Group Final Project

For our final project we were asked to design a complex visualization that displays what we have learned this semester in order to explain it to someone who has not taken this class. At first we were not sure what we were going to do because there were so many possibilities. Then one of us had an idea to make a children’s book that incorporated material from the class into a simple narrative. We based the book off of a book that was popular with young girls when we were younger because of the way the author chose to dual-code the images with the text so that they work together to tell the story. We followed the same basic storyline the author used and factored in vocabulary words from the glossary by throwing in extra details and elaborating on parts of the story. We also tried to factor in as many of the projects we did in class, such as mind maps etc. where we could fit them in. Creating the actual book and meticulously hand writing every word and hand drawing a lot of the images was easily the hardest and most time consuming part of this project and took a little bit longer than expected. Creating the narrative was a bit easier because we could just type it up and we just had to follow along with the book but it was also quite time consuming as well.

                Overall this project was a great learning experience; a true crowning piece to recap everything we have learned in class this semester.  I think doing this project was more helpful than taking a final would have been because of the hands on learning experience it required for us to utilize the knowledge we gained throughout the class. Working in a group allowed us to combine our knowledge and build of each other’s ideas to form a unified and complete understanding of the course material.

               

Personal Reflection:  When doing this project I thought that we came up with a good idea.  As you can see we decided to create a book.  Within the book we had our character,  or our main audience, a 6th grade girl.  We figured this would be a good age audience bec as we get older as people it is important to understand other and it is also important to understand how we should communicate with others as well.  We also figured that the sixth grade audience is a very curious one because they are at the age where they are learning how to become young adults, and obviously probably question mostly everything around them.  So for the project it was fun to create a character and have her go through her everyday life in a journal where she could express what she did that day/week while using terms from Comm 165.  Some of the terms were also very easy ones for a younger student to understand so it made it easy to incorporate them within the story that was being told each day.  All in all, I really liked how our project came out and I think that it is very creative in the sense that we had to be able to include most of what we learned this semester.  The group did a great job working together!