School: St. Paul's High School (Junior High)
    Kaohsiung, Taiwan, R.O.C.

20 students, ages 13-15 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on April 1, 2003. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 1999

Classes and Teachers: Mr. Chien-Tai Lin; Ms. Chuen-Lan Wu; Ms. Shin-Yi Kuo; Mr. Badi Chen

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://class.mcsh.kh.edu.tw/city_food

1. Description of Our Community

Kaohsiung is a harbor city in southern Taiwan. Going north along beautiful Shou-san Mountain, which includes Ku-san District and Tsou-ying District, up to Kaohsiung county, well-known for its agriculture and fishery, visitors can easily find Flag and Drum Cakes, Kapok Cakes, Water Caltrop, Milkfish, and Cabrilla are five of the special foods that they would like to taste most.

2. Summary of Our Project

This web-based learning project is intended to explore the well-known special foods in Kaohsiung area. There are 5 kinds of foods researched in details by us. They are (1)Flag and Drum Cake, (2)Kapok Cake, (3)Water Caltrop, (4) Milkfish, and (5) Cabrilla. (1) Flag and Drum Cake, also known as Chi Ku Bin, is one of the most representative foods in Kaohsiung City. This special food is often highlighted by tourists on Chi Ku Festival (Flags and drums festival) with the other festivities. (2) Kapok Cake In addition to Flag and Drum Cakes, Kapok Cake is another dessert worth of tasting in Kaohsiung. It is made of Kapok flowers, the City Flower. (3) Water caltrops, our third food, are easily found in Tsou-ying District in Kaohsiung. It tastes marvelous with sauces. (4) Milkfish Going up to Kaohsiung County, we went on learning about milkfish and Cabrilla. There are a lot of delicious fishes in Er-a-liao in Kaohsiung County. Milkfish is one of the most famous species. (5) Cabrilla As famous as milkfish is Cabrilla. They are also noted food in Kaohsiung. This project not only helps us better understand the special foods in our own hometown, but also shows interesting facts to the tourists.

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:more than 6

C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection

D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:more than 6

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

St. Paul's High School is the place where we did this learning project. T1 and Taiwan Fixed Network(TFN)are two major ISPs we have. Besides, we can also link up to Tanet through Nation Sun Yet-sen University.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

"Hard work bring success." Although we are too young to overcome every problem by ourselves, we are lucky to have people around us give us valuable advice and resource. The problems we met are stated below. (1) Some interviewees are reluctant to be interviewed. When we went to do an interview and find stories related to Flag and Drum Cake and Kapok cakes on the spot, our interviewee, a shopkeeper, spent too much time talking about something else, instead of answering the questions we asked. It doesn't seem that they could share their business experiences with us. We couldn't get any satisfactory answer right to our questions. Everything was out of our expectation in the interview, but we still thanked for their allowing us to take photos at their shop. Fortunately, our team leader's uncle, Mr. Zheng, helped us to locate another shop selling Flags and Drums Cake and Kapok Cake. At last, the field interview could be completed. (2) Poor time management and serious language gap. These problems happened to us when we went on a field trip to study water caltrops. Getting up early on the weekend is not easy to we "busy" students. However, farmers always pick water caltrops early in the morning. Despite that we checked the time again and again before the trip, most of us still failed to show up on time. On the other hand, our poor mother tongue didn't work very well when we used it to communicate with the community residents and farmers. To overcome this problem, we had to learn and practice our mother tongue again with our parents and teachers. (3) Transportation problems. The place we visited, Tzi Kuan, is far away from our school. Surely, we couldn't go there alone without assistance from our parents and teachers. We were lucky to have their help to transport us to different places, such as traditional markets and the like.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

Learning the foods in Kaoshiung by doing the web-based project means a lot to us. (1)First of all, this project makes curriculum integration, which is one of the most important education reform in Taiwan, and the cooperation among the school administration, teachers, paretns and the communities possible. (2)To accomplish the tasks, students need to change their learning style from subject-based to project based and from teacher-centered to student-centered autononous learning. (3)The teachers faciliate the students to work as a team to discover their answers with necessary assistance available from the community and our school.

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

(1)A mission to know our own hometown. Kaohsiung is our hometown. The foods in Koahsiung are quite famous, so we would like to let people know much more about them. Of these foods, Water Caltrop, Milk Fish, Cabrilla, Kapok Cakes, and Flags and Drum Cake are the five items in our concern. (2)This learning project fit into the need of curriculum integration under the guidelines of the 9-year coherent education policy in Taiwan. The students are mostly in the 10th grade. Mr. Lin, the homeroom teacher, coordinated the class-based project with the other teachers of various domains, including language, and computer. We believed this project could be developed into a model of curriculum integration for our school. (3)ICT in education becomes much more popular at our school. More and more teachers participated in PBL at St. Paul's High School. The teachers work as a team and help estatblish a PBL club through the Internet.

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

Typical PBL tools, such as networked computer software and hardware, digital cameras and recorders, and printers are all available at our school. In addition to these tools, we also make use of a AJET Digital School (AJDS), a learning platform developed and provided by National Sun Yat-sen Univ. It made real-time and asynchronous discussion possible, which is concerned as the most helpful tool to us. At AJDS, there is a PBL club for St. Paul's High School, which includes a variety of courses for students interested in PBL. Below is the list of ICT tools we applied in our project. *Communication Tools: Telephones, mobile phones. *Hardware: Tape recorders, photocopy machines, printers (HP Laser Jet, SamSung), scanners (ScanMaker V310, Epson), digital/traditional cameras (Lumix), electronic dictionaries, TDK Burning Rom. *Software: AJET Digital School (http://ajds.nsysu.edu.tw), Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Front Page), PhotoImpant, Dreamweaver.

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

Basically, our learning project was divided into different groups. Our instructors, Mr. Lin, Ms. Wu, and Ms. Kuo helped with coordination, field study and computer technology support, and library research respectively. Before we took a field trip, our instructors required us to be well-prepared with interviewing questions. We took turn to do the interview with community residents. When the residents were told what we intended to do, they became even more active in providing more valuable information to us. We were greatly encouraged by them as well.

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

Through the website we created, we believe that we can help people better understand the five kinds of well-known foods in Kaohsiung. The website not only includes basic knowledge about these foods, but also the first hand data obtained from our field trips to villages, traditional markets, and modern bakeries. The community residents' professional skills and experiences could also be taught to students and shared by the community residents themselves.

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

We would like to express our gratitude to those who helped us complete this learning project. without their assistance, this task would never be done. (1) Parents and Schoolmates: Our parents and schoolmates offered us a great deal of available resource, contact information and encouragement. (2) Interviewees: In our field trips, we knew a lot of friends. For many times, the interviewees assist us actively and also received us warmly. We were so lucky that they cooked the delicious "foods" studied in our project for us to taste!

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

(1)This is our first time we joined the project-based learning. It is not the result that we care about. What we learned most is from the process of doing the project together with teammates, teachers, and community residents. There are countless stroies and revelations happened to us in this process. (2) Although we had to learn lots of things that we had never touched before, like how to "dig out" stroies on the spot, take a photograph, and make use of our poor mother tongue (South-min Dialect) to talk with the grownups, all of these learning experiences encourage us to "learn more by doing" in the future.