School: Hua Hsing High School
    Taipei city , Taiwan, Taiwan

five students, ages thirteen ~ fourteen years worked together to complete this CyberFair project on February 4, 2003. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): none

Classes and Teachers: Mrs. Chiang Chia-Wuan,Mrs. Kao Mei-lan, Mrs. Wang Mei-lan ,Miss Lai Chen-lin,Miss Chang Ling-yun, Miss Liu Wen-huei and Mr. Chen Hung-lin

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://www.hhhs.tp.edu.tw

1. Description of Our Community

Taipei is a modern city renowned for its advance in information technology. But it still keeps many local religious features. For example, there are many Land God temples located among the towering business buildings. And Land God acts as the patron guarding the safety of the people living around its temples. Though there are only 36 Land God shrines registered in Bureau of Civil Affairs of Taipei City Government, we have visited 64 Land God shrines up to now. So we guess that there must be over 200 Land God temples in Taipei.

2. Summary of Our Project

Worried that her students couldn’t finish the project of Cyberfair before the deadline, our teacher went to a temple of Land God and drew a lot saying “ Don’t give up. If you keep working on what you’re doing, there’ll be two blessings falling on you!” Maybe it is Land God that brought the good luck. His students won a silver award—and a platinum award. Though the great honor ought to be credited to the teachers and students’ effort, we can’t deny that Land God played an important role of settling down our anxiety and bringing us the feeling of confidence. For thousands of years, Land God has been very close to people since its temples are located in people’s communities. Compared to the big temples of higher –level gods, the ones of Land God are usually not very magnificent. But they are definitely the most distinctive temples built by people themselves instead of the official institutions. Most importantly, the temples of Land God are also people’s spiritual shelters. Our projects focuses on gathering the historical information of Land God, visiting nearby local Land God’s temples and collecting and analyzing the lots of these temples. We hope that our project can have people know more about the way of the interaction between Land God and the interesting culture behind it. We sincerely introduce the legendary patron to our friends of Cyberfair.

3. Our Computer and Internet Access

A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:more than 50%

B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:2-3

C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dial-up modem

D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:2-3

E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):

Our participants surfed on the Internet to look for the information or exchange our opinions about the project.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

A.Lack of time: The lack of time is our biggest challenge. We spend most of our time studying in school. Even though we started to plan our project quite early, we hadn’t really got started on doing it until winter break. Moreover, Taipei is a big city. But the Land God temples are always unnoticed building with small number plates. So it was hard for us to find the temples we were going to visit within a short time. Solution:We checked the latest route of the temples on the Internet or and divided into 3 groups for three routes of visiting the 64 Land God temples in Taipei. With our perseverance and the careful advance plan, we spent only three times to visit all the Land God temples. B.Lack of manpower: In the process of doing the project, we need many people’s help. For example, we needed teachers’ companion when visiting the temples we had never been to. But we had only one Cyberfair instructor while technically we needed at least three teachers for our three groups. Solution: Fortunately, we got the help from many parents. They volunteered to take us to visit temples throughout the three days. Besides, the teacher Miss Lei Pei-tzen, Mrs. Wang Mei and her husband gave us a lot of ideas and advice on how to take pictures to gather the information about Land God while visiting the temples. C.The difficulty of taking good pictures: Everyone, including our teachers and participants, has one digital camera to take the pictures of Land God and its temples we visited. But because of the dim light in the temples and the great distance from the position of taking pictures to the statues of Land God, we scarcely took the clear pictures of Land God. Solution: To make sure we could take the clearest pictures of Land God, we took nearly 3000 photos. Also, we fixed the pictures with image editing software so that they can be shown clearly on the Internet.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

With the blessing of Land God, we can do anything successfully. But instead of depending on our luck all the time, we believe we have to work hard to make Land God, our local faith center, widely known around the world.

6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?

Our school requires stuednts not to memorize mechanically all the contents in textbooks but connect them with our daily life. Though we have studied the stories about Land God in our textbooks, we never thought how many Land God temples in our community and how Land god influences our life. But when we surfed the Internet to look for the information about Land God, it surprised us that there were so many websites introducing the Land God in our community. And we gained a lot of information about the temples in our community and knowledge about the great influence of Chinese religion and tradition on our life. In the process of looking for the Land Gad temples in Taipei, we tried to locate them according to the maps from the Internet and books and really understood how to tell the direction and find out our destinations with a map by doing so ourselves. When visiting the temples, we even found that the couplets and fortune lots there convey the beauty of Chinese literature. That impressed us more than what we have learnt from Chinese textbooks.

1) What information tools & technologies did you used to complete your CyberFair project?

Interview: visiting the Land God temples and having an interview with the volunteers of the Land God temples. Internet: Surfing the Internet to look for the relative websites and discussing the schedule of our project through MSN Messenger. Book, magazine: reading the publications about Land God, lots of luck and lunar calendar. Digital camera: taking the picture of the statues of Land God and the monuments of the history about the temples to make sure we didn’t lose any important information. Personal multifunction and all-in-one: used to scan the images of print words, do images editing and copy the information we need. Telephone, mobile phone: used to liaise with our interviewees to confirm details. Computer software: Photoshop 4.0/5.0、FrontPage98/2000、Real Encoder、WS_FTP…etc.. Ps. our teachers and parents offer Most of the equipments above.

2) In what ways did you act as "ambassadors" and spokespersons for your CyberFair project both on-line and in person.

Though not having any specific religious faith, we all sincerely believe the positive power that Land God brings to our community but few people are aware of its influence. So we are responsible for estimating the number of Land God temples and making more people both in Taiwan and oversea know is this legendary local God is more than a popular deity-- It is the symbol of Chinese religion and tradition. And it is our efforts to introducing Land God that made many enthusiastic interviewees and residents willing to gather more information of the Land God temples in Taipei. 　

3) What has been the impact of your project on your community?

Land god is our local specialty and its temples are also our local historical sites. But its importance to people in Taipei is fading away and many people and their next generation even don’ t know what Land God looks like. Therefore, our project provides the number and the exact locations of Land God temples and some interesting legends about Land God to have people learn more about it. Moreover, when these years hometown education is more and more important, our project can be the very useful learning material resource for students. They can get what they want to know about the Land God nearby on the website of our project.

4) How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?

Maybe it was the blessing of Land god. Every time when we were lost and almost gave up looking for Land God temples, suddenly there must be somebody showing up and telling us how to go to our destination. Besides, many volunteers of Land God temples offered us many print publications, told us the miracles and blessing that Land God brought to the residents there and even made the exception of taking the pictures of Land God for us (It offends God to take pictures of it.). We thank our teachers Mr.Lai Chen-lin for proofreading our scripts, the computer teacher Mr. Chen Hung-lin for teaching us with the homepage making and graphic skills, Miss Chang Ling-yun and Miss Liu Wen-huei for translating our project into English, and specially our Cyberfair instructor Mrs. Chiang Chia-Wuan and our parents for supporting us and being with us to go through the toughest time.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

Tight schedule and pressure gave us extra push to bring out our potential. Within 3 days, we visited most of the Land God temples in Taipei. When finally finishing visiting the temples, we got to study the information we gathered and picked suitable pictures for being put on our homepage among 2000~3000 photos and added some explanation for them until midnight. Our teacher was worried whether we could complete this big research that almost covered the whole Taipei city. But we really made it! On the other hand, we also learn that being eager to finish our project within a short time must leave something imperfect or waste more time. For example, in order to visit the most temples with the least time, we had to do so at night. But we found the photos taken at night were not clear because of lack of the light. And sometimes it’s too late to visit them. So we had to go back to the temples the next day. And the tight schedule of our visit caused us hard time gathering complete information about the temples we had gone to. From our project, we learn a lot about the history of our “land” and feel the warm from our teachers, families and so many people in our community. More importantly, we know that we teenagers can make something for our community by educating our people about Land God and therefore raising their recognition to our community.