Natalie Wiehagen

Approaching the last week of working on our Minecraft game, my group knew there was still some work to be done in order to make our game the best it can be before the due date, on Sunday. We were excited for Monday, because we finally had the opportunity to let other teams play our game, and on Tuesday, we were given some feedback to improve our game, including adding some torches to light up some dark, hard to see places through the long, difficult maze, but overall most people enjoyed our game. I found it very helpful and interesting for others to be able to play our game, and help us with last minute things we were unsure on whether to change or not. On Wednesday, during our conferences, Casey and Madison continued figuring out the spawn point situation, and Mr. Love luckily helped our group out, so by the end of class on Thursday, the spawn point was finally set up after much frustration and confusion. This was probably the most challenging task our group had to do through this whole process of creating a unique game. The spawn point had to be reworked many times, and took several commands and codes to set up properly. To conclude, I am very impressed with our game, and feel as though it is very unique and definitely fun to play, due to all the decorations, and overall design. As this project comes to an end, I would have to say that I am very proud of the final product of my group’s game, and of our progress. We all have come such a long way, from not knowing anything about Minecraft to now having our own game to play. I can now say I am a hundred percent confident that our game is the best it can be and is ready to be zipped and dropped into our folder.

After the second week of building our Minecraft game, I would have to say my group has made some amazing progress! After much frustration and a few obstacles along the way, I can say that our game is gradually coming together. The most challenging task this week was setting up a spawn point which sounds so simple, yet takes many commands and codes to set up properly. Thankfully, Madison and Casey worked together on this, while Whitney and I finished building the maze. It is really interesting to look back a couple weeks ago, when we barely knew how to play Minecraft and truly had no idea what kind of game we wanted to build for this project or even how to do it, and now we can say our game is almost complete, and that we feel pretty confident in our Minecraft abilities. It has been a very long process of building, and fitting all sorts of signs, dead ends, and decorations into our game, and we still have a few little issues to fix until our game is complete. Although we still have some more work to do, I am confident enough to say that by Sunday night, when our Beta Zipped game is dropped into our folder, it will be ready for new people to come play and explore. We are also hoping to get some quality feedback in order to make our game even better, with outside views, but we are all hoping it will be appealing to most people, especially those who thoroughly enjoy playing video games, and figuring out puzzles and mazes. To conclude, I would have to say that I am very proud of my group and our progress, considering none of us had ever played many video games before, let alone Minecraft. Together as a group, we have put all our heads together and used many online resources to work efficiently as a team to make sure we had some fun with this project and built the best game we could; I can’t wait to see the final product! 

After the first week of truly building and creating our Minecraft game, my group has decided that the name of our game will be Maze Craze. Throughout the week, we have formulated a theme, setting, obstacles, and have built a number of walls and paths for our game. We have designed Maze Craze for people that may like to solve puzzles. My group had spent half of the week developing the details of the game, and the other half crafting our game. There are many obstacles we put in our game, including creepers, pigs, sheep, cats, zombies, lava, trap doors, and other complications. We focused on making our game in a Halloween type theme, truly capturing the fall time, with even a jack-o-lantern being the player of the game. Our maze even lights up due to the amount of glowstone that was placed carefully around the perimeter, since the game will be played mostly at night. This was part of the challenge, being that the player must be able to safely make their way around the maze, while collecting resources and avoiding obstacles as fast as possible through the dark. We particularly thought that the pumpkins, wheat, hay bales, and corn added a flare of fall to dress up the scenery of our maze, to find it also visually appealing, which we thought was important for any gamer. We plan to keep working on our game a little each day to build up our maze, and try to make it more and more complicated, but still manageable for any player. Our game is designed for anyone really, and we hope many people will enjoy it. We have come across a few problems in designing our game, but have fixed them gradually, and we know our game is going to be awesome by the end of this project!

It was a Thursday morning around 8am, where I didn’t have class until later on, and I was just waking up to not just check my text messages, but my social media sites, particularly Facebook and Twitter. I usually do this every morning and it delays me getting out of bed until I feel as though I have covered what has gone on from the time I went to sleep to the time I got up. I sometimes feel like I have missed so much, and feel so much better after getting updated. I am in this same rhetorical situation each day while I bet many other young adults are too. Personally, I believe this part of my daily routine acts as my purpose for waking up each morning because starting to read long articles, statuses, and tweets gets my brain flowing and ready to wake up and start my day. I feel as though the biggest constraint of this situation is time. It is so easy to waste time sitting in bed, starting out as minutes and turning into hours, because social media is constantly updating by the second. This has made me late to things before because well, social media is addicting! I am the only audience member of this situation, although I know many others are checking their news feeds each day. It is crazy to think that years ago, this sites didn’t exist, when today, people even use them for work and school. Many celebrities even have these sites to keep in touch with this fans and maintain their popularity. Overall, this rhetorical situation will continue to be a part of my life each day, and it was interesting to analyze this situation which I don’t think twice about doing each day.

Sponsors of Literacy, written by Deborah Brandt, explains literacy, its history, and also explains how influences form the way we learn and practice literacy. Brant’s argues that the forces that influence one’s literacy are sponsors of literacy, which becomes the exigence or purpose of this article. Forces are those who influence an individual’s literacy such as parents, siblings and teachers, along with culture, language, and politics. It’s interesting to think about how many things and people can truly affect one’s literacy, directly and indirectly. I believe any sponsor can act as an audience member for this article. I particularly enjoyed when Brant described past events in our history to explain what exactly a sponsor is, along with interviewing a number of people. I also found it interesting with the different ages and backgrounds of all the people she interviewed and how much it has changed and evolved over time. Since Brant interviewed a variety of people, this limited her constraints and provided a more open minded view of the situation. One of Brandt’s main focuses had to do with how sponsors contribute to “the literacy crisis” and how during this crisis standards of literacy are always changing which is hard for some to keep up with. This sort of acted as a constraint because it is hard to truly define the standards of literacy since they are always changing. This almost acts like a gap between one’s ability to reach literacy standards, which are constantly rising due to economic and political competition. I liked that Brant stated that even small individual changes in literacy can easily relate to more big-picture changes. Overall, I enjoyed this reading and felt as though Brandt’s conclusion, that sponsorship of literacy is unique to each person, was a valid point to make. 

Born Digital, written by Palfrey and Gasser, was a very interesting and easy to read piece of literature. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article and found it very relatable to me and the society we live in today. The article is met for a variety of people to read, and addresses many concerns having to do with adults, the youth, policies, and technological capabilities. The situation of this piece of literature has to do with explaining what Digital Natives are. Digital Natives are simply people who have been born into the technology stage of life. Some say these people have become problematic to society while others find them very helpful to our world today. I found the comparison to Digital Immigrants very interesting because these are people who weren’t born in the technology stage of life. I believe the whole article is met for these “immigrants” and they act as the author’s audience. They say that Digital Immigrants are supposed to lead Digital Natives away from the negative parts of technology which is the exigence of the article’s argument, but I feel as though natives should help the immigrants get used to our world today. There are several constraints of this argument being the audience as a big one because the author focuses on making the Digital Natives his audience when truly both natives and immigrants should be the audience. After finishing the article, it truly shaped my thinking about these issues and inspired me to get involved. The authors mainly focus on discovering the consequences of the wide availability of the internet to the first generation of people who have been born in to it. The debate between how policy connects to practice and technology was quite intriguing. I do agree that technology has created a great divide in today’s world, and that our older generations and younger generations are on separate spectrums of advancement. I truly believe this story should be read by all, including parents, grandparents, teachers, and also young people. Many adults are perplexed on these issues and policy arguments when if they took some time to learn about them, they would be much less confused and interested. Overall, I thought this was a very interesting piece of writing, and enjoyed the range of issues that were mentioned and people who are affected.

After reading Future of Literacy written by Devoss et al, I was instantly attracted to how Devoss started the story, letting readers know what to expect throughout the article and also to let them know what factors to look out for like authorship and conventions. Devoss’s main idea behind writing this article was to explain the role technology has in our society today, talking about how the advancements being made in technology are being used by many people in order to gain a broader literacy skill set. Many people believe that technologies have helped them further their knowledge and communicate thoughts, and also has expanded their learning, causing them to become better writers. Growing up in the age of technology, I can relate to this article a lot. I have had a computer mostly all of my life, and I got my first cell phone in middle school which is relatively young, but now you see kids with cell phones and even fancy Ipads that are in elementary school which I find crazy! It is funny to think years and years ago technology was barely used, but today in society it’s all we ever use. It is also a bit weird to think how much technology is involved with school and work lives too. For instance, as a student I use my computer for most projects, reading, writing, and research and it is rare that I turn in a paper copy assignment. In college, a lot of my homework and quizzes are also online. Social networking sites which I check on a daily basis are also part of the new technology age of today. These sites help me check to see what is going on in the world around me. To conclude, I think technology will continue to advance and will stay part of our society, more opportunities will occur as development continues.

On September 8, 2013, it was a typical Sunday morning. Around 9am, I woke up and checked my text messages. This would probably be one of my most common posts from my Lit Log. In fact, I probably sit in bed for an extra thirty minutes doing so, especially on the weekends where I don’t have to rush right away to get anywhere. I also use this time to check social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. The stranger thing is that the situation of texting occurs constantly throughout my day, I text in between classes, during my meals, and fit texting in between my daily schedule. Texting probably takes up a good chunk of my time which could be spent doing other productive things, but today’s society has people constantly on their phones. I have always questioned in this rhetorical situation, who would be the audience, but have found that it changes in every situation. The person sending the text message is going to have a different purpose or reason each time for their message. What many of us don’t realize, is exactly how many different constraints come along with texting. For example, some phones work faster than others. This can cause miscommunication if texts do not send to a person as fast as we had hoped because today, texting is one of our primary communications between people which has supposedly made having conversations a lot easier. I feel as though it is hurting us in some ways, causing students to write texting lingo in important papers, and documents. Overall, I constantly relieve this same rhetorical situation each day of my life and still wonder what life would be like without people constantly on their phones, I mean a call or email would be nice sometime too!

Throughout my life, I have moved around quite a bit. A lot of kids would say “I’ve lived here my whole life”, while I would struggle to find where my real home was. Up until fifth grade, I had lived in three separate houses, but luckily all were located in the small state of Delaware, surrounded by my beloved friends and family. However, the summer of my fifth grade year, I was forced to move to Wisconsin due to my father’s job. At first, I was a total emotional mess, but soon began to like the Midwestern people and atmosphere. Then, in seventh grade, I moved back to Delaware and attended a half black, half white school, with a great divide in economic and social status. My eighth grade year, I moved to Pennsylvania, and ended up staying there for the rest of my high school life, until I came to Indiana to attend Purdue. I would have to say that throughout those short years in middle school, I had met a variety of people and had been introduced to many different places and things. Wisconsin was filled with your average people, all very nice and down to earth, and I truly felt comfortable there. On the other hand, walking down the hall of my Delaware school, I would see at least one fight involved blood and even the police every so often, and found that many of the kids didn’t feel the need to try in school and had difficult lives at home. Pennsylvania, was a total opposite situation, with many upper-class white children, and about two percent of diversity. Personally, I enjoy diversity and that is why I am so glad I came to Purdue. I feel as though throughout the years I have been exposed to a variety of cultures, places, and people, and enjoy these experiences because I believe they have made me a well-rounded person. I would like to continue this path for a long time and now I am not scared, yet excited to move to more new places. I truly think being exposed to so many different places has made me grow as a person. This literacy would have to be one of my favorite literacies because I feel as though it has affected me and shaped me into the person I am the most.

  #Eng106

From seventh grade, to my senior year of high school, cheerleading became my life. Each week I would spend a number of hours every day after school stunting, jumping, running, and communicating. I became close friends with many of the girls on my team, older and younger than me. It was very interesting to meet so many different personality types and levels of people. We definitely weren't your stereotypical cheerleaders you see in the movies. A lot of us were complete opposites, but we were all united in some aspect which made us become like family very quickly. At first, I was nervous to join the team, because I can be kind of shy when I first meet people and I know how social and outgoing most cheerleaders are, but over time I got more and more comfortable with myself, and cheerleading turned into being one of the biggest sponsors of literacy in my life. I use the skills I have learned from cheerleading each day. I believe I will always be able to use this type of literacy in my life because I have not just learned the art of cheerleading, but I have met so many people over the years, and learned to work together with them, without a single detrimental argument, which is a much needed life skill to possess. Communication is key. Also, I learned to manage my time to balance between school, family, friends, and my sport. It was neat to be captain my eighth grade year and senior year, because I learned even more valuable lessons and values. I couldn't  imagine my life today if it wasn't for cheerleading. I learned to be confident, got excellent exercise and flexibility skills, and used this activity as an escape from reality. I have made lifetime friends through this literacy, and continue to talk to them each day, some being in high school still, and others almost done college! Cheerleading is definitely an awesome literacy that has changed my life.

Throughout the years, I have found that my parents have stood as two of the most influential sponsors of literacy in my life. To this day, I have always reflected on how crazy it is to think that at a time I didn’t know how to read or write, and how much of an impact my parents have had on shaping me into the person I am today. When I was younger, my parents would always read me bedtime stories, and as I matured they would have me read the stories to them. My parents would also make sure that every summer I read the required books my school asked me to read, while some other kids either chose not to do this or read summaries of the books. At the time, I wanted to enjoy my summer and be free, but now I see how much a little reading each day can do to the brain. Personally, I found that I always struggled in reading and would have to say it was my least strongest subject I was good at in school, but it has definitely been great having my parents push me to do my best and accept my abilities as long as I put effort in. They even tried introducing interactive things like Leap Frog, which is an educational toy that allows you to read and analyze stories. I am very thankful for my parents caring so much about my progress in school, yet never allowing me to feel pressured or uncomfortable. They have been two of my motivators for a very long time now, and are even paying for my college degree. They have pushed me to be the best I can be and I am so blessed to have them as not only my sponsors of literacy, but my true role models.

Natalie Wiehagen