I went into this with a plan, and came out of it without one. What I wanted to do was give a glimpse into what the city of Boston— and some of the surrounding neighborhoods—looked like to the detached eye. These photos are vignettes of a sort, in that they capture a real moment of a real story in time. Take a look, and try to figure out the place, time, or story in the photos. They may not be perfect, complete, or beautiful, but they are alive. These photos were purposely unlabeled and untitled within the show so that the viewer is forced to think more about what and where they represent and come from. In doing this, details become more pronounced and important. I want people to be inside the scene, rather than be outside looking in. I hope you enjoy the show!

Most modern games treat gameplay and stories as distinct and opposing forces. They feature primarily linear narratives that fail to change substantially in response to player interaction. Frustrated with this restrictive approach to interaction and storytelling, I spent a semester exploring alternate game designs. My research culminated in an online interactive game design document for a unique game without the shortcomings in these games. Time Mansion: Take Back the Future is a concept for a pointandclick puzzle adventure game that allows players to influence a dynamic story inspired by Agatha Christie mystery fiction. Players travel back in time to influence the interactions between computercontrolled characters.

Synopsis: Inspired by my love of sailing and history, I sculpted my AHS Capstone project into an investigation based in these subjects. The resultant paper is a discussion of the relationships between engineering and design, and their influence on fabrication techniques in sailboat design. To this end, I discuss the designer Nathanael Herreshoff, the America’s Cup, and the influence of the US Navy.

I examined media and textbooks aimed at children and analyzed what assumptions and lessons they contain about human rights in historical and colonial contexts. I then gave a presentation on my findings and on why these issues matter.

Over the last five hundred years, the North American landscape has been shaped by human expansion. In that time, the attitude toward nature has shifted from respect to attempts at domination. Urbanization and sprawl have worn away at the human-nature bond and living spaces once sculpted out of forests are now deposited on bulldozed lots. This semester, I created this series of photographs to tell a story of how our connection to the surrounding natural environment is realized through the homes we build. This story is spatial rather than temporal and is not intended as a criticism of city life or suburban sprawl. While preparing this collection, I was struck by small modernist villas encompassed by towering oak trees and by old farm houses framed by perfectly manicured lawns. The following images aim to remind of the ways in which we can design human environments to harmonize with those already present.

As someone who has been in and around the theater his entire life, I knew that my AHS Capstone project would involve some sort of production. Luckily for me, Claire Barnes was already planning on putting on a production of one of my favorite musicals, Next to Normal, for her capstone project. I hopped on board and now we are playing Diana and Dan, the wife and husband leads of the show. My project has a major section and a minor section. The major section is the actual acting. As someone who has never formally taken an acting class, I am embracing this opportunity as a great chance to learn in a private, personal matter. In addition, this show is giving me an acting opportunity that will extend my range as an actor. Actors have types - the typical sort of character they play. For me, that means the young, optimistic, tenor love interest lead. Playing Dan is a challenge for me because it is essentially the opposite of my type: older, tired, and fatherly. The very intense dramatic nature of this show also provides me an interesting opportunity because I rarely am involved in very dramatic scenes. I am excited at the opportunity to portray this role to the best of my abilities. The minor section, but by no means less important section, is research into mental illness. As part of developing my character, I am looking into how mental illness can affect social life, especially amongst family members. I will also be writing a note that will be in the playbill, discussing the role of mental illness in a family environment. I hope that this research will assist in my character development to create a deeper, more believable persona.

I am attracted to working in metal because it is a medium of many contradictions. The heft of the metal grounds it to the earth, yet it still manages to dance in curves and valleys. Through its malleability and ductility, metal is able to be moved atom by atom, and shaped by a hand which gifts it the qualities of movement. From this movement, the piece can come to an equilibrium and arrive at the final form. This final form is a suspension—a balance of forces compressive and in tension. It’s seemingly static—but in reality, very much alive.

One reason I wanted to explore high speed was to branch out artistically. In the past, I've specialized in macro still life photographs. Macro embodies the idea that everything is amazing if you look at it closely enough. It makes tiny worlds all around us appear, for a moment, larger than life, stimulating the imagination. To me, the capture of things that are small on the time axis (as opposed to the size axis) seemed analogous but more technically challenging. The \staging" of a transient event is an art of its own. Some, like Reugels, have it down to a science. I don't, but through this work I gained a deep enough understanding of the process to have some consistency of quality in my photographs while exploring different materials.

For my AHS Capstone project, I was invited to teach in a seventh grade classroom at the Fuller Middle School in Framingham, MA. I taught seven class sessions, dividing them into four parts to do a crash-course in various types of engineering. Two classes were spent teaching computer programming concepts using Scratch, two classes involved learning about circuits through MaKey MaKeys, one class was spent on a design exercise to encourage creativity and designing for real people, and two classes involved an active build where each student built their own custom standing desk converter using cardboard. The lesson plans and teaching materials used for this project are included in this document.

I set out to connect three subjects with this project: my AHS concentration in media studies, science fiction and fantasy media, and education. The intersection of these topics is the result of my project: a curriculum for a media studies course analyzing common themes and structures used in the representation of fictional worlds and their connections to modern and historical cultures and societies. The media I explored and class discussion prompts I created raise a variety of questions and will spur conversation on philosophy, ethics, religion, race, sexuality, and the foundation of them all, identity. This project has provided a unique opportunity for me to go through the experience of analyzing books, film, and television from my perspective as a student, but also from the perspective of a teacher. In forming my exploration into a cohesive curriculum, I worked to create an overarching structure that builds up new ideas and concepts in both a logical and interesting order. As the course concludes, the topics and the relationships among them should begin to crystalize and connect, ideally in a manner that reveals as many new questions as answers and leaves students excited to continue to further pursue the ideas of the course in their own media consumption. The following document includes the course syllabus and lesson plans for a half-semester course that I will co-teach with my advisor, Prof. Maruta Vitols, in Spring 2016.

At the most fundamental level Augustine's Confessions is Augustine of Hippo sharing his story of conversion to Christianity. This story, however, doesn't fit neatly into what one might typically imagine when contemplating the process by which a future saint finds God. Indeed, a large part of what makes Augustine's journey so delightful is that in many ways it was a very personal and common project: finding one's place in the world.

Through our faces, we express emotions, form relationships, and sense the world. It’s natural for humans to want to reproduce this critical element of our identities, and portraiture photography is a popular art genre centered around the face. We live in an age of digitally massaged portraits designed to flatter the subject in the context of the society’s beauty standards. In my series, Faces, I’ve subverted this model—nobody’s pores have been edited out, nobody’s face has been manipulated. Here, I have deliberately taken up methods and techniques that are foreign to the digitally “perfected” image and alien to my “digital native” age. In this essay, I describe some of my technical and artistic choices in documenting faces and I suggest how they engage with the tradition of portraiture. The unvarnished, unretouched examination of people's faces is novel for the subjects of Faces, leading one of the subjects to remark that she “didn't know [her] face looked like” what was reproduced in the picture I took of her.

For my AHS Capstone project, I researched the life and times of Ada Lovelace, a 19th century noblewoman widely regarded as the world's first programmer for her work with Charles Babbage on his mechanical computers. After outlining my historical research and developing multiple graphical representations of my story (plot plots? :D), I created a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of my novel to guide my writing process. My final submission is this outline as well as the completed first two chapters, which cover the events of a few days in young Ada Lovelace's life.

This project is an exercise in digital painting, world building, and self-indulgence. My goal for it has always been to take a ‘pet’ idea I’ve had and expand on it as much as I could within a semester. While I’ve done digital art for a few years, I wanted to do an original project with a cohesive environment that conveyed something on a narrative level; both things that were new to me, as prior to this I was mainly concerned with rendering detail or primarily character focused. Through exposure in the gaming and film industry, I wanted to do the work of a concept artist, who creates illustrations of areas that do not exist to be used in media. For this project I created three large paintings as well as an array of sketches of a world built over human society dominated by fish-people. I defined the world of the compositions to be one where a race of humanoid fish creatures emerged from the sea, killing all humans, and integrating into the human infrastructure around them.

Although a photograph is an image of the past, it can only exist in the present and is thus subject to interpretation in the immediate context of whoever is viewing it. I explored the essence of photography by exploring contrast, a fundamental element of photography. My exploration is framed by a pursuit of basic geometric elements in my environment: the building blocks of all forms, whether natural or artificial. By focusing on elemental themes (contrast and geometry), I directed my energy at expressing my perception of the essence of photography.

Optical illusions are interesting within scientific disciplines because they lie on the border of what we are able to see. Different kinds of optical illusions may be better explained by one discipline or another. Some optical illusions trick us because of the properties of light and the way our eyes work, and are addressed by biology and perhaps optics, while other illusions depend on a “higher” level of processing which is better addressed by psychology. Some illusions can only be fully explained using knowledge of more than one discipline. When there are both biological and psychological explanations, they may both be right. In this paper, I cover some relevant theories from the fields of biology and psychology, and then apply them to four different optical illusions.

The transition from praxis to theoria—from mathematics as tekhne (techniquesfor dealing with practical activities) to mathematics as episteme and gnosis (a form of pure knowledge)—occurred only once in human history, namely, among the classical Greeks. No earlier mathematical tradition gives evidence of such a theoretical dimension,and where one encounters mathematical theory among later traditions, it is in the context of some manner of borrowing from the ancient Greek precedent. The goal of this paper is to examine the above “Greek precedent,” their process of developing mathematics as well as other scientific theory. We will first examine the rise of rational thought and beginnings of deduction in the Archaic Era, using Thales as representative of the time period. Then we will see how Aristotle added the syllogism and emphasis on observation during the Classical Era in order to enhance and codify deductive reasoning. Finally, Archimedes enters the picture and introduces an inductive method of discovery that crosses the disciplines of mathematics and mechanics.Throughout the paper are examples of how the Greeks applied their mathematical and scientific knowledge in order to demonstrate what new developments in reasoning added to the times.

I have always been interested in both 19th century Spanish piano music and Jewish religious music, and I have spent my four years at Olin investigating the connection between the two. While learning about that connection through music and history classes, I worked steadily on composing a three-part musical piece that captured my understanding and displayed the relationship between the two different musical styles, and their influence on my own personal style. Can a musical piece be organized in a way that explains those connections to a listener? Can a musical piece take clearly separate multiple styles of music and connect them in an reasonable manner? I believe it can. My composition will have a large and complicated structure which I plan on explaining and justifying to my audience, along with a written description of the background and education that inspired my work. My objective is for an individual to read my written explanation, then listen to the musical work and clearly recognize the connection between Spanish piano music and Jewish religious music.

For my AHS Capstone, I have been working with Tom Kochem on writing the screenplay[1] for the movie Yellow Lights, which we are also producing, directing, and editing. We have been working on this screenplay since June 2005 and have essentially finished the production version of the screenplay for the start of filming in early December 2005. Between June and December, the screenplay will have gone through over 80 revisions and over 300 hours of work put in from both Tom and me. [1] Throughout this annotation, I will interchangeably use the words script and screenplay. In film, the main difference is that a screenplay is a script written to be filmed, instead of performed in a theater.

There is general confusion amongst many young students about what an engineer does. Some common misconceptions of an engineer’s occupation include driving a train or repairing a VCR. This narrow definition of engineering is misleading many students, leaving them uninformed about the possible career opportunities available to them. This includes females, who historically have been underrepresented in engineering due to such factors as lack of encouragement and inhibiting environments. Therefore, there is a significant need to attract students of both genders equally into engineering careers to create a balance workforce.

I’ve been interested in languages since 3rd grade when I started taking Spanish language classes. In 7th grade I switched my focus to the French language and after 3 years of French I decided to spend a year abroad in Belgium to completely immerse myself in the French language and culture. That experience made me curious about the way in which languages are learned and how children learn them with more ease and success than adults. To combine my love of languages and education, I chose to do a 4 month project on immersion schooling in the hopes of making a useful guide for others to learn about the idea.

After studying formal theories of dance composition, I choreographed 3 dance pieces and documented my own choreographic process. I then compared these with the processes of professional choreographers to determine the differences.

The goal of my AHS Capstone project has been to analyze the role of computers and the computing gap during the period between Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Specifically, I attempted to identify the means by which computers and the computing gap affected the Soviet Union during this active period of shifting economic, political, and social structures. I specifically discuss the economic consequences of the computing gap, and analyze the effect the relative backwardness in computing technology had on the Soviet Union, both in general, and in relation to the restructuring effort orchestrated by Gorbachev as part of perestroika. I then discuss the political consequences of the attempted rapidintroduction of computers during the Gorbachev reforms. Finally, I attempt to quantitatively describe the scope and magnitude of the computing gap, and to draw some broad conclusionsabout the role computer technologies play in geo-politics.

Though formal and informal forms of any language always diverge to some degree, the particular political and social influences on French have created a marked difference between the textbook and colloquial varieties of the language. For non-native speakers who are proficient in the textbook variety, sudden immersion into the vernacular French culture can be a shock and can create misunderstandings between native and non-native speakers. This paper will provide the potential traveler with a historical understanding of how the two threads of the language evolved. It will also look at political and social influences on modern French and introduce the reader to situations for which formal French education may not prepare.

Musicians generally do not divide themselves with respect to their ability to hear. Instead, musicians rally around how or why they create music: players self-assemble under a common genre, instrument, style or type of ensemble. Musicians rarely question how a peer perceives sound if that sound is recognized as musical. However, hearing ability is an important distinction that elucidates important and unobvious opportunities for exploring what music means to musicians. This project is a study of musicians who fall at different places on the continuum that connects hearing and deafness. The goal of this study is to create a starting point for musicians to explore how others who share their passion can approach and perceive music in radically different ways.