Michael's Apollo Projects
My name is Michael Tencariu, and I'm currently a senior attending Central York High School. This is my first year doing Apollo, but I've previously enrolled in one other self-paced class. Apollo contrasts traditional brick and mortar learning in a very positive light as the student receives complete freedom for their projects. I plan to attend a university and major in Mechanical Engineering and minor in Programming.
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My Projects
Project 1 - Public Transport and Individualism
My first project this year was about the relation between individualism in the USA and choice of transport transport, and culture around public transport. I wanted to see the correlation between individualism in the USA and how the public looks at transport. I conducted two surveys and found that adults are far more individualistic and way less likely to favor public transport over teenagers. On the other hand, teenagers are more collectivist, bu they still favor private transport. This data helped me come to an understanding of how Americans view transport. I wrote an essay favoring public transport and collectivist thinking, and I modeled a steam engine.
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Project 2 - The LGBT Perspective
For my second project in the Apollo program, I partnered up with another student named Nolan Vasali. We looked at the perspective of CYHS on the LGBT community, and we attempted to look at twitters perspective. Nolan and I created two surveys for the purpose of finding these perspectives, but we found little success with the twitter one. For English, we created personal essays that reflected on our change of perspectives on politics, the LGBT community, and minority group struggles. Nolan didn't have take the art class, so I had to do this portion myself. I created an art piece that depicted the perspective of a trans man that feels extreme discomfort and insecurity about having the body of a female.
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Project 3 - Fascists and Revolution
My third Apollo project was on fascism, and fascist groups in America. I wanted to find the reason that people may join groups like the proud boys, and research the background behind fascism. For my art portion, I researched Käthe Kollwitz and futurism. I created an art piece in her style that depicted the consequences of futurist ideals. For English, I wrote a narrative about a revolution against a fascist leader. My Social Studies portion was a Microsoft Sway that went over different Neo-fascist groups and why people may join them.
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Project 4 - Horror Game
For my last Apollo project, me, Nolan Vasali, and Nathaniel Linder all teamed up to create a horror video game. By the end of the project work time, we created a short playable demo where you can walk around a living room, swing a hammer, open doors, and switch a flashlight on and off. There were a lot of problems while we were developing the game, especially with scripting and learning to program. We accomplished a lot in our short period of development and learning, and we have plans to continue to develop it. For the English portion of our project, we wrote an in-depth story based on the tragedy of Beatrice Cenci. Our Art portion was us learning Blender and creating designs inspired by Silent Hill. Lastly, For our Social Studies portion we studied fear in video games, andthe psychology behind fear.
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