Going into 8th grade year proved to be more difficult than I thought. After all, eighth-grade was my last year of middle school. I have managed to persevere through most of my classes with little failure except for a few exceptions. I’m not ashamed to admit that I have failed a couple times in PLTW. After every single failure though I was able to stand back up and keep going because if I didn’t, how would I ever learn from my mistakes? Since PLTW consists of modules that require us to make/build things, I did make some mistakes along the way. I was especially discouraged knowing that I had deadlines. For example the Computer Science Module. I thought it was going to be really fun because I love computer sciences but it ended up being really difficult. My group and I had ideas but they kept getting shut down. Eventually we came up with one solid idea did work and we ended up getting a good grade. After that I didn’t seem to have many problems except for when we had to start making our Maker Project for the Maker Faire. For those of you who don’t know, a Maker Faire is a place for innovators and inventors to show of things they have made. Knowing that our school dedicated a day to our projects made me a bit nervous. For my project my partner and I decided to make an app that helps girls at ARS deal with all the hardships of technology that associates itself with our school. As a student at ARS I know that it is difficult having to access many different websites for all our school needs, especially on our phones. We decided that the best way to make this all accessible was to make an app.

We started with the help of a guy named Nick, he told us about the basics like prototyping, websites we could use, etc. Unfortunately we lost contact but were able to continue prototyping on a website name Proto.io which helped us mimick what our real app would look like. Of course we didn’t know about Proto.io right away so we were using other websites such as Flinto.com but we eventually found Proto.io. Because of our deadline, working became kind of stressful but when you love what you’re doing it becomes worth it. So we pushed forward. One big problem though was that we had a free trial and when we were halfway finished our trial expired! Fortunately there are ways to extend our trial and we finished by the Maker Faire. I’ve never been so proud!

Now I do feel like I’m falling though. Making an app is a big deal that obviously requires lots of work and experience. I am willing to put forward all my effort on this app it’s just hard to keep hope when we have absolutely no idea how to start. We know more like what we can do after we’ve started but not how to start. I won’t let this fall get to me though because I know that no matter what I’m doing something big, learning so many things, experiencing a lot of things and in the long run it’ll be worth it. 🙂

These are a couple parts of the app that were designed on Adobe Illustrator, and the website we used, Proto.io.