Creating a product from my internship experience started out quite easy.  My mentor and I spent the first two working meetings going through all of the ideas we could investigate and working through the physics of it all.  We started big and whittled it down to smaller pieces.  My internship experience has followed a different pattern than a lot of the other internships.  My focus has been primarily on curriculum development.  Like I have said in a previous blog post, SAMSI provides time for their Kenan Fellow to create a unique product without having any requirements for their organization.  This has been both a challenge and a success wrapped in one.  The success is that I have had a lot of time to think through the curriculum I want to create and actually work through creating it now rather than later when the school year starts.  The challenge is that, it is almost my entire internship experience.  Because the majority of my internship experience is the curriculum product writing, it can be easy to burn out from day to day…especially if you haven’t had to sit at a desk for 8 hours ever before!  One of the things that I have learned from being in this setting is that many of the people who work here work from home or from another office.  In order to be more successful with my product, I made sure to change up where I was working at least once a week to mimic how they spent their time.  I think the biggest success I have had while creating this educational resource is not even my own success, but my mentor’s.  He has helped me meld our visions together to create something truly exciting and beneficial for my students.  Tom spent a lot of time creating code in a computer program that would be accessible and available for my students to use.  The time and dedication that he has put into my project to help me become a better teacher has made any challenge that I have had nonexistent.  Any roadblock I have had, no matter how minor, has been flattened because he has provided guidance, ideas, coding, and feedback on my project without hesitation.  It will be easy to continue from the rough rough draft that was due today because of all of his help.