Welcome to the Capstone Project.
In this course, you get an opportunity to work through everything you've learned through
the other courses and put it together to create your own project and complete it.
We'll start with learning about Story Maps.
So, even though that's going to be the very last thing you do in this project,
I want you to appreciate what they
are and how you might use them from the very beginning.
So, as you're going through
the course you can think about what you might want to do with them.
Then, we'll talk about writing a project proposal and data discovery.
The idea here is that I want you to go through the proposal writing process as a way
of clarifying your thinking and working through what it is you plan to do.
This will then relate to data discovery because
your project will only be as good as the data that's available.
So, if you can't find exactly the data sets that you want,
you may have to modify your proposal and go back and forth a little bit to
make sure that you have a strong proposal with good supporting data.
Then basically, you're going to work through the sections from
the previous courses on things like how to get data in,
what file format you need,
do you need to project the data,
what are you going to do about map design,
what types of analysis you're planning to use.
All of those things will be combined to complete the project.
The whole idea here is, I really want it to be something that you find useful and
interesting and that you can put all this together into a story map.
So, what I want to see at the end is that you have something that you're proud of,
that's visual, compelling, and really shows
off the things that you've learned and the maps that you've made.
So that's it. I hope you're excited to get started.
Don't get too discouraged.
Sometimes this can take a while to get started and find data sets.
So, I encourage you to stick with it.
Talk to different people through the discussion board.
Ask for help if you need it.
Try different things, be flexible in your thinking.
What I really want to see at the end of it is a project that you're really
happy with and that you can show off to your friends,
family, employers, potential clients,
whomever you want to.
I'm really excited to see you get started and I can't wait to see what you come up with.
