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1. Description of Our Community
We live in Westland Village, Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous County in Gansu Province, China. Tianzhu is the main area where Huarui Tibetans live, and it is far away from Tibet Autonomous Region, where most Tibetans live in China. Tianzhu is the first autonomous county in China, and it is the hometown of white yak. The population in Tianzhu is about 80,000 and the percentage of Tibetan is about 30%. Different from the culture in Tibet, Huarui Tibetan culture has its own characteristics
2. Summary of Our Project
The theme of our project is Huarui Tibetan Culture, and we planned to choose daily things beside us but easily ignored as our research object, such as language, religion, costume and daily life. Through a serial of interviews, we found how special and brilliant our culture is. One of our participants, Niu Dang-zhi, who is a Huarui Tibetan, but gave up learning Tibetan language, lots of students like him know little about their own culture. After we finished this project, Dang-zhi said he became very proud to be a Huarui Tibetan, and had a wish to learn Tibetan culture in college in the future. Since Huarui Tibetan is a minority in local area, we felt more responsibility to protect our culture in future.
3. Our Computer and Internet Access
A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:none
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):
The computers in our school are donated by Yellow Sheep River Project. The participants don't have computers at home. There is only one computer with Internet access, and this computer helped us much on finishing the project.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
Huarui Tibetan Culture was too big a topic for us, but although we live in Huarui Tibetan area, we really know little about our own nationality. The first problem was that we didn't have even one book about Huarui Tibetan in our hands. We had only one computer to access to the Internet, and we had to control the cost of accessing to the Internet. So we had to find other ways to solve it. The Tibetan language teachers in our school had to give up much rest time to answer our questions, and we even wrote to the mayor of Wuwei City, where our county belongs to, to ask for his new book. The host in Shama Temple accompanied us for a whole day to introduce Tibetan Buddhism to us. Every noon, we would study for one hour.
The other problem is that since we live in the village, and never go out of the mountain, we don't have enough confidence to participate in an international competition. Fortunately, our teacher kept encouraging us, and we really found much joy to participate the competition.
Other problems such as time limitation - we can only carry out the project at school, since we live far away from the school and we don't have computers at home. And the problem like we had to walk for long time in bumpy road, all of them we have overcome.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
Teachers found that they are proud of their students - the children are really capable.And they hope the website could open a window to let more people know about the nationality. Students found that they are proud to be a Huarui Tibetan and their own culture is brilliant.They learned to unite and cooperate, and got deep friendship from the program. They also learned that caring about others is more important than learning knowledge in text and getting better performance in examinations. The school got more concern from the outside world, and people from Taiwan, Hongkong and other places kept visiting and helping the school. Local people got the name of Huarui Tibetan and were very glad to see more people visiting them. The mayor got the name of CyberFair and encouraged the children to participate in the competition.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
Our research related to different subject such as Tibetan language, religion, arts and so on. We visited everywhere of our community such as temple and herdsman's home. We got the help from all kinds of the society and learned more that could not get from the textbook. And we also learned how to collect information and how to talk to others. All these abilities will accompany us for a whole life.
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