After wandering the halls for these past four years, I at some point realized that our school was missing something. Every student knows that a drab environment propagates a less-than-ideal education, after all, and I wanted to fix this. The fix I devised was to design, build, and install a welcome sign for the school: an inviting, friendly, and universally accepted concept. I used Adobe Illustrator to create outlines of the sign's letters, which I decided would say "Welcome to WYNNE HIGH SCHOOL Home of the Yellowjackets," and these letters could be exported to our classroom's Glowforge. From here the Glowforge cut out the letters and I nailed them to a board in the front of our school. This full process was done by taking exact measurements of each letter and penciling lines on the board on which they were to be placed. Once these guidelines were established, the letters were carefully placed and nailed with a nail gun multiple times to ensure their safety and position. After this, in order to add more flair and color to the sign, I created a pair of yellow jackets, our school mascot, to be placed on either side of the sign. This was done by cutting out two separate outlines for the jackets, one as a base and one for the detailed parts, and painting them, partly through spray paint and partly by hand.
My Community Partner involvement has included the Wynne High School, of which I am enrolled, and Bruce Guthrie, the principal. I also employed the help of the school counselors as well as my fellow EAST student Matthew Miller in order to judge and assess the placement and evenness of the letters on the sign.
The project has been in progress since the Spring of last year, as we started designing the sign, but was delayed because of the Coronavirus. Therefore, I resumed the project at the start of this year and worked on it more vigorously than in the Spring.
The project has been promoted on social media, particularly the Wynne High School Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/eastatwynne