School: Boon Lay Secondary School
    Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

45 students, ages 13 to 18 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on March 15, 2007. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 0

Classes and Teachers: Shirley Wong Huia Lee, Mohan and Mohd Syed and BLSS CyberAce IT club

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://schools.moe.edu.sg/blss/

1. Description of Our Community

Singapore is a country of outstanding greeneries with plants at all angles. It is famous for it cleans environment and an evergreen beauty of rows and rows of trees. That is why Singapore is known as the ‘Grader City’. Singaporeans are also well known their hospitality and friendliness. Since our independence from the British and Japanese many things in Singapore have change. One very significant event, is that, we have become democratic state. A state that rules it self, a state that is free from any deserter. Singapore that is what we are! Singapore is a rather small country (city) which is the major centre of culture, industry and trade, with a multi racial society comprises of Chinese, Malay India and Eurasian. Singapore consists of 63 islands, including the main island itself. It is located at the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula. During the Japanese occupation many monument of battle fortress were left behind which now forms many historic land marks of Singapore. Build in 1977, our school is a public school with about 1400 pupils, age 12 to 17. Our pupils come from different background, mainly the working class. A multi racial of different religions (mainly Buddhist, Taoism, Islamic, Hinduism, Christianity) speaking Chinese, Malay, Tamil and English. Most of us stay in HDB (public housing) flats around the Jurong area. Our school consists of about 82 teachers, who are well-qualified and very committed to their job. We are actively involved in various charity and community activities, such as gathering clothes and toys for the poor children, or visiting old and sick people, and school performances in Jurong area (Street Parade 2006, Chinese dance, Malay dances from our various clubs). We are slowly gaining recognition around our area with our continuous involvements over the years.

2. Summary of Our Project

Our project Sungei Buloh focuses on providing information about the natural and man made attractions of mangrove in our country. Sungei Buloh has too much history and flora and fauna to offer. We have created an education website, friendly to ages, to promote the unique feature of our mangrove, for example the prop roots, Aerial roots, funny plants, mudskipper, etc. Apart from the many hundreds of pictures that we took, there are some really very interesting facts about this unique ecosystem too. These await us to discovered them. We took many video shots too to further capture and share them later. Coupled with interviews with some tourists during our last excursion, we managed to gain further insights on their view on this tourist attraction, and even special footage that a still camera would not be able to capture. Our project gives every one in this world a chance to be enrich themselves with nature of Singapore. It gives us a chance to explain the important of conserving mangrove before it’s all gone. As the power to make decisions lies with us human and the youths , it is important for us to anticipate the events of the future, and take proper measures against it. It also gives us opportunities to apply our knowledge gained during our lesson time (geography, sciences, languages just to name a few) into this project. Not forgetting to apply our IT skills that we had gained over the years. We are indeed proud of our project!

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):

Most of us do not have Dreamweaver and CorelDraw (for drawing) at home and it’s used only in school.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

We learnt how to do online site uploading/hosting. CorelDraw software compatibility created problems initially, which we later found that it can be exported in JPG, thus we used MS Paint as a substitute. We did not have Photoshop in school which enable us to do better fine-tune our digital photos. We learnt the program Dreamweaver on the spot, which include tables alignment, graphic alignment, etc. It was tough at the start. We had to comprise on certain “appearances” and remove “certain pages” to ensure that the dateline can be met. We tried to convert MVW format to Quicktime or u-tube but failed as more problems arise(the files are just to be very big) We abandoned it including the quiz option due to time constraints. We also rejected Flash insertion in this project although a class on the creation of Flash animal samples were conducted. We had faced many problems when doing this project. Firstly, it is very hard to get the co-operation from all members of the groups as this is the first time we are working in this group. WE overcome this in order to get the project started and ensure that it can be completed on time. Secondly, poor time management is the other major problem. We had limited time to meet up, and have limited discussions for this project. Some group members have other commitments outside, such as, co-curriculum activities and tuitions. As a group, it is hard to find a time slot whereby everyone is free and can commit in doing this project, as most of us are busy with our school work. Rush, we did and comprise all the way, we tried not too at first Thirdly, different opinions, ideas and views and working styles of group members are another serious problem. Ultimately comprise and more comprise has to be made at the last minute to ensure project can be completed on time! Lastly, an internet connection is also another serious problem. Internet is very important for such a collaborate projects, for researching and proof-reading and uploading/refining of completed work. Storage (due to large storage of photos and videos) also post a great deal of constraints on us to enable us to accessed each other’s work! Internet connects people and time-zone too, like that of the telephones we use which are usually taken for granted.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

Contributions to society starts now and with us, the youth!

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

We try to fit our contents that are appealing to teenagers of 12 to 18 age group. We try to fit into the CyberFair Competition requirements, and copyrights expectation, decent presentation for audience (all ages “ non- vulgarity”, etc), etc All these IT skills cum team work will not only help us in my studies, but it also helps me in my future. Building a web site is not an easy task, it take a lot of time and preparations. The whole CyberAce club helps out in this project. The members help out with the drawing and designing posters, animals, etc. Artists were given the task of sketching some animals and birds which we did not manage to photo during the excursion. After we have collected them(via our e-mail), we organize them and linked it to our web site. Teamwork and brain-storming and elimination of duplicate work have to be carried out. We learnt a great deal about the mangrove (plants, animals, visitors) and its ecological system with its food chain. Uniqueness of certain plants, animals impressed us, including its history, identify different plants and animals that lived there. This project challenges us and encourages us to participate, as best as we can, from the juniors to the seniors with different level of contribution from everyone. eg artists, video editor, photographer, IT experts, proof-readers, etc. This help us to be more IT savvy. The promotion and education of youngsters on the importance of nature and conservation activities (Love Nature and protect them) will hopefully made them the “ambassador”. Surfing the net, allows quick data verification and research (instead of books) had helped tremendously. Our school encourages us to develop useful skills as they could benefit us in the future. Such as co-operation, socializing, self-discipline, creativity and research skills. This project also helps us to gain knowledge of Social Studies, History, English, and Geography in order to complete it. Learning Dreamwaver Macromedia Flash to enhance our website to make it more interesting and attractive. We also get to learnt some other communities world wide. Overall this international school CyberFair projects a very rich and rewarding learning activity to us.

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

We used tape recorders to conduct interviews, a scanner to scan images into the computers. These images are taken by our school’s digital cameras and some of our own personal cameras. Computer software programs included Microsoft Word to type information, Paint to edit some of the pictures, Macromedia Flash Player 8 to make animations, Microsoft Publisher and CorelDraw to design and create our own drawings, Video Studio 8 to edit our videos and last of all Macromedia Dreamweaver to design everything to allow the webpages to be posted online. We sourced our information from our well-known National Library for books, and newspaper articles regarding Sungei Buloh. The above programs and references we had mentioned were valuable and extremely helpful to us. Without them, we could not create our very first online project which we are very proud of!

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

This project forces us to communicate with each other, different race groups and locations, and work together to complete our research and competition. We communicate through e-mail, cell phone, etc to accomplish our project. This give us a chance to practice our communication skills, and it also gave us the opportunity to express ourselves through journal writing and reflections. In these processes, we manage to communicate with the officials of the Sungei Buluh park and obtained a face to face interview with them. At the same time we, promote our CyberAce IT club, our school and to them. This left a good impression on both sides, as they were, as willing to help, as we were to learn about their organization and nature! With our online sites now, we can and will sell our CyberAce IT club, our school, Singapore and Sungei Buluh attraction to the education world out there!

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

This project would make a difference by educating more people and youths on the conservation of mangrove. Therefore more people would have a better understanding on the mangrove and the wildlife found there. Hopefully, people would cherish them, since mangrove sites around the world are getting lesser by the days. This, being an international competition, will allow viewers from other countries to be further educated! This would assist us to educate our next generation on the conservation of mangrove. We got good feedback from our teachers too. I quote one of them, here : Ms Lin said “Your project is great! How did you do this website and what program did you used? I am amazed by your work, this is the first time I have seen a web page done by a group of students (or a student). Keep up the good work!”. Our project was also comment by one of our pupil (who witness us doing our project in our Lab 1). “Congratulation! I would be waiting to see your website page on-line. I was reading your website and I found many interesting information that will help me in my class project. I want to thank you for it. Your website was very informative and have well designs.”

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

We would like to thank Fong-Ren on technical tips on using Dreamweaver, HTML how to improve our presentation (from peers of our Singapore schools), and Mr Kamin, our lab tech on the use of Video Studio 8 (as we are completely new to this)and to edit our videos,Ms Pek on online uploading to other sites when we encountered problems. Not forgetting Shirley Wong for her project consultation and Mohammad Syed for his language editing of our websites and journals. We also got help our grandparents to give us some insight on what was Sungei Buloh was like during their old days. Some relatives gave us addition information on mangrove conservation too. Classmates also help in the drawing of the animals in the mangrove and some even go to an extent in helping us borrow books on the mangrove, including a librarianwho had helped us to dig out all books related to Sungei Buloh of Singapore. Lastly we would like to thank all the volunteers and helpers who have helped us in this project, thus allowing us to complete it on time.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

There are many interesting discoveries and surprises that we made during the project. We got to know many types of animals like spiders, birds and many more. We saw many types of spiders, but this is the first time that we saw a spider than stands in a cross position its called the cross-spider. We have also learned more on mangrove plants that we have never seen before. One example is the mangroves trees : its “stick-out” extensive roots from the muddy ground during low tide to allow us to see it clearly, but these roots are submerged during high tide . Its adaptation to the harsh environment is really an eye-opener for us! The ‘hanging leaf’ was also very unique here during our mangrove trail. This leaves are hung by the spiders by their sticky web to help them catch insect by camouflaging themselves in it. It was shocking for us to find out that attap chee is a kind of fruit that grew in the mangrove environment, which giving it a unique taste and flavor. The Tree climbing crab caught us off guarded, we were amazed when we saw it swiftly climbing up the tree. The shy and quiet mudskipper that looks so innocent here, really catches our eyes. Some of us wish, we could bring it back to be reared in our aquarium. But,.. survival again issue!!! Our module(IT lesson) has a module on self relection/journals on this trip too.