims to give our students a space for leisure and serendipitous discovery. Pursuing that goal led me to numerous strategies with varied sub-goals, which slowly built together into an unachievable ideal of what I wanted to leave behind after my time in SLA. However, the continued achievement of that goal isn’t all up to me, it’s a task for all future members of the SLA community to uphold, maintaining cleanliness and organization is crucial, and encouraging that without being in the building has been one of my biggest goals. Read all about the simultaneously slow and panicked rapid struggle that established SLA’s library, and when you’re done, stop in, look at the books, and enjoy the bean bag chairs— and remember to throw away your trash and put your books back where they belong. :)

Bibliography

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15C1srdgnyDYzfr7hlJ5QTlWx-3DW0-gpfhL1skcIOWs/edit?usp=sharing

If anyone decides to continue working on the library in the future, here are my basic thoughts and plans. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pbZ2xOVqKuJXPFMHZDHuOQC0Q8LsYQyElESTZl3tuIU/edit?usp=sharing