Going into this project I laid out three main goals for myself, all of which I think I was able to achieve one way or another. My first goal was to learn basic HTML and CSS in order to create a website to put our game reviews on. We realized pretty quickly that it was unrealistic to try and make an entire website from scratch without having any prior coding experience, so we decided to use Wix to help us make a website. However, we still wanted to learn some coding so we continued learning from various YouTube videos. We were still able to apply this to our website and customize it further, it just wasn’t used to make the entire website like we had planned. My second goal was to learn more about website creation and design which I also feel like I achieved. We wrote a lot of reviews and had to analyze a lot of games that were all very different. This made me analyze games not just by how much I enjoyed playing them, but also by their graphics, story, characters, music, and more which all add to the quality of the game. My third and final goal was to form connections with my peers and this is the goal I think I had the most success with. Not only did I get to spend time with friends I already had, but I also made new friends by playing different games and reaching out to more people to play with. There are so many different ways to meet people online and find community which I embraced during this project.

                I enjoyed this project a lot, but I don’t know if I would necessarily recommend this exact thing to students in the future. I think that our project worked well given the context of the year and the way Covid has emphasized online connections more than ever before. We also had a shorter time period to work on our projects. However, this won’t be the case during future projects, so while I would definitely recommend something similar to this project, there would probably need to be some changes to help it work better in a more normal year.

 I still think that the school should incorporate some of the wider passion projects into more traditional senior projects. I think that students should be encouraged to explore these passions, especially before going off to college, and that a lot of unique and creative outcomes will come from this, as well as just allowing seniors to really enjoy their projects rather than it being a source of stress after all the work they’ve put in during the last four years. I also think that the school should continue allowing cohorts to work together. Working with a friend who shared my interests helped motivate me throughout the project. We were able to build off of each other and form new and better ideas. It also helps strengthen collaboration and communication skills.

One comment on my last post asked what games we’ve been playing. Our website now has a more complete list of reviews that cover most of the games we’ve been playing, including things like Raft, The Stanley Parable, and Apex Legends. The comment also suggested we organize some of our basic gaming terms alphabetically to make it easier to navigate which is a great idea and we’ll definitely be doing that!