Capstone Reflection

By going to capstones, I learned that I'm already behind. Everyone's advice to me was to start earlier than the actual semester of Capstones. While I have my idea already secured in place, I really don't have much fleshed out about it. However, I did see a very good capstone where the person doing it didn't even know he was going to be doing a capstone until the start of the semester when he was informed that he could graduate then. It turned out pretty good, too. It was my favorite of the few capstones that I did see. Something I found surprising was how much people really used their timelines. I knew it would be helpful to have, but when I asked the question about whether or not they found it helpful, everyone said it was (even if they weren't using it all the time). I'm not a very organized person, so I can see how it'd be a big help.

Capstone Interviews

Name: Ellis Gary

1. Why did you choose this for your capstone project?
   He wanted to learn more about photography, but he also wanted to teach about it.
   
2. What are some of the changes that you had to make between your original idea and what you are presenting today?When he first started, he was all over the board. He had to narrow it down a lot to get to where he ended up.
   
3. What is your opinion of the timeline for your capstone? Was it helpful or a waste of time? Why?
   He did not make a timeline/wasn't forced to make one. He thought that it would have been very helpful to him to have one, though.
   
4. If you could change anything about your capstone, what would it be?He'd want to be better prepared and have better planning throughout the duration of the project.
   
5. What advice would you give me in planning for my capstone?
   His advice: Start early. Don't procrastinate. Make sure you plan things out. 

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Name: Thint T. Cho

1. Why did you choose this for your capstone project?
   She chose this capstone because she felt there wasn't enough good information out there on the culture of Burma. Apparently, if you look for information on Burma, you'll only find information about how bad the government is.
   
2. What are some of the changes that you had to make between your original idea and what you are presenting today?She changed the entire interface by midterms. The colors were an orange/sunset theme and she ended up not using them. She had to cut back about 15 pages for the presentations, as she wouldn't have enough time to go through everything with people otherwise.
   
3. What is your opinion of the timeline for your capstone? Was it helpful or a waste of time? Why?
   She found the timeline to be very helpful in keeping her organized. It changed a lot by midterm and was generally tentative and changeable.
   
4. If you could change anything about your capstone, what would it be?She would have added more videos instead of having slideshows of pictures.
   
5. What advice would you give me in planning for my capstone?
   Her advice: Start early. Gather all the information you'll need first and don't wait for the actual semester of your capstone to start working on it. 

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Name: Saviss

1. Why did you choose this for your capstone project?
   He worked in Lenscrafter for a number of years and knew what he had to do, but the newer employees could use a tutorial.
   
2. What are some of the changes that you had to make between your original idea and what you are presenting today?He had to cut it back a lot. He originally wanted to do more models and went down from 50 to 3 to eventually 1 (very well done) model.
   
3. What is your opinion of the timeline for your capstone? Was it helpful or a waste of time? Why?
   He didn't use the hard copy of the timeline very much. He had a very good idea in his head of when he wanted things to be completed, and allowed himself some time to change it if he needed to.
   
4. If you could change anything about your capstone, what would it be? He would have changed the lighting of the scene to make it better, and he would have focused the scene a bit better.
   
5. What advice would you give me in planning for my capstone?
   His advice was to start now. 

Timeline & Midterm

A couple weekends ago, I finally decided on a Project Idea for my Capstone. I'm going to be abstracting some of the goals, skills and such of the culinary arts into a card game. It'll focus around Mad Chefs (kinda like Mad Scientists) with a goal of matching your mixing bowl (or playing field) to the goal on the Dish Card (goal card). For 2-4 players. While I'd obviously like to focus on making the game fun, another big part of the project is going to be creating an art-style that fits the overall feel of the game (silly, mostly).

I recently had to put my timeline down on paper and my first thought was: SHIT. I'm a little behind from the get-go. While a lot of people have already begun working on their projects, I just picked mine out a week or two ago! Still, it really helped show me how much work I have ahead of me and how busy I need to start being. Since I'm making a card game, I'm trying to get most things accomplished a full month before presentations begin so that I can get a finished product in my hand and know whether or not I need to make some drastic changes or not. I'm assuming that a lot of things can (and possibly will) go wrong, so I'm just trying to allow for a little extra time for that. I actually started out my timeline by working backwards. I decided when I'd like to be finished with my project, and figured out what I'd have to accomplish each week in order to do that.

Peer Support Group

I'm going to be posting which general category I feel my capstone might belong in, and what tools I think I might end up using.

General Category: Video, Web, Culinary arts
Tools & Technologies: Final cut, Premiere Pro, Dreamweaver?, HTML/CSS

Panda Powell

The Big Picture

In class, we were paired off and told to discuss our capstones/capstone ideas. I feel that I would have benefited more from the exercise if I had any idea what I really wanted to do for my capstone at the time of the discussion. Since all I had was an overarching subject (baking) that I wanted to work with, I couldn't really give my partner much information. I can see how it would be useful, though, and I did get a couple ideas from my partner (such as a baking show podcast type thing), so it wasn't entirely a bust. It might be worthwhile for me to try doing this exercise again in the future once I have a more solid idea for my capstone.

Panda Powell

Capstone Ideas

I haven't decided what I'm going to do my Capstone on, so I'll be listing three ideas. They're all pretty vague at this point. I'm trying to come up with ways to make a link between the skills I picked up in college and baking (culinary baking). My ideas are pretty vague right now, and I feel like I'd really need to expand on all of them before they'd be capstone worthy.

1. Some sort of video, but not a cooking show type of thing. I was thinking of making something similar to a speed painting, but with some sort of really fancy dessert instead. Maybe even venture into making things with fondant.

2. Edible games. It sounds weird. An example of what I mean would be, say... An edible game of chess, where you've got mini cupcakes and chess pieces made out of fondant or icing or something on top. Maybe I could design my own game rather than redesigning one.

3. I could brand myself. With this, I could create a website (& logo) for myself that would include a gallery of desserts that I've made, an area for recipes I've created, a blog, and a place for cooking with Panda videos.

Some things that inspired me... my love of baking, a fondness for watching speed painting videos on youtube, the cooking bloggers that I follow (50+), and a general love of games.

-Panda

What is a Capstone?

If you'd asked me what a capstone was about a year ago, I'd have told you I thought it was a hoop that you have to jump through in order to graduate, but that's mostly because I just didn't want to do one. I'd gone through new media and tried just about everything it had to offer and nothing was really clicking. But, now that I know what I want to work towards in my life, I feel like a capstone is more of a culmination of all the skills you've acquired through your college years wrapped up in one big, shiny project. The most memorable ones are from the people that took it seriously, and the ones that sucked were likely from people who thought that it was just a hoop to jump through. 

I hope to come out of this experience with a project I am proud of, more than anything else. My goal in life isn’t to acquire the best-paying job; it’s to work towards things that make me happy, like working in a bakery. It’s important to me that I enjoy whatever capstone project I end up with.

It’s completely normal to be given a semester-long project by a professor, or at least it’s been normal throughout my entire college career. So, it really only seems natural that the administration would prefer that we take two (or more) semesters to work on our capstones. Considering that it is supposed to represent all the things you’ve learned through college (which takes you four years or more to complete, typically), you should take longer than a single semester to work on the project. It just makes more sense that way.  

-Panda

First!

I don't have anything to say, I just wanted to make a post on my blog.

-Panda