About MeHello! Welcome to my Apollo Website! My name is Lakshita Paidipati and I am currently a junior at Central York High School. I am fifteen years old. A couple years ago, during my high school orientation, I learned about this program called APOLLO, a project-based learning platform that combines English, Art and History. Intrigued, I signed up for it, and I think it might've been one of the best decisions of my life. Through APOLLO, I found an outlet in which I could pursue my passions and manage my learning in a way I could never do in other traditional classes. With APOLLO, students are allowed to manage their own time, create their own schedules, decide what they are learning about, and how to put the lessons they have acquired into practice through a final product.
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About APOLLOAPOLLO is a project-based program that fuses together English, Art and History and it began at Central York High School in 2015. It was founded by three high school teachers, James Grandi, Wesley Ward, and Gregory Wimmer ("The APOLLO Dads"). After witnessing how students lost interest with traditional lesson plans and lectures, they wanted to find a way to solve this problem. And together, in their resolve, they created APOLLO. APOLLO is more than just a class, it is a community of talented individuals with a love of learning. We support each other through our trials and learn from one another as best as we can. This mission has inspired many students and caused APOLLO, through the years to grow and catch the attention of numerous media groups, as you can see below:
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Step 1: Ideation
To make the project, one must come up with an idea on what it could possibly be about first. So, at the beginning, we must come up with topics that we want to base our projects around and potential products to produce that align with a specific thinking skill. Thinking skills are learning objectives that we must achieve and showcase throughout our process. All in all, we produce four projects throughout a semester in APOLLO, and each project focuses on a different thinking skill. For example, Project 1 is usually about Contextualization, while Projects 2, 3 and 4 are about Perspective, Reasoning and Synthesis respectively. Once we have come up with an initial idea for a topic, we complete the Project Planning Documents and detail our ideas to the teachers. |
Step 2: Incubation: After ideation, we go around in a group of four to six other people and discuss our ideas with them and vice versa. To purpose is to receive feedback and a different perspective on the topic. This helps us become more open-minded and it encourages us to more readily accept the ideas of others.
Step 3: Research: Once our topics are finalized, we begin research and browse the internet and look at sources of any kind to gain information and become an expert within our topic. During the process, we also record our information and site our sources. Step 4: Communication: One thing that must be maintained throughout the entire process is communication with our peers and teachers. We must gain feedback from others to fully understand the scope of our topic and broaden our perspectives. |