The Big Day! By: Carina, Dennis, and Zabdi

The big day came when we had to present our project to the whole school. At first we were a little nervous presenting our project because we did not know if we would be able to catch people’s interest with our project but we came to realize that many ARS students have a high interest in Bioethics. We were able to engage in many discussions that centered on important medical issues that were addressed in our Ebook. We gathered a lot of attention with our catch phrase which highlights how it is important to know their rights as patients. We realized that putting controversial topics within the Ebook helped to advertise our Ebook better. In addition, we enjoyed talking to the students of how we came to choose our project. We explained to them that they could combine any other pathway with their interests in order to achieve whatever they wished to pursue as a career. For example, our Ebook  combined Law, Engineering and Biomed pathways. We brought two computers with us, one displaying the Ebook and the other one our power point in order to guide our conversations with students. We also had many flyers to hand out which outlined the contents of our electronic book.

The outcome of the project was very different in comparison to what we envisioned in the beginning stages. Our initial plan was to create a game that would incorporate the different aspects of biomedical ethics. However, we found that the time constraints would not allow us to have a good final product so we settled on making a detailed Ebook consisting of different bioethical topics. The students were extremely intrigued with our project to the point in which they asked us where they could purchase this book. Our next step will be to publish our book. We also gathered feedback about certain changes that we could do since the puzzles had titles like abortion, and people kept commenting on how the puzzle was named “Abortion”. Therefore, we are thinking about changing the titles for the puzzles so that people do not misinterpret our intentions.

This project really helped with time management skills. We learned how to make a detailed schedule, and the importance of keeping up with our calendar. Our team gained numerous of communications skills since we realized the importance of this factor within a time-intensive project. We realized from the first few days working on this project how we needed to communicate more with one another in order to ensure that everyone completed their tasks with the best of their abilities. This project resembles a college class, because we all had a goal we had to reach for a specific date and our teacher was not there to guide us through every step of the process, she was just there as our mentor if we had any question. Our process for the bioethics Ebook helped us remain aware of the importance of time management and communication skills which were essential for our Capstone project to succeed.

If we were to give ourselves a grade, we believe that a 97 is appropriate concerning our effort and work ethic. As always there are still improvements that could be done, but we made sure to do the best we could to get ready for the MakerOrama. A few of these improvements include that we should’ve invested a bit more time on the aesthetics of our Ebook. We do have many interesting pictures, but we believe that adding even more interactive icons would increase its appeal. Our group also believes that we could improve our title page so that our book can seem engaging even from the front cover. I also want to include more games for our Ebook so that people would not regard it so much like a textbook. We devoted ourselves to a lot of research time, thus our content is solid. In addition, we did a great job advertising our project and making sure we met deadlines. Our electronic book is still interactive with the features that we chose such as the pictures, hyperlinks, quizzes, and YouTube videos which makes the book better than just reading through it.

Since we are passionate about the different topics incorporated into our Ebook we hope to officially publish the book to make it available on the Apple book store to share this knowledge with other people. We also plan to talk to many of the biomedical teachers to let them know that our Ebook might be a good resource for students interested in medical ethics. Our team plans to advertise our Ebook specifically to biomedical students from the Ann Richards school and possibly to other students from different schools. We also believe that our Ebook will be a good resource for patients at a hospital since it discusses the rights of patients and the appropriate relationship with their doctors. Advertising to this group of people may also be a good idea.

Above all, our team enjoyed the entire process that led to the creation of our Ebook. We loved the amount of research that we invested since we nurtured and expanded our minds. We realized that although we already have our own beliefs concerning specific medical topics, the actual truth is that many issues are not as simple as black and white. We were able to delve into numerous of PRO and CON arguments concerning on issues such as truth telling, euthanasia, and abortion. The students that visited our MakerOrama stand were also surprised about the many sides of one issue. We are pleased to have this type of impact with students, and we hope they will one day decide to read our Ebook.