Civics Project Reflection
A few weeks ago, in humanities, we chose to split up into groups and do a project under the category of civics. We chose our groups by having a discussion about how often we work with a few of our peers and organized ourselves into groups with classmates that we haven’t worked with much this year and in seventh grade. Originally I was in one of the two, two person groups and was paired up with David, but after talking, we decided to collaborate with Max and Sofia, (the other two person group). Our project plan was to hold a realistic presidential race with presidential and vice presidential candidates. We then made advertisements acting like actual politittinions that we thought were were likely going to run in the 2012 election. We did our best to act like our given politicians and use their opinions in our ads. Each group (David and I were one group and Max and Sofia were the other) was a different political party and made one promotional advertisement and one attack ad. David and I were representing the republican party acting like Sarah Palin and Ron Paul and Max and Sofia we representing the democratic party acting like Barack Obama and Hilary Clintin. Towards the end of our project dead line we hosted a showing of our ads to the fifth through eighth graders and had them vote on which candidate they thought would be better for our country based on the ads we made. Then we calculated the votes we received and made an info-graphic to show to the class.
I think that we produced an average project. I wish that I could have done more with it and put a little bit more time and energy into the detailed of the project. For example, while presenting our ads we were asked the question “How do we vote? Do we vote for the candidate based on our already existing opinions or do we vote on which ad had the most quality?”. We answered with a different answer than we wrote on our project description and I believe that that probably changed a lot of he peoples votes. another example was when people were voting we realized about half way through that we forgot to have people write their names on their papers. We had to have everyone collect their papers agin and write their name on it. I think that we should have been more prepared to present and explained a little more about our project and what to do to the people voting.
One of the things that we really wanted to learn more about from this project was the difference between a promotional ad and an attack ad and which one was more effective. I feel like I leaned the basics about what they are and making one of each helped me understand the differences between them. While presenting our ads we decided to show the promotional ads from each group first, have them vote ad then show he attack ads and vote again. This way we thought that this could give a clearer indication if their opinion changed after seeing the attack ad. On the ballet that we gave to the classes we asked a question that said, “Which type of ad influenced your opinion the most?”. Most of them marked Promotional over the attack ad. I find this interesting because a lot of the students and teachers changed their opinions after seeing the attack ad. I think this also has to do with the quality of the ad.
Another thing that we wanted to learn from this project that we put on our expectation list was “Does the appearance of the people in the ad change the vote, compared to the words they are saying?”. I think from this project I learned that not so much the appearance of the person or people in the ad but the way the speak effects the vote. After our presentation and voting session, some people came up to me and said that the way David spoke was distracting and took away from the seriousness of the ad. Some of them said that that was what changed their vote. Also, on one of the ballots that we received has a side note next to on of the candidates ads that said the ads had a stronger opinion as well as volume. I think it is interesting that something as small as the volume of the ad could change someone’s vote.
I think that our group participation was a little uneven. Some of it was uncontrollable but I feel that (at least with me and David) I did a lot of the work and kept having to remind him to stay on track. I admit that sometimes I got distracted as well but I was the one that did the majority of the work. Max and Sofia chose to each make one of the ads instead of doing both of the ads together like David and I did. I have mixed feelings about this because I know if we followed this method at least one of our ads would have been very different than it is. I think by us choosing our method I took the safe road, I didn’t want to risk the votes of having a bad ad, so I took on most of both. Maybe, next time I could have given one ad to David and just let him do it and risk the votes. It was a trade off.
I definitely would not say this is the best project I have done. From the beginning I know that this would not be one of the most elaborate projects due to time constraints, group member and my limited knowledge about civics. I think that I worked fairly hard on it but it doesn’t really show. I know if I had more time we could have added to the project and maybe could have showed our ads to people outside of the school and had them vote and maybe that would have changed our end results. I came into this project knowing very little about this topic I learned way more than I thought I would about civics and about the opinions of severel canidates. For the most part we met most of our expectations and created an okay project.
