|
1. Description of Our Community
We live in Radauti, a small town (around 30, 000 inhabitants) in the county of Suceava, Bukovina, in Northern Romania. The ethnic composition is made of Romanians, Hungarians, Rroma, Germans and Jews. Our community is one of the oldest settlements in Moldavia, known since the 15th century. Radauti evolved due to its favorable location midway between the Carpathians and the tableland area (with traders from both regions establishing contact in the local market). The fairs at Radauti have been dated to the time of Stephen the Great. An important part of our community is the “Arcanul” festival, organized each summer, in which traditional folk dancers from countries like Cyprus, Hungary, Italy, Georgia and others compete for the first prize, and march through the town centre, much to the delight of the locals. The community in which we live in is one with friendly, welcoming people, that still respect the old customs and traditions, even being renown for these characteristics. The people here have always been hard workers, hearty and eager to help even a stranger. The landscape seems to be taken out of fairy-tales, with high mountains, imposing respect and admiration, and wide valleys in which we can see images of the perfect communion between man and nature, images heaven like, where everything is at it’s place, images of perfection. So, the community we chose, Bukovina, isn’t just a local one, it's part of a bigger ensemble of goodness.
2. Summary of Our Project
Summary of our project: The purpose of our research was to identify the youth’s knowledge concerning both traditional and imported customs celebrated in Romania. Also, we wished to find out the teenagers’ opinion on the importance and significance of the customs and in what measures are they celebrated by the locals. We tried to analyze the conceptions that were revealed through the final results of our questionnaires . Our project was thought to be a tocsin for preventing the traditional Romanian customs from being forgotten.
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
E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):
Our school's classrooms are not equipped with computers, and thus we couldn't access the internet in the classroom. However, our school has three informatics labs , where we had access to the internet and could conduct our research and build our project.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
The greatest problem we had to overcome was the lack of cooperation from the church. Some of the priests we wanted to interview couldn’t find time and others failed to understand what we meant by our questions. At some points, the lack of proper equipment was a problem, but we solved it by borrowing what we needed from our colleagues (digital cameras, recorders). When we got involved in this project, we were aware of the fact that a great amount of work would involve computer and web designing skills, and since this is not included in our school curriculum, we thought we would have a hard time finding someone to help us with the site’s design. Fortunately, eleventh grader Laur helped Hrihor Adrian from our team to understand how web designing works. Unfortunately, after the first attempt of designing the web site, he had to redesign it because the design was utterly inappropriate.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
As soon as the students found out about our project they were really intrigued by it and wanted to see our work and give us some advice. In the end they were real happy with what we had done and suggested students from other schools to view our project.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
For this project, we improved our skills in almost every curricular and extra-curricular field, such as History, Geography, Web Design, English, Photography, Photo Manipulation, or Folk Traditions. We made sure that every member of the team had to work on a specific part of the project, according to his or her experience and knowledge about the subject. We developed skills in both Romanian text editing, as well as English translation, we perfected our abilities in conducting interviews and communicating with important people in our community and we also learnt a great deal about our ancestors and the old traditions of our people. As it is our school’s main goal to develop our personality and help us discover what it is that we like and are good at, as well as giving us the opportunity of researching almost any field we are interested in, this project fit perfectly in our school’s requirements. In the course of creating our web site, we realized that using the Internet would be a more useful way of learning, but, because we couldn’t have managed to complete our project without the use of traditional methods such as books and research, we consider that the ideal way is a mix between the two.
|
