The Capstone Bootcamp was an amazing experience and abundantly helpful for our team. Prior to the Bootcamp our project idea was to help prevent the spread of misinformation in digital media, provide people with an unbiased news source, and create a community with civil political discourse. Although there are many causes of misinformation, the Bootcamp helped us realize we need to narrow the vision for our project and figure out how to attack the problem in a feasible way where our impact could be shown.
Throughout the Bootcamp we worked as a team to zoom in on specific problems that we could try to mitigate and creatively think of solutions we could implement. Furthermore, the Bootcamp helped us to narrow our vision and create a decisive plan to move forward with. For our project, the insights of others during the Bootcamp helped us realize a new target could be to raise media literacy by providing convenient resources people can use in order to make them more informed and prevent misinformation from affecting their individual thoughts, beliefs, and actions. We were able to pinpoint research ideologies and figure out exactly what the information we wanted to collect would be. Additionally, our team found the 5 whys and fishbone activities very helpful in finding more specific root causes for the broad problems we originally sought to address. We learned several new ways to effectively convey our ideas and develop strategies for implementation. Additionally, we were able to open up to new research strategies, not only for learning more about the topics of disinformation, polarization, and media but also for receiving feedback. For example, we are now planning on collecting testimonials through a discussion board post on Reddit or another site. Having the opportunity to interact with the other teams, and receive guidance from different campus organizations was an incredible experience and extremely helpful for our project.
NonPolar Team: Aaron Williams, Corey Schneck, Siddarth Marthi, Adam Aguilar, Jacob Domagalski
