School: ITESM - CEM
    Mexico, Mexico State, Mexico

5 students, ages between 16 and 17 years worked together to complete this CyberFair project on March 9, 2004. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 2003 and 2004

Classes and Teachers: Coaches: Víctor G, Francisco E, Angela H, Mariana M, Rafael M / Students: Javier A, Carlos C, David E, Victor L, Ricardo S

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://www.cem.itesm.mx

1. Description of Our Team

The team’s members are: Javier A. (17 years), Carlos C. (16 years), David E. (17 years), Víctor L. (17 years) and Ricardo S. (16 years)

We joined together to do this project because we are best friends and of course we share a lot of things, mostly a big part of our free time. We met more or less two years ago, when we started High School studies.

We tried to work all time together to have a complete success in this project, so the work was as less divided as possible. To complete the goal we worked after classes in the school and in weekends we were in contact by MSN-Messenger service.

We received a lot of help form our coaches. For example: - Victor G. (the team’s coach) was remembering us the important dates in which we had to make something for the project. - Francisco E. and Mariana M. (the topic coaches) were giving us important information and also they were asking us to investigate in specific topics. Adding this, if we had doubts they answered our questions in a friendly way. - Rafael M. (the technical coach) answered our doubts on how putting the little animations and all related to the media problems. - Angela H. (the language coach) checked and corrected all our English mistakes.

If you want to know more about the team members, visit our web page and see the menu “Creators”…

2. Summary of Our Project

In this work we are going to talk about the most important terrorism attacks that occurred in the last decade, for example the famous airplane crashes committed against the Twin Towers in United States. Also we will explain how terrorism affects to other countries and why diplomacy’s role is important to reduce it.

By the way we are going to mention some international agreements that fight against terrorism, and the most recent reforms that were included to them. And if we consider that some of them are not working well, we will suggest some changes in order to make them more efficient.

Likewise, we know that after terrorism attacks became popular, many countries planned some security programs, like the polemic and exaggerate checkups that are made at the airports and frontiers; topics which might be showed during this work, of course we will also make changes to those programs in order to increase security and reduce inconveniences to people.

Besides all these points, we are going to describe the most important terrorism’s ideas in order to try to understand why are they practiced. This, because we will try to give a solution to all these problems, we will also include their point of view.

The context of this web page can be considered as cruel, so it is recommended to an audience of ample criteria. The treated subject is the terrorism and its consequences, and many times it includes explicit images. To see the content of our web page is under your responsibility.

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):

We didn’t have too many problems in this aspect, because we can access internet either in our houses or in the school because each one of us has a computer.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

At the beginning we had chosen another category and of course another topic; it was titled “Technological aeronautic developments after the Second World War”, but our team’s coach told us that it was not a very good idea and we decided to choose another topic. So after 2 days we decided to change the topic, and named it: “Terrorism, the biggest challenge for diplomacy”.

Another problem we had to face was that we had other school projects and homework assignments to do so we could not dedicate all our time to the web page and in consequence we had very few time to finish the work. Also when we started investigating we discovered that there exists a lot of information about the topic, so we had to select very well the important data.

We had another point to take in consideration and it was that Terrorism, as a topic, is not well seen by people, because it is considered only as violence acts, but this is more than just it, because many of the Terrorist groups are based in complete political or religious ideas.

All this problems were solved with our effort and dedication, accompanied with a lot of hard work culture of all the integrants of the team. (And we are referring to us as students and to our coaches)

5. Our Project Sound Bite

In our school exists one internal magazine that is published every 2 weeks, it is named “Signo Azul”. We went with its editors and exposed our objectives. They got interested in our project and helped us with some space in the magazine in order to explain what is “Doors to Diplomacy” and what our web page consists in. The article that we wrote for the magazine is added in the web page at the link “Worried about our community” and it is going to be printed in “Signo Azul” on April 9th, 2004.

We are very concerned for our community, in fact we could not wait until April 9th to promote our web page, so we went to “Frecuencia Cem”, the school’s radio station. We chose this mass media because it is heard either at the school facilities or being in tune by Internet, increasing in this way the rank of reach. The radio speaker interviewed us about the purpose of our web page and why we get interested in the challenge of “Doors to Diplomacy”. The complete interview is also added in the web page at the link “Worried about our community”.

This are concrete examples of what we have already done. Furthermore we are trying to promote our web page in local communities newspapers…

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

All the members of the team are studying the 4th semester of High School at the “Tecnológico de Monterrey” in a special curriculum called “interdisciplinary”. This program consist in studying all the subjects in a mixed way, or the best interrelated as possible. We got involved in the “Doors to Diplomacy” contest because our teachers informed us about it, and we started this project because it was part of our grades, but as we were progressing we get more and more interested in the topic.

Besides we are friends, working in group taught us to work together as integrants of a team; sharing ideas and contributing with all kind of opinions in order to reach our goal in order to have a successful web page project.

In Mexico, terrorism is not a very strong problem, because the acts that can be considered as terrorists are the frequent assaults at Mexico City and another aspect that really scares people is the kidnappings, which are increasing in a warning way. But the international problems have effects on Mexican people, for example the attacks on September 11th, 2001 at United States and March 11th, 2004 at Spain caused strong emotional concerns in such a way that people promoted religious ceremonies, went to the streets for manifestations against terrorism, and even the Mexican President, Vicente Fox, called the US President and the King of Spain in order to join the Mexican feelings with theirs residents.

Maybe you are asking why we chose this topic… well, first of all we have to mention that part of the school’s mission is “to bring up people with strong social, economic and politic compromises”, so fulfilling the mission we chose this topic because we are concerned about the worldwide situation and we want to make new options in order to make a better world to live in.

About the Internet services our opinion is that this tool is very useful because you can find there many recent information for any specific topic; but at the same time it has its disadvantages, for example there exists a lot of information that can not be proved to be true. Because of these aspects, Internet is only another investigating method that needs to be complemented with traditional methods, like books, magazines, newspapers, etc…

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

Every member of the team has a laptop what represents a great advantage, a phone line at home to access internet, what was very useful to access some terrorism source centers; therefore we considered it as the most important tool that we used. Also, one member of the team, brought some magazines (TIME) with information about the terrorist attacks occurred on September 11th 2001 in New York, and we used them to explain the actions taken by the government of the United States and also get some images using a scanner. Also at school we have very useful and valuable tools, such as the library, where we found some updated books that talk about history, definitions, challenges, perspectives and Issues to understand terrorism.

Another important facts that helped us during the making of this web page, were our coaches that we continuously consulted, asked for their advice and opinions, etc. They also gave us some recommendations about internet pages and printed articles about terrorism we could consult.

All our sources were important for the team because each one was specially selected…

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

First of all, in our project we give a short summary about terrorism, giving a short review about the its history, explaining some concepts that may help people to understand it better and mentioning the types of terrorism, things that help us to introduce people our topic.

Then we start talking about different groups of terrorism, so people can be able to make conscience about the ideologies of terrorist, given that most of them have an inspiration for doing those acts and not only for making damage to other people, therefore people can understand them and make their own judgment.

After mentioning the ideologies of terrorists, we mention the solutions that diplomacy is taking to control terrorism in the world, because we considered terrorism as a challenge for the diplomacy and give several links that people can consult for more information. And finally we propose our solutions that combat against terrorism. The main purpose of the project is to support diplomacy as the best option to solve problems.

We will ask our family, our friends, our teachers, and all the people we can, to visit our page and to give their opinions and their own solutions, also how does the terrorism could affect on their community. And if we succeed in our purpose, they will reflect about the importance of this problem and the challenges it represent.

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

This project represents our effort and a lot of investigation that we realize, therefore we considered very important for us and for our school, because our teachers were the ones who help us to realize the project, even tough we had a lot of extra work to do.

Another important thing that make us very proud of our work, are all the goods comments we have received from the people that help us while doing our page, and of the people that already checked or job finished, as our family, teachers and even some friends.

Likewise, we think that the people that visit our pages will learn a lot of things and also they might find very interesting things we made, our solutions and other important aspect is that they can give their opinions in a way that they would get involved with the problem, so they could understand it better.

We also consider our work as a reference page for students that are making investigations about terrorism or those who do it because they want to learn more, because we are trying to explain the concepts in an easy way, based on the opinions of some experts in this topic.

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

We think that we need a lot of help from our coaches to complete our job, but even though they only serve as a guide and give us some recommendations, because all the investigation and adapting part was part of our labor in which each member of the team participated.

The people who helped us are teachers from our school, but not only teachers, they were also our friends, because of that we have a very good relationship with them and confidence. They always helped us when we needed and gave us excellent advises and for that reason we were very happy working with them, so we don’t have words to say how pleasant was working with them, even tough we have a lot of work to do.

We are especially grateful with our teachers Mariana M, Angela H, Victor G, Francisco E. and Rafael M. that were the ones that we selected to be our coaches. Francisco E, Victor G. and Rafael M are the only ones that have been our teachers. That’s why we have a very good relationship with them, and also we chose them because we know they are very smart and could bring us a lot of help. Victor G. is our math teacher and is always trying to help us. He is very demanding with us, what helped us to make better our work and researches. Then, when we asked teacher Francisco E. to be our coach, he recommended us a person that could help us a lot on our project: Teacher Mariana M. No one of the team even knew her, but when we met her, we were very pleasant, because we consider her as a person with a lot of energy, very likeable and also very intelligent that could give us excellent advises for our work. And finally we need a teacher that could help us in redacting correct our work, therefore we ask teacher Angela H, that was recommended by other teacher and we were very thankful working with her.

Those were our coaches during the project and we just want to say them “Thanks for everything”.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

Of course this project made us obtain some “extra values”, not only the experience of doing and uploading a web page to the Internet, we obtained many benefits as the knowledge in this research process; we discovered facts we were not able even to imagine of terrorist networks, like how they work and what are their goals; we had to read many articles, what left us a lot of knew knowledge; we also saw some images that made us reflect about how hard could terrorism affects the world, what damages can it provoke and all the consequences people suffer in these kind of damaging attempts.

About the topic we can say that we, at the beginning thought that it was not a wide topic, we chose it almost in unconscious way, it was in a brainstorming, but we discovered that this topic is really exiting, because terrorism is not only attacking places, but it is everything it goes with it, how they plan the attack, how do they choose the target etc. and the thing that most excited us was to try to do a way of stopping terrorism, to decrease the damages it cause, etc.

But we thing that the most valuable benefit we could obtain, was to work all together, we had not been able to join in a working group, and we discovered that working with people you like joining with, can make your work more efficient, more pleasant and of course the work get easier to work on...