Capstone Project:

The Capstone Project is the end-all-be-all project of Project Lead the Way. It takes place in the fourth year, and can round up everything a student has learned within their four years of high school. My group's capstone project is a project more of awareness, observation, and a willingness to act. We have decided to cover the topic of mental health, specifically with the harmful concept of self-diagnosis. Many of peers have observed their friends mentioning certain medical conditions and states. Some say depression, others say ADHD. Is it truly the case where such a large percent of the student body is affected by these serious mental conditions? I don't believe so. My hypothesis is that students are placing themselves within certain labels in order to associate with other that feel like them. Am I stating that they aren't suffering from something? Not at all. I just believe that diagnosis should be left to a medical professional. Hence, my project's true goal: To reduce self-diagnosis and increase the percentage of the student body that accesses the Santa Monica High School mental health resources. We have compiled an ongoing document in order to show the process of the project.

Update: Our group has acquired two possible mentors. They both seem to head important mental health programs at Santa Monica High School. Their names are Emily Ferro and Shuli Lotan. Ms. Ferro is the mental health coordinator while Ms. Lotan is the head of the Student Wellness Advisory Group (SWAG). We hope that they can provide information that would allow us to narrow down our focus and actually make an impact. They seem eager to assist in our project, and we look forward to their assistance. 

Update: As we are coming to an end of the first semester, the project has taken an interesting turn into subjectivity. Since our project is different than others, specifically in terms of physicality and tangibility, we have had to make arrangements in order to tailor the project's outcome to our needs. Our sketch of the prototype design is less of a drawing and more of a train of thought. Since mental health is an age-old problem that has no true solution, we had to create a survey that appealed to our audience while also asking non-sensitive and clear questions. Due to the nature of project, a 3D CAD design is impossible, so that section of the requirements had to be adapted into a revised version of the survey. 

Update: Now in phase two, our group continues to add and renovate our project to the best of our ability. Now focusing on our competition and rollout of our survey, we face challenges but will not back down. After managing and sorting our resources and potential pitfalls, we have now pushed towards thinking about outreach and "selling" our idea. Here is our rough elevator pitch: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17bFrDpeHPeUguOPZKdJOAlc0QZwktW6n/view