the shape of things to come
H.G. Wells

google projects

If you have not yet looked ahead to the Final Project, you might want to do so now.you will see that this is actually a pre-writing activity that leads up to that essay; much of this material may be used in that paper, so do your best here.

The assignment will be submitted the same way you submit your essays. It must by typed in MLA format. Online students can refer to "How to Submit your Work" on our class Writing Assignments information page. Papers and Works Cited pages (and internal citations) need to be in MLA format.

Google is that search engine company, yes, that seems to have expanded into phones and apps and all sorts of popular tech arenas, but Google's vision is much larger than its in-house projects. As you've seen from this week's readings, Google funds a massive array of projects in wildly-unrelated areas: politics, the arts, medicine, the environment, gaming, bio-tech, robotics/A.I., transportation, the economy, and so on. Your paper is going to be an exploration of Google Projects, but the topic is so huge that it would take a book, so the topic is going to be narrowed down quite a bit.

I'm going to help focus it for you, to make it more manageable and to give you something of a template to structure your paper with.

Note: Papers must be in MLA format and at least three full pages to earn credit; if you are trying for a grade higher than a "C," then your paper needs to be at least four full pages. As always, pictures and the Works Cited page do not count as pages of text.

There are five parts to this assignment, but please do not number them or put headings for each section. This should be arranged as an essay. You will open with a paragraph, and each of the other sections will be in paragraph form, one following the other (not on separate pages). There should be smooth transition sentences leading from one paragraph to the next.

In your opening paragraph you may want to capture your reader's imagination by describing some activity (people wandering the city with cell phones trying to close alien portals or a muralist in the Irish countryside brilliantly painting the side of a bleak, concrete building). After you set the scene creatively, reveal that this is actually a project funded by Google. At the end of this paragraph or the beginning of the next, your transition will explain what Google Projects are. Try to give a general explanation as well as a compelling quotation (quote directly and document) from one of our readings or from a different source. The opening paragraph should be no more than one page.

Your next paragraph will refer to the diversity and broad range of Google projects (begin the paragraph with a transition sentence that says pretty much just that). Mention the different sorts of areas and issues these projects cover. Then describe a handful of them in a two to three very specific sentences each. Try to find some which are very different from each other (some ecological, some medical, some economic, some artistic, and, yes, some high-tech). This will exemplify that diversity and range you are writing about. Then speculate (again, use your research sources; quote and cite in as many of these sections as you can) about why Google is willing to fund/support such an incredibly broad set of projects. This paragraph should also be no more than one page.

This next part will be two or more paragraphs focused on two or more specific projects in more in more depth than those short descriptions in the transitional paragraph above (yes, whole paragraphs can actually serve as transitions, though you can make the transition even stronger by beginning paragraph 3 with "One project that Goodle supports [or supported] is _______"). Look at the key features of the project, what field is it in (technology? entertainment? medicine? art? etc.), who it serves specifically, what need it fills, some of the successes and challenges the project has experienced, why Google decided to fund it (or cancelled funding/support for it)? Be specific and find examples from at least one source not on our reading list that you quote directly from and follow with parenthetical citations that give examples in as many of these areas as possible.

The next main body paragraph will do the same with another project (supported or cancelled), and the transition between these two paragraphs will be something like this

or this

So that first transtion would work if you'd just finished writing abou The Data Center Mural Project in Paragraph 3, and you were starting Paragraph 4 discussing Ingress. That second transition would work if you had just finished going into details of Project Loon and how it was used in Puerto Rico, and you were now about to look at the Waymo self drive vehicle and why it was eventually scrappeda s a Moonshot.

NOTE: About 1/3 of this body section should be observation / quotation (citation) / explanation.

The conclusion will be a relatively short paragraph, maybe half a page, where you are going to take a position. Based on strengths and weaknesses (people served, benefit offered, practicality, safety/risk, cost, etc.) which one Googe Project NOT YET MENTIONED IN YOUR PAPER should continue to receive support or not? Most projects have both pluses and minuses, and do mention both, but in the end you will weigh the two and draw a conclusion. Base the decision on actual examples or potential examples, not on personal opinion (see IMPORTANT NOTE below).

Do not go into too much depth because if you choose this as your Final Paper topic, you will be turning this short conclusion into a very detailed, longer look at this project and the justification for supporting or discontinuing it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Although this last project is one you are taking a position on, avoid any "I" or "me" kinds of statements in this paper. That might seem odd, but you can do this quite easiy with "One project that Google should consider funding is ___________. There is currently a huge need for this because ___________," and so on. I am not just being strange here, but 1) it is about the project, not about you, and 2) some teachers just don't allow any first-person references in a research paper, so it's best to know how to work around it :)

Create a correctly-formatted MLA-8 Works Cited page that includes entries for the sources that you quoted above.


NOTE: Try to include pictures in the essay; they do not count as pages of text, but they do enhance your work.

sample assignment

Check out the Sample Student Papers in this week's readings folder in the Files section of Canvas :)