From its very beginnings, the web has been open to participation. If you didn’t like how was, you could spin up your own site. If there was something you wanted it to be and it wasn’t out there, you could bring it into the world. This is fundamental to the web, as a medium.
And the web’s utility has been defined, in no small part, by individual people trying to meet a specific need. Many sites, even today—after decades of growth and commercialization—were started to solve a problem, whether for a specific individual or for a community.
These sites, and the web, proliferated when others found them—as the desire of one is often the desire of many. And online, you can “cast a large net.” People have found shared joy, confusion, interest, and ultimately usefulness in the web. (Among other things.) And this is at the core of its ubiquity.
In this capstone project, students will identify
The problem should be something they can realistically and feasibly hope to solve—or at least improve, with what they know, can learn, and in the time they have. This isn’t a hypothetical thing; this is an actual thing. Students will research and understand this problem, before conceptualizing and building a web-based solution.
The goal of this project is to give students the time and space to explore a topic of their own interest, within the lens of the material we’ve covered in this course. The final deliverable will likely be a website—though it doesn’t strictly have to be. We do, however, require that it make use of the fundamental web skills of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript we have learned here together.
Students should focus on a strong conceptual base—as the project will rest entirely on their own idea. And then we will use the rest of the semester (and of our course) to tackle the problem.
Define Your Problem #
You’ll identify three distinct possible problems you can consider:
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The problems could be mundane, little annoyances; they could be some bigger, vital difficulties.
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It could be something in your daily life, or out in the world, or in your community.
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It is important that these problems are meaningful to you, whether they affect you directly or not. (We’re not swapping!)
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Don’t be afraid to push the conceptual boundaries of a “problem”—but it can also be something straightforward.
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Consider also problems that will allow you to research and conceptualize your solution thoroughly.
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Like any function, your project should take an input and have an output. It should transform the input, to answer the problem. (Ask yourself: what are my inputs; what are my outputs?)
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And again, your projects should be achievable and address real concerns. Where can you “make a dent?” We’ll have 6 weeks; can you approach it in that time?
For each problem, write a paragraph (150–200 words each) describing its nature and how you hope to solve or improve it. Each proposal should include some background context for the problem at hand, as well as a brief outline of how (conceptually, practically, etc.) you would might address it. Describe how you’ll approach it, with what you know and the near horizon of what you can learn.
This should take the form of a (nicely-formatted) Google Doc. When you are done, submit your link—making sure that it is accessible to newschool.edu accounts:
Due March 19.
We’ll unpack the rest of the project when we return from break!