April 12th, 2017

Our project overview was about figuring out the "truth in this crazy world", when we are surrounded by fake news, media, website and conspiracy theories based on real news. An except from our project handout went a little like this:
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People tell you stuff all the time, and expect you to just accept it. And it doesn’t get any better when you’re an adult: now you are supposed to vote, and there are literally thousands of websites giving “news” about the candidates. Some of it sounds totally crazy: one website tells you that Hillary Clinton is a secret satanist. Another tells you that Donald Trump’s campaign manager has been receiving secret payments from foreign governments. How are you supposed to sort out what’s true from what’s false?

That’s what this project is all about: finding the truth in a crazy world, so you never need to take what adults tell you at face value ever again.

Conspiracy Theory Presentation
Researching this topic was tough, since me and Thalia were working as a pair with this presentation, we had to decide on a topic together. This topic had been important and close to me since my family all loves The Beatles and always talk about the conspiracy's that come with the band.

Dr. P's Hoax Website

Dr. P had asked us one day to analyze a website which contained various stories about paranormal sightings and UFO sightings around Chula Vista. At first sight, I realized something was off about it because why would Dr. P ask us to analyze some random website about hoaxes? As we looked through the DP as a group, we realized that Dr. P had made this website by googling the image that was on the "ABOUT THE AUTHOR" page. We realized that the person was an actor and his real name wasn't the one put on the website. From here on, we helped Dr. P make the website more realistic and change little things about it.

Hoax Story
For my first Hoax Story, I felt really proud of it because I really love to write fake stories or just fictional ones in general. When I was writing it, I didn´t know how to start it especially since my story would be about a ghost boy who mysteriously died near High Tech High Chula Vista years ago, when we were in 6th grade.

I was thinking to first say that a teacher here was responsible for the death but it wasn´t allowed to put the blame on an innocent teacher even if it was fake. So I decided to use a local neighbor from the community who used to work for the family´s company, and was fired from his job for not having enough ¨skills¨ necessary for the job.

My Story So Far
All of the students in our class had to write one where we described how we felt about the project so far vs. when we started it. For everyone, it was different, since we all had different point of views about the project. Some felt like the project wasn´t fun and we lost interest in the beginning and some feel like the project was good and we just needed to develop it more in order for it to come together.

Police Report
For this police report, we worked as a group to figure out ¨Who Killed Winston.¨ For this activity, each of us had to contribute something different to the police report to decide whether Winston committed suicide or he was murdered. In the beginning, the police report was started with a little bit of everything. Half of the group thought that Winston had committed suicide and the other half thought he was murdered. While we were writing this, we changed perspectives based on the evidence that was given to us.

Ad Campaign For Colette

For our ad campaign, we thought of different ways it could attract the attention of a younger and older audience as well. We first came up with the idea to include different ad places and how much money they would cost and then we came up with out description and our title. It's a simple idea in the end and I feel like it doesn't show how much we really put into it. It was really fun and challenging making this but overall, we were able to make a fake ad and learn a skill or two about how to create fake ads.

Fake News Olympics Story

For this, I contributed to writing the description and what the article was about, the Title and looking for a source we could use for the article. Each of us contributed something different for the article but I feel like we could have worked harder on it. It wasn´t good enough to be in the News Story Olympics but our class was still able to win the Olympics against the other class.

My Final Fake News
For my final news story, I did a topic that was important to most teenage girls now a days. Kim Kardashian.

Ever since she has been in fame, her and her family is known to have gotten plastic surgery. And there's always some disagreement on whether she got her behind done or she didn't.

While thinking of what kind of article to write, I decided on doing one where Kim sues her family plastic surgeon for a body modification gone wrong. It would be interesting and, of course, be fake.
The red flags that I have are:
1. This article is not from Comspolitan.
2. Cosmopolitan.com.co is not a real website.
3. The author doesn't exist.
4. Exclamation mark in the title creates emotion at first sight.
5. This article was never published on December 27th, 2016.

Exhibition

The beginning concept for exhibition was to have a cafe where out visitors could walk through, get a little snack or treat, grab an article that would be hanging up on the whiteboards and sit down. They would then read out article and one of us would walk up and help them understand what "red flags" are and that all of our articles are actually fake. For exhibition, trying to make this all come together was hard because we would run into little problems in the beginning and we wouldn't know how we could fix them or they would bring more challenges for us to work with. For my part of exhibition, I had to take pictures and document everything that happened in the exhibition for people to see. I would be walking into one classroom with my camera and take pictures of my classmates and how the exhibition for our team was going. It was different to see my exhibition come to life because at first, I thought out exhibition would be about explaining how we were able to hoax the school into thinking that something was real when it was actually fake. I had a lot of fun working in the beginning on the project and I enjoyed how exhibition turned out in the end. I got a lot of feedback from parents walking into exhibition. I did hear a couple parents say that ours looked like it came together on the last day. It was helpful to hear rough feedback because it makes you think about how you can exhibit something differently and how to change things up a bit. Some parents were kind and told us that they loved the idea and how it felt like a cafe. I truly enjoyed the experience and I would go through it again, but put more effort into my last products that are showcased.