We finished our presentation but we still need to work on our process paper due Friday, After Friday the most overwhelming part of the year begins. AP testing will start on monday, both david and i will be taking the environmental science test.

We have finished the power point and website, everything has been finalized for our presentation which will be held in a few minutes. we have been practicing for some time now and will hopefully be ready for the presentation. Two of our judges are already here and we are now preparing the paper work. Hopefully we will do ok.

This is the last class before our presentation, i am currently working on the power point, the website is done. I am going to david's house tomorrow to finish anything that we have left and to practice.

Today we took a picture together for the contact us page on the website.

I finished the website over the weekend, and all that's left is the PowerPoint and practicing for the presentation. As far as judges go, we have 2 for sure, and a third one has noted he interest in judging. Hopefully my brother will be able to get back to me on that within the next couple days.

Thesis is almost done, and all we'll have to work on is the term paper after Friday. This is good, since APs are also coming up soon.

We split up again and continued to work. The website is down to one last page where I outline most of the questions. Thankfully, the formatting of the website is easy and won't take very long to finish.

The PowerPoint is also almost done, and the term paper is coming along also. The paper is due on May 1st, so we will be focusing on other two products and the presentation itself.

As of now, our presentation will fit well within the 20 minute minimum, and may exceed it by a lot. We need to work on cutting down the presentation so that we don't go over the time limit.

Our presentation is almost here, with about a week left. Today we split up, and Jesus worked on the PowerPoint presentation while I worked on the website.

We will begin outlining the presentation itself so we can begin practicing it soon. With Panam coming up soon, we won't be able to work on the weekend, so we need to finish up most of it this week and spend next week practicing.

We emailed out the lists of students that completed our surveys to both Dr. J and Ms. Dewberry. Our second page on the website is being worked on, and it outlines the different types of stem cells.
Further pages are still under consideration, as we have to pick specific topics for each page.

We are still emailing people, searching for our third and final judge. We have a possible judge that has responded, and hopefully he continues to respond.

Our term paper is also being worked on, and will be completed in time.
The PowerPoint presentation has not been started, and we will create it over the weekend.

Today we continued to work on our website, typing up more paragraphs to paste into the website. The additional website tabs are also coming along, with more pictures and our contact information at the bottom. We are still searching for a 3rd judge, with 2 secured.
With our presentation coming up in two weeks or so, we need begin planning our presentation and type up a script, or at least an outline. Once the website is done, we can get started on practice for our presentation.

With the schedule all messed up, we had two B-days in a row.
We managed to secure a second judge today, Keilah's mom. All that remains is to find one last judge. We also went ahead and secured a time slot, and our presentation will be on the 24th of April, at 11:45 AM. Yousef presented today, but we did not get to watch his presentation.

We worked more on our website and the final paper during this class period.

Still only 1 judge, and we need a second one to secure a time slot. I have continued to email other potential judges, but they seem to have lost interest.

One of our other potential judges also stopped responding, but at least we have 1 for sure.
We continued to work on the website and the term paper, and also began brainstorming how our PowerPoint will look like.

Today I contacted my brother, and he has agreed to search within UTD for another judge for us. Hopefully he will be able to find one soon, so we can secure a date for our presentation.

It is getting close, and we are continuing to work on the website and the term paper. The Google docs with the website paragraphs is good, and we are compiling images for our website. Most of the images will come from our survey results, as Google forms automatically creates graphs based on the survey.

I started the final submission paper today, and Jesus began the website. We picked a format, and have started creating our final project. The paper will be 10 pages, with the website as a product. The website will analyze the survey in a way that is easily examined.

So far, we only have two judge who has a couple dates open. However, the dates that they have provided are both conflicting, so unless one of them changes their dates, we will have to continue searching for more judges.

Sadly, none of the other judges have responded, and even if they have, they have stopped contacting us. I have sent some follow up emails out, yet some have not responded to those either. We will continue contacting people we can find, possibly even ask friends to volunteer.

Presentations will start soon, and we will be ready when ours comes!

We started our website today, we were unable to find a template that suite the presentation so we are going to have to re-arrange another template and make it work. Since our presentation will likely not have many pictures, we will either need to generate many graphs or just use text.

Some of our judges have not responded, but we went ahead and emailed another lady suggested to us. Hopefully she will be able to judge our presentation.

As of right now, we only have 1 confirmed judge, so we cannot actually secure a time slot.

We took our panoramic senior picture today which took the majority of the class. We returned and found an additional fourteen responses bringing us to 71 responses. Not our expected number of responses but it will do. We began reviewing the remainder of the responses and have gotten in touch with our now confirmed judges to try and figure out a date for our presentation. David and I are going to be working on the paper and the website for now in order to get ready for our presentation.

Thankfully we received several responses we now have 57 responses. We started reading the responses to get a general idea of what the juniors and seniors of TAG had to say, we will be closing the survey at the end of Tuesday to allow any other students to respond to the survey during the weekend.

We have decided to compile the information we used and create a website along with the results of the survey as a final product. We will begin writing our abstract and final paper and the website next time as well.

We talked to Mr. Templet and Dr. J today, and asked both of them if they would give the extra credit. Mr. Templet agreed to think about it, and Dr. J said she would offer some for juniors as well as seniors. We asked Mr. Correa to send it out today, and hopefully we will have a lot of responses by next class. We plan to close our survey collection by Tuesday.

So far, only one of the judges has replied, and he stopped answering after the first email. Hopefully some of them will get back to us soon.

We decided to add a few more questions to our survey. I am going to be finishing up today and send it out to the senior class due to the lack of responses in the tag group. As an incentive Ms. Dewberry is going to offer a few extra credit points. We have a few possible mentors, (Thank You very much Dr. Frederick Grinnell) we have contacted them and are now working on possible presentation dates.

Today we continued our survey, but we only received 8 responses in total.
We will be sending the survey out to the TAG students, with the incentive of extra credit so we can get more responses. Hopefully a couple teachers will agree to giving extra credit.

We have also tweaked some of our questions based on what some of the responses we got said, and will be adding a couple more questions that we thought of based on their responses.

Our survey should be complete soon, and we will begin creating the final presentation shortly. With most of our research done, completing this will not be a problem.

We were able to finish editing the survey and share the link on the Tag Magnet facebook page composed by hundreds of previous TAG alumni. Hopefully we receive several responses. Further research has shown us that embryonic stem cells are becoming less controversial because of new findings and new procedures that can rid of the need for embryos such as the carbon nanotube scaffolds we discussed in past posts.

After the long weekend due to the snow that settled in, we are back continuing to work on our survey. It is almost complete, and we are just tweaking some of the pages, and will release it by this class or next class.

We have also continued to do research on stem cells, to solidify our knowledge of the topic.
The search for judges continues, and after the survey we will be asking people on the Facebook group to help judge our presentation. Since other students have found success here, we are hoping to also find two judges and get a time spot quickly.

After spring break, there isn't much time to work so we need to finish this quickly.

Today we compiled a spreadsheet with the responses so we can view them in an organized fashion. Ravnik gave us suggestions, and we made those changes to the survey. I have asked Amy Lupica to also take a look at the survey, and will be making any changes she suggests to it. Once we do this, the survey will be complete and ready for sending out.

The spreadsheet had to be formatted to fit responses that were longer than expected, as some have shorter answers than others. Thankfully, the survey automatically sends the responses to the spreadsheet, so it shouldn't be too hard to format all of the responses.

For sure by next class our survey will be ready to send out. We will be asking Mr. Correa to send it out, as well as posting the link up here.

Today we finished the survey, and asked Alexander Ravnik, a classmate who sits nearby, to complete it. He is knowledgeable in the science field, and we wanted some feedback on our form. He completed it near the end of class, and next class we will tweak our survey with his suggestions. For the most part, the survey itself was good and only required minor changes. After this it should be good for sending out to other people, hopefully by next class period.

We may also want to ask one or two other classmates to complete the survey and give feedback before officially sending it out.

Still working on the survey today, but we realized we had made a mistake and accidentally released it early. We already had one person complete the survey even though it wasn't finished. Even though it was a mistake, this helped us gain insight on what we needed to improve on and what questions we were missing, and we added some sections on personal information to help gain a better idea of our audience.
We closed the survey for now, and worked with some of the formatting to make it look more appealing. It is almost done and should be available for use within the next week or so.
We also considered requiring people to log into Google so we can see who is actually responding, but since not everyone has an account we decided against it.

We added a new page to our survey making it a four page survey. These new questions will be used to figure out how age and education levels affect the responses. They will also allow us to verify the merit and how trustworthy the responses are. We are still rewording and making sure that bias will not have a prominent effect in the responses. In this page we also added a few questions on cell viability.

Our survey now has multiple pages, with the format being:
Page 1 - general questions on prior knowledge
Page 2 - general stem cell research information and more questions
Page 3 - more specific information pertaining to the ethics and opinions of others

Further pages are still being considered, and wording has been a concern that is harder than it seems. The survey must be as unbiased as possible, and finding the right way to convey information without swaying the opinion of the survey taker is difficult.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1b-CuYzpDkulwgev4R3SaqW0yj7YXLZRxgXIypz36Z_8/viewform

We are unsure if this link will work since it is a "view form" link for our gmail accounts. Once we release the real thing, we will be posting the link up here.

Today we began our survey, using Google Forms.
While figuring out how to work the document, we also encountered the problem of wording and how to prevent people from accidentally looking ahead.

Using multiple pages seems to be the best way to avoid revealing information ahead of time. We will be releasing this survey via email as soon as we complete it and figure out a way to deliver it to everyone. Our best bet for doing this is asking Mr. Correa to send it out, like how Steven sent it out.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1b-CuYzpDkulwgev4R3SaqW0yj7YXLZRxgXIypz36Z_8/viewform

Today we continued our research and are searching up vehicles to deliver our survey. With the April deadline fast approaching, we need to push our survey and deliver it soon so that we have time to compile our data.

"Online Surveys

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that online surveys are becoming the most popular and cost effective type of surveys. The technology has grown rapidly and the number of people able to access the internet has grown as well. On a global scale, online surveys are the most cost-effective way to reach the greatest number of people.

However, email inboxes are quickly becoming the same as the mailboxes outside our doors, stuffed with mail we don’t want. This makes it easy to lump e-mailed survey invitations into the ‘junk mail’ category. But once someone responds to your survey, you will get the results immediately, eliminating the long wait times of mailed surveys."

https://www.nbrii.com/blog/what-type-of-survey-method-is-best/

We decided a while back to use an online method, and using Google forms seems the best route to take for this. We will begin working on it next class, since we spent time exploring our other options during this one.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/272284.php

In this new report researchers bring the idea that embryonic stem cells are controversial but have been some of the most promising so far. As mentioned in our presentation we brought up the idea that the use of technology could push the public acceptance of such procedure, recently a team at the University of California started cultivating SC using carbon nanotubes as scaffolds that imitate the supporting cells in which the stem cells grow in the body.

Most of class was taken up discussing our presentations with Mr. Correa, and after, while reviewing Dr. Grinnell's excerpt he sent us a while back, we decided to take a closer look into the Helsinki Code of Ethics. This set of ethics covers a range of topics on human research, and other things.

We have also decided to expand our presentation to examples of other medical practices, such as in vitro fertilization, that were at first not accepted, but later reconsidered. Stem cell research could possibly be another example of a medical procedure that is later accepted with advances in technology and a change in societies perspective.

Today we did our presentation and listened to other people present. Wednesday will be the last day of presentations. 

Today the next set of thesis presentation began, and we spent today's class listening to other presentations.

Mr. Correa went over how we needed to find judges, and finding 2 will be required before we can give them a definite date. Since mentors cannot be judges, we will have to find someone besides Dr. Grinnell. By giving them a range of dates, we can find one that will work for both of our mentors. We will begin searching for judges.

We also started a new PowerPoint for our presentation next week. Since we have new data and have condensed it, the old one will not work. We also want to change the theme as well, just to change things up.

Jesus and I both spent a while designing our college squares on the cabinet as well.

We will continue working next period, and will likely meet up over the weekend to finalize our presentation and get the timing and such down.