Today Sam and I met for what would soon be the most crucial meeting I have had this year. All of my stress instantly melted away as my beloved teammate told me that he had found some amazing sources that would blow my mind. And he was right. While I am very happy about the direction our project was going in I had only come up with one solid lead when it came to research. That all changed today however when my teammate revealed to me that he had just found the holy grail of resources.
Sam found a wonderful book that as an alternative to Marco Polo presents the stories of four travelers from around the world who wrote about their experiences traveling the silk road and interacting with the mongol court. Not only is this resource good for our project as a whole but it also makes me feel a lot more supported because It contains some very good mongol resources. I am really excited to get to go through  this book with Sam and I think it could become one of our most useful resources in our project.
As far as research goes, truthfully it is moving very slowly. Being weighed down with classes I haven’t had a lot of time after completing my other homework to do intense research and so I have not delved nearly as deep as I wanted to at this point in planning. However despite this setback I have a plan and a lot of faith in myself that I will be able to accomplish it. I’m planning this fall break to do some catch up internet research and find some books that I will be able to check out when I get back on campus at the Hege Library.
Ideally I will also be able to lay out an outline for the portion of the project that I will be contributing the most too. I am really excited to see what our project will be like when it all comes together. While I think our team has a lot of research skills I believe that our best work will come when making the actual webpage. I think our group has a lot of creative thinkers who in our meetings have already had a lot of great conversations about our end goal. Because of the success of meetings like this I have been feeling really good recently about the direction that Team Earth is headed in.