Background
Topic
Impact
Timeline
Process Paper
Bibliography
Process paper
We chose this topic because we wanted something new. We had multiple topics that wee interesting and had lots of research but they had been done already by previous students in the past so we didn’t feel like we were doing something original. We also wanted to something on immigration but we where having a hard time finding a narrow topic that was new or not done previously. Then we found about John Bardeen and that lead to us finding his accomplishments and what he had done to forward the progress of technology and being the only person to have two nobel prizes in the same category. Usually when people get two Nobel prizes it’s separate categories but he managed to get two in physics. This really inspired us us to look into him and use him for our project.
We started with a few encyclopedias to get a basic understanding of our broad topics and looked for sources through Google Scholar, and student Resources in Context. We eventually emailed and called the department of history at the university of Illinois looking for primary sources and they eventually emailed us a list of primary sources that we could use for our project and where very useful and gave us more information. We also received through email videos and audio files of John Bardeen teaching and explaining the transistor. We did email people related to John Bardeen and even the person who made a biography on him but we received minimal information from them or in one case Nick Holonyak even told us to use google despite being a student of John Bardeen. We later got emails from more sources that had magazines of the time showing his success and even John Bardeen's research profile from his university’s.
We chose to make a website because that was the category we felt most confident about doing and would be easier to make and we thought this was the category that we were most likely to move on in the competition. We wrote our web text files and all the words we would need for the project on a google doc so we could have an accurate word count then we copied and pasted what was on the doc onto website, we then added our multimedia, quotes, timeline, and bibliography.
Our project relates to this year's National History Day theme because the invention that John Bardeen made was revolutionary it allowed technology to break the size, speed, and data barrier. Without it technology today would be still advancing very slowly and we would not have the fast and easy technology that has been made. It made every computer, smartphone, and even modern cars possible. It also broke the mind barrier it allowed people to see what they could do with smaller technology. It allowed people to do more with less allowing for modern innovators and bright minds go for the once thought impossible.