1. Take a look back at your essential question. Did you answer it? Do you think that question was a good frame for your Senior Project? If not, how would you phrase that question now?

I think that I created an essential question that helped guide me throughout my final goal of writing a story that deals with all the themes I was aiming to explore in a way that was enriched by the story format. I think that my essential question is not necessarily one that CAN be answered, considering the way everyone approaches it will be different, but I think that I definitely succeeded in exploring it and trying to stretch my understanding to its breaking point.

1. You had a sense of what you would learn and do during Senior Project. Did you have to adjust your expectations?

I think that I spent less time on frustration with coding the project than I had imagined, because once I had decided on a course of action for a particular part of the story, I was able to puzzle my way through the difficult parts. I think if I had more difficult interactive elements to implement I would have struggled more with this project, but since I had pretty clear ideas of the way I wanted this story to look, it made it easier for me to deal with the things I feared I would struggle with.

1. Did you meet your goal(s) for Senior Project? Explain in detail.

I think that I did meet my goals and though I did not finish my story, I have a final product that got to parts of the story I was excited to write and to show to other people. I think the fact that I have a final product that excites me and is being interpreted by others in the way that I intended shows that I succeeded in creating the type of project that I was hoping to. I think that while I would have loved to finish writing my story, I always knew that would be an unrealistic goal for the 6 weeks time I had for this project. However, I think that I finished enough of the story to give a representative snippet of the story I wanted to tell.

1. What challenges did you face throughout your project? How did you overcome those challenges?

Most of my challenges were either motivating myself to read difficult nonfiction books or to work on the coding parts of the project. The tendency with coding is that changing one thing breaks everything else, and in order to make it appear correctly you must comb through the entire thing to find where you have made a mistake. I find this process frustrating, especially with my lack of wider knowledge about coding, but using Twine allowed me to scale these obstacles with its easy to use user interface, so I did not face any challenges I felt wholly unequipped to handle. This was combined by the fact Twine has a thriving userbase, so I was able to look up the problems I was having and use other user’s threads in the Twine forums to help me fix my own work.