Chinese+2

By far, the best project that I have completed in my Chinese 2 class was the Spring Festival PowerPoint project. The purpose of the project was to understand more about what the Chinese New Year (also known as the Spring Festival) was, and why it was celebrated.

We needed to include a lot in the PowerPoint. There needed to be a description of how and when the Chinese New Year was celebrated, who celebrated it, and why it was celebrated. We also needed to include a video of the group singing the chorus of the Chinese song Gong Xi (恭喜). In addition to all of that, there also needed to be a diary written in Chinese about what we did to celebrate the Spring Festival. I immediately knew what to write about because the entire class of Chinese 2 students went to Wright State on a field trip to watch performances by Chinese performers and eat traditional Chinese food.

The best thing that I learned from the project was how the Chinese celebrate the Spring Festival. I learned this during the field trip to Wright State. The performers did amazing things like the crowd-wowing magic face changing and the tango on the unicycle.

The biggest struggle that I had throughout the project was writing the diary. It required a lot of translation from English to Chinese, and Google Translate doesn't get the concept of sentence structures, so that wasn't an option. The diary needed to be at least five sentences long, and include all of the activities that were done during the field trip.

In the beginning, a lot of research was done to figure out what the Spring Festival is, and how it was celebrated. Once the research was finished, the information was entered into a PowerPoint. After the basic information was found, it was time for the field trip to Wright State. After the day of celebration, I wrote a diary on the day into the PowerPoint in both simplified characters and pinyin. Then the PowerPoint was complete, and it was time for the class presentation.

The quality that I used the most during the project was inquiry. I needed to be extra curious to find the information, so I was asking questions everywhere. Just before the presentation, I asked myself, "How could I make this diary better?" The answer to that was to add a pinyin version in as well as the simplified characters version. I was asking questions throughout the course of completing the project, and then acting upon those questions. Overall, I received a grade of 100/100 on the PowerPoint.