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1. Description of Our Community
Taipei city, the international center of Taiwan, is the place where we learn and live. And Taipei 101 is the center and landmark of our community. As it was just built up, many people doubted “ What can the strange tall building bring for our community?” But later on because of he multiple functions of Taipei 101, it becomes part of our community. Besides, Taipei 101 is no doubt the “top” place where we have activities and festivals. And the image of this tallest building in the world catches everyone’s eye when it appears on TV , newspapers and ads. So in our project, we want to show people around the world more details about the most important skyscraper.
2. Summary of Our Project
Many people think Taipei 101 is a must-visit tourist spot. But in fact the official name of Taipei 101 is “Taipei Financial Center.” It combines the functions of finance and recreation. In Taipei 101 are a department store, a supermarket, a bookstore, restaurants and upscale boutiques. We like to shop, eat, and get the whole view of Taipei city from its observatory with our parents there. But we want to know more about this special building, not just something about food and play! So in order to make us understand how many functions Taipei 101 has, our teachers teach us how to study Taipei 101 within different subjects like language, math, technology, art, society, and local education. We worked as teams to research this local financial building. By taking the pictures of Taipei 101 and writing down what we found about this tallest skyscraper on the worksheets and our website, we recorded interesting detailed information you may not know about Taipei 101!
During the process, we used many technology tools and software. And we also gained lots of information by surfing the internet. We wrote and draw what we found on the papers or the computers. And our teachers helped us how to organize our research content on our website.
To know people’s impression about Taipei 101, we did the survey of many visitors’ opinions about their favorite parts of Taipei 101 and interviewed the employers and employees to get further information. And we even tried our best to interview the foreign tourists visiting Taipei 101 in English. (Our teachers taught us how to ask questions in English first.) Except studying our project through “learning by doing,” we’ve also learnt many essential skills of doing a research. We discussed a lot through MSN and interviewed people to develop our negotiation and communicative ability. We build up our skills of using technology and software by writing, drawing, taking pictures, managing files and editing films and photos.
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:1
C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:4-6
E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):
We surfed the internet through ADSL and Cable mode. And MSN Messenger 7.5 is our on-line communication tool that we often used to have meetings and discussed project progress with our members even when they were in other countries. The Adobe photo editing software helped us a lot when we had problems of fixing the pictures of Taipei101.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
Our 9 members are from 7 classes so it’s not easy to get together for meeting, not to mention interview training, making survey, and writing practice. So from May 2005, we started to use Email and MSN. But later on we still faced a few problems:
A. Language limit To know more about Taipei 101, we took more efforts on the development of bilingual communicative ability because we needed to interview our local residents but also 230 foreigners. It was a great challenge for us since we didn’t have much opportunity to communicate in English before. Fortunately, we made the simple and clear English survey for foreign visitors so that they could read the questions on the survey and answer directly. We still could talk with them in simple English. In fact, some foreigners and our local residents thought our English is not bad! B.Interview limit Taipei 101 is the commercial center of Taipei city and also one of the most famous tourist spot with many well-know boutiques. So it also has the restrictions on interviewing and shooting. We spent lots of time negotiating with the managers, telling them what we wanted to show Taipei 101 more people around the world and finally we got the permission of interviewing the staffs and taking pictures.
C.Time limit Many of us have many busy school life and even after school and on weekend we have to study math, language or practice playing the piano. So we spent most of our summer vacation (2 months) practicing some basic skills and doing most of our project.
D.Ability limit Every one in our team has different abilities but also lack some other abilities. Our teacher told us we needed to work together and assisted each other. Plus, we improved our abilities to achieve the goal of self growth.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
Be brave when facing the difficulties. Be grateful. Be active in exploring new knowledge. Although we are little, we can tell everyone what we know!
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
Although Taipei 101 is the landmark of Taipei city and also the tallest skyscraper in the world, not many people know much about it. We spent half a year doing the in-depth research on Taipei 101 by gathering lots of information about its structure and commercial activities and knowing the foreigners’ impression to Taipei 101 and being the ambassadors to introducing its features to the people in our community.
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