This project lasted for most of the first semester, and for the latter half was done intermittently with the Museo de Vida project. The Fingerprint project was meant to be a project about identity. For the main part of the project, we wrote a ten-sentence response to a question of our choice (please click here to view my English response), then translated our responses into Spanish, by hand and using only Spanish-English dictionaries, one kind with the translations and another with the conjugations of various verbs. Of course, knowing very little Spanish at the time that we began these translations - I didn't even know that I was supposed to conjugate verbs when I began - most of us took a vast multitude of drafts to get it right, or would have if the project had been realized to its full extent. Because the project was truncated a bit when the focus of the class shifted to the Museo de Vida project - and because I figured out how to use the conjugation dictionaries at some point while I was writing my first draft, partly by asking a plethora of questions - I only had two drafts. I believe, though, that my second draft was fairly well done. Below are scanned images of my first draft (top row) and second draft (bottom row). My first draft has multiple pen markings on it from Aleida's critiques.
Aleida scanned one of her fingerprints, enlarged it, and cut it out of plywood to create several strips of wood that formed a fingerprint when rearranged. Each person received one large piece or multiple smaller pieces and decorated them according to his/her own identity, including images or words reminiscent of things or activities integral to them. Because this was Spanish class, each piece had to include some Spanish writing. Originally, the project was designed so that the Spanish responses such as my drafts above would be copied at least in part onto these fingerprint pieces, but when the focus of the class shifted to the Museo de Vida project, that requirement was relaxed so that the Spanish writing on the fingerprint pieces could just be a couple of words or phrases per piece, from the Spanish responses or not. I received three smaller pieces. I chose to decorate two of them with words from my response; one was focused on engineering and the other was focused on physics, since I love both sciences. The third and smallest piece was just dedicated to a sentence or two from my response, talking about what I saw for my future as the question to my response asked. Below are photos of my pieces and the put-together fingerprint from my class.