Welcome to what seems like my 400th blogpost. Within this beautifully crafted post you will read and learn about all the learning and hard work put into the creation of a eBook about the Manhattan Project. I had been anticipating this project for a while because I’ve always found the history of the atomic bomb intriguing because of the controversial views around the world.
To get the gears within the project moving, we touched back on the idea and meaning of historical significance which would later play a big role. Over the years, we’ve familiarized ourselves with this concept quite well but it was now the primary focus of the project so we had to make sure everyone was on the same page. We were tasked to write a C-E-R (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning). At this point in the project I wasn’t 100% sure what we were working towards and coincidentally decided to write about the creation of the atomic bomb. It took a couple revisions but I eventually got it right and made a proper C-E-R essay. Read it below ⬇️
As soon as this was finished, we began to learn the basics of the Manhattan project and how it came to be through a series of notes we took with Mr. Hughes’s presentations. With all this information, we were ready to get into the main part of the project.
This year, our class was split into two separate field studies to spread out the numbers to accommodate two big trips. The first group (which I wasn’t apart) departed for New Mexico and learned all about the Manhattan Project there. The class was split up into groups with a minimum of 2 New Mexico travellers in each group to work to create an interactive eBook about the historical significance of the Manhattan Project using photos, videos, and interviews from the field study along with all the research and knowledge on our own behalf. My group was Claire, Max, Ben, and Dylan and coincidentally were the smallest group in the class. While Ben and Dylan flew to New Mexico, Max, Claire, and I worked hard to build the structure of the book.
See it in link below ⬇️
However, before they left we decided on what chapters we were going to have and who was responsible for each one. This is where things began getting a little choppy because considering everything we wanted to cover and the amount of people we had, that meant some of us were going to have to do more work than the others but I had anticipated this already.
As we worked on writing chapters, I thought of the idea to use National Geographic’s media design as our theme for our book. I wanted to create a replica of a National Geographic magazine because I thought it wouldn’t be that hard and I was seriously invested in getting better with my media design skills. I made a design guide for the cover page, pages, fonts, titles, etc. to make it as easy as possible for my group to reach our goal. Click the link below to see my guide. ⬇️
The weeks that came after that weren’t as smooth as they could have been. I don’t think we had a full group in class more than 3 times due to trips, sports, and other absences so it was hard to see how everyone was doing and where they were at but regardless we got work done.
Fast forward to the week the book was due, and our group was in shambles. Chapters weren’t completed, other’s had gone their own way and ignored the design process so we improvised. Three of us were given a chance to shorten our book to our personal chapters and tweak the thesis to create a complete and ready book to hand in and that’s exactly what we did. I initially thought this was going to end up being a lot of work but out of the nowhere, Claire came through and pushed us to the finish line. Read our book below ⬇️
Although the book was finished, the project was not. We ended with three assignments before calling it quits which were a group-work reflection, a speech analysis, and a text analysis. Everyone in the class had given their own opinions on how the project had gone for themselves and for the rest of their groups and I thought this was significant because it was easy to say that I ended up pulling a lot of weight in the end. The speech analysis was challenging for the entire class because it was a long speech Oppenheimer had made post-Hiroshima which had multiple perspectives and attitudes toward the topic but was really interesting to learn on how he felt as a person and a scientist. The final assignment was a quick text analysis that again was challenging but interesting because there was a style of English which we weren’t used to and had many, many metaphors.
In the end, the main focus of the competencies was Communication meaning that our work involved communicating to a larger audience through the book. There were highs and lows throughout the project but one thing for sure is that there was a lot of learning off-project as well. I learned that it really is important to be able to be there for help and support for group members especially if you have a specific goal you want everyone to reach with you. Communication ends up being the most crucial part in most situations which I ended up learning the hard way but my takeaway from this project is that if you want something to get done you most likely will have to do it yourself. You could give all the advice, help, support that someone would need and you still can’t force them to do something. Unfortunately I did finish the project with a different book than a few group members but that’s just how things go sometimes.
All in all I really enjoyed this project because it included a couple of current interests and although things didn’t go according to plan, I’m happy with the final result of my work.
See ya