School: Chiefess Kamakahelei Middle School
    Lihue, Hawaii, United States

6 students, ages from 10 to 12 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on October 15, 2001. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 2

Classes and Teachers: Leah Aiwohi and Kevin Matsunaga

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://kauila.k12.hi.us/~tqjr

1. Description of Our Community

Our focus is to promote the Hawaiian islands and to try to make Hawaii more alluring to the visitor. We will be promoting the natural beauty of the islands in our Aloha State with an emphasis on values. Faith, patience and respect are a few of the many values we feel makes Hawaii the paradise that we treasure. We also hope to foster an awareness that these values exist in all our communities throughout the world.

2. Summary of Our Project

Ours is a website created specifically to highlight the many virtuous examples of the aloha spirit readily seen throughout our beautiful Hawaiian islands.

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:2-3

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

In the beginning, although the idea was appealing, working on building a website to highlight the treasures of our Aloha state soon became an overwhelming task as we began to realize that there is evidence of Aloha everywhere around us here. There is so much to share with the world, it was difficult to keep our narrow focused. The bigger challenge was having to cover all eight major islands in our Hawaiian chain, it's hard enough to be selective about what we wanted to share about our island then to think we had to be just as limiting with the other islands. One year working on this website is not merely enough time to do our beautiful state justice in sharing it's many beauties. This website will have to be an on-going project that will continue to grow as time allows us to share more with the world.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

A popular local song sums up our website vision and purpose. Sung by The Manao Company, it's a well known song in the islands: "Spread A Little Aloha" - something we hope to do via our website.

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

By working on building our website, we've managed to address all curriculum areas addressed in our state standards. Students have made significant gains in mostly all areas, and have truly experienced learnings connected to the realm of Universal Concepts (unity/diversity, change, causality, interdependence, perseverance, tolerance, interaction, etc)

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

Within the course of doing research to gather information, our team traveled to four of the other islands (Oahu, Maui, Molokai, and the Big Island) where we managed to interact with people local to the islands. We have been fortunate to have a lot of community support. Our local Kauai Economic Development Board funded our travels throughout the year.

Doing personal interviews, visiting historical landmarks and sites, experiencing the variety of community lifestyles was a valuable learning opportunity.

The team did preliminary research using books and other printed material, including information already on the Internet to build our knowledge base. Meeting and interviewing different people around the islands, we relied on laptop computers, digital cameras a video camera and the traditional fall-back of pencil and paper to record our adventures.

We've listed the number of software we used on our site, to see what we learned to use and how much time we invested in this project, go to: http://library.thinkquest.org/J0111103/frames.html

scrolling on the bottom of the page, we have a "banner" of sorts.

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

The source of most of the information we based our project around came from people we met who either experienced the events we chose to share about or are living out the values we decided to focus on.

The team has become Aloha Ambassadors in many ways. As we've shared what our vision is, to spread aloha around the world, we have in turn recieved so much aloha from everyone we've been fortunate to meet up with. People have been so cooperative and willing to share, and very supportive of our endeavors.

Whether by email, snail mail, telephone, or in person, as we approached people we were always greeted warmly. I believe that in itself reflects the aloha spirit we've tried so hard to share, and having our students experience that aloha has been the biggest reward.

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

We have included a message board on our website. Reviewing the many comments left there by visitors, we are seeing that our project is indeed making an impact. Local people are appreciating our paradise home more, people far away enjoy experiencing the beauty of islands even from afar, and more importantly, the comments from former residents have had the most impact because it "hits home" with them...fond memories of island living are invoked which to us is a good indication that we've managed to share via the web what we live here, Aloha.

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

We have a long list of people we'd like to acknowledge, and we have on our website: http://library.thinkquest.org/J0111103/credits/acknowledgements.html

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

We originally started working on this project to enter in the ThinkQuest Junior competition, which is a web based competition. Our team placed among the finalists.