Criterion E: Evaluation "Cell Phones"

The unit question was “How to inventors come up with their inventions?” and what I concluded was: First, you have to have a big idea. You have to solidify that idea, and commit yourself to it. Second, have the resources, materials, and perseverance to build, test, and tweak. Through trial and error, you make the invention complete. This unit was fun, since I was doing something I was interested in. Technology was always one of my major interests, and I always love to see new and amazing tech coming into reality. The Cell Phone is definitely an important invention, and I personally would not be able to live without it.

Investigation:

The Investigation was easy because we had the sheet that had all the basic information about the cell phone. The sheet had easy and understandable text so I had no trouble.

Plan:

I chose to make a movie, giving basic information about the history of the cell phone, and then a video about the evolution of cell phones since the beginning. I wanted to something fun, and not something boring like an essay. I had fun doing this movie, all the editing and adding music and all that stuff. I was happy I was doing something in a sort of “official” type of way.

Create:

First I needed download an evolution of cell phones video off of YouTube, and that was only available on computers that had RealPlayer support. All the computers in the I.T lab did, so I couldn’t do it at home. Once I downloaded it and mailed it to myself, I had realized that it was in “flv” format, which means it can only be played on flash players. I used Mrs. Wilson’s computer to change the format, but I didn’t work out so well. Once I got home, I used an online video format converter to change it to MPEG-4 format, so I could use it on iMovie. I started to edit the video, but I couldn’t get it the way I wanted, and I realized I had iMovie ’08, and iMovie ’09 had all the new features, but I couldn’t download it because it costs money. So I downloaded it the illegal way. Haha. Then I started to make the movie and it turned out really well. I realized I needed more information than just the evolution of cell phones, but I couldn’t make slides on iMovie. Luckily the other day, I found out there’s a way to take a screenshot of the screen already built into Mac books so I took advantage of that, made slides on PowerPoint, and took pictures of that, and used it as a slideshow of pictures on the video. All I needed to do now was add music, and the final touches. Unfortunately we had moved on to the new unit too quickly and I had no time to make a survey. From the comments I got from the video, people thought my video was good. That was a relief. However, I had forgotten to include the unit question in my video. Hahaha =]