Every year, CIT hosts Senior Capstone Extravaganza Night, an event for CIT seniors to present their projects and answer questions. A capstone project is a long term independent research project with the help of professional mentors. It is an opportunity for learners to research on something they are really passionate about and get school credit for it. The two semester course is for students in the center and taught by Mrs. Lynne Norris and Mr. Will Caudle.

  Inspiration can come from anywhere at anytime. For these CIT students, some knew from freshman year what they want to do for the Capstone.

 “I was inspired to do it because I have had a passion for community service during all four of my high school years. [For my project] I chose the game design concentration area and made a two-dimensional platformer game that teaches about community service,” senior Jocelyn Marencik said.

  Others got last minute inspirations from outside of school.

  “My inspiration for [my project] actually stems from my Latin teacher, Mr. Penland. We were on the Latin library website looking at what resources we had available [for an assignment] when someone asked why so many hyperlinks were broken. That gave me the idea to create a Latin translator that uses neural machine translation. The idea is to make it really quick for researchers and historians to translate Latin texts,” senior Neha Dil said.

  The projects are in many areas like film, education, and video games.

 “My project is a survival game where the player has to collect, manage, and ration resources in order to survive. It was nice to be able to make a game that I can claim as mine, but there were certainly aspects of the class that I could have managed better,” senior Jackson Fales said.

 For students who are thinking about the class next year, here’s a tip from one of our seniors.

  “Find a good mentor who has the time to help and choose something that you really want to do. My project was not a hundred percent successful, but even then, I thought that the experience was very fulfilling and unique. I would highly recommend this to everyone I know,” Dil said.

  This year, the extravaganza will take place on May 29 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the main hallway.