ISR Semester 1 Whitepaper Guidelines This whitepaper will serve as the summative documentation of your work for the first semester. In concise prose, you will detail how you implemented your project, discuss the results of your work, and explain next steps for the second semester. Appendices will provide the reader with the documentation and resources they can reference to learn more about your project. The whitepaper is worth half of your final exam grade for the first semester. Grading Rubric [ 55 points total ] Basic Expectations & Formatting [ 5 points ] Turned in digitally as a PDF through the Haiku dropbox and posted to your ISR blog (also as a PDF) File name should follow the format: ISR S1 Whitepaper - Your Last Name For example: ISR S1 Whitepaper - Halstead Written component is 500-1000 words in length (not including appendices) Text should be single-spaced, 11 pt font (Choose a clean, professional font such as Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, or Georgia) Consistent font and text formatting throughout document (Appendices can be exempt if they include something that requires a different format, such as code) Include your name, course name, instructor name, date, and project title at the top of the document Section titles from this rubric are used to organize content (Abstract, Introduction & Goals, etc.) Appendices are included on new pages after the written component (Use page breaks to ensure consistency!) Writing Conventions [ 5 points ] The S1 Whitepaper is a formal, professional document. Your writing should meet the basic standards of clean english prose: no spelling errors, no major grammatical issues, correct punctuation, etc. Abstract [ 5 points ] My project for ISR, in the year of 2016-2017, is to build an interactive website detailing Life At HPA s Elab, focusing mainly on projects in ISR class F period. This semester I have completed the template and outline of the website on Wix and it is ready to be filled with articles. Introduction & Goals [ 10 points ] Background: Over summer of 2016, when I knew that I would be going into ISR, I started thinking about what project would I want to work on. I have thought of several ideas, some including continuing the drone project from last year robotics, starting something new with Astronomy, since I was drawn to it ever after attending an Astronomy Camp, or creating a website, which is what I chose to do. Original Goals: When I first started working on my website, I had absolutely no idea what it will be about. At first I wanted to code my website myself using HTML and CSS as a base. I started working on Codecademy units for website building. After a week of still being undecided with the idea for my website s purpose, Mr.
Shorn and Mr. Halstead have approached me with an idea for what the purpose could be. The idea was that I could continue Kate s 16 website from last year that document Elab and projects done at Elab. That was when I was introduced to Wix website builder and my original idea was changed quite a bit. Essential Question: Building a Website is an essential skill for someone pursuing a career in business and engineering. I have joined this class originally just as a class where I could do something that I loved, programming and designing, for fun. After hearing from Mr. H about all the opportunities that website building could bring you later in universities and career paths, I realized that this project was setting it s way for a much bigger impact on my life in later stages. Planning & Implementation [ 10 points ] Project Planning: My approach to my project was essentially based on research and looking up a lot of different websites and seeing how different purposes design the project. Interesting things that I noticed, is that behind all the colors and differences in content, websites of same kind look pretty similar. Different blogs, online stores, galleries, they all look similar to each of their kind. After getting the idea for what I wanted to make, I then created little sketches for how I saw my website designed as and used Wix to go off of that. Research and Resources: I had to go through a lot of tutorials on how to use Wix. That was the biggest piece that I had to learn. I was also using Codecademy to learn HTML and CSS. Mr. Shorn was also giving Buki and me a tutorial into people s minds and how they take in things that they see and how that should affect what we put on our home page of the website. Main sources to learn these skills were: Wix tutorial, Codecademy, Mr. Shorn. Implementation: My first couple weeks or so were going slow, designing the website, learning how to use the tools for it, settling on an idea for the project. In the weeks later and on I mostly worked on Wix and Codecademy, later however, I have abandoned Codecademy to work on Wix only. Some of the main milestones that I have accomplished is that I got the overall template and outline of my website complete. Challenges & Next Steps [ 10 points ] Challenges: Some of the challenges that I have found in this project was that Wix kept crushing which was a really big blocker for me. I couldn t do anything about it because I searched all of the internet to find their email, but somehow didn t find it any way of contacting them. Another challenge was that I got badly ill and was absent from school for a month which has set my progress quite far back, but I recovered and was able to catch up with work. Rather than that, I had almost no other challenges. Accomplishments: This semester I have worked hard and accomplished quite a lot. I finished 2 phases on my asana which were planning out the design for the project and research and the second phase was completing the template for the website and finishing the designing of it.
Next Steps: Next semester I will need to reorganize my asana and create a lot of new tasks and change one of my phases. I need to interview people and learn more about their projects. After which I will be writing articles and filling out pages for the website. My projects will almost become an English class during second semester. The biggest milestone will hopefully getting it published. Lessons Learned: Some of the key skills was definitely how to build not just a website, but also a website that will satisfy all different types of people who went on it. So far my work was pretty easy going and much less strict on guidelines; however, next semester is where a lot of writing and much more structured guidelines come in with real due dates, which will be definitely a different type of work in the independent than what I was doing this semester, so that will be a change. Appendix A: Project Documentation [ 5 points ] Website design My original design idea for the website
Home Page Home page for how my website looks right now. Kate s website Kate s website from last year which has been my inspiration
Website building unit Codecademy unit that I was working on
Pages Mobile version of my website and the pages that I created on my website for each of the projects. Appendix C: Key Resources [ 5 points ] 1) Alicia Chow - Alicia s project is Humans Of HPA. She has been taking pictures of people s project for her project and she has been kind enough to agree to helping me out with my own project, sharing some of the pictures that she has been taking to put on my website. Has been a great help for my website, making it look alive. 2) Lots and lots of different and most randomest websites all over the internet in order to get an idea for what other people have been creating, both using wix and other website building platforms. Has been a great help to get an idea for what I wanted to design my own website like 3) Of course Wix and it s help of building the overall designing part that my imagination was creating.