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1. Description of Our Community
Dong-Guang Elementary School is adjacent to Chengcing lake, Taiwan, and is the far east school in Kaohsiung City before the city and county were merged as one. The floor space of campus is 4.65 acres in total. Through four principals’ efforts, many characteristics feature our school. And among these characteristics, the nation-known one is “innovation.” There are 80 classes in total—72 general classes, 7 special classes (including gifted classes, learning disabled classes, and speech impaired classes) and 1 kindergarten class, amounting to 2150 students altogether. Our school vision is to cultivate holistic students by implementing curriculum on a basis of humanities, nature, and life. And we expect that each student can stay in an environment of high-quality.
2. Summary of Our Project
We dream, therefore we are. We human beings evolve with invention, on which our competitiveness for future bases. As a result, how to develop students’ creativity competitiveness is teachers’ critical task in the 21st century. Since 2005, Dong-Guang Elementary School of Kaohsiung has cultivated many little inventors under the instruction of a team of teachers. Over the past seven years, the little inventors have been exalted by many in that they have won innumerable prizes. In 2009, “Innovation Center” of Dong-Guang was established to display awarded inventions over the years. Thanks to endeavors from teachers, students, and administrative staff, innovation has blossomed fragrantly on our campus. Nowadays, innovation has featured Dong-Guang. In Kaohsiung, you can’t mention innovation without referring to Dong-Guang. The achievement is a result of painstaking efforts of many, and is definitely our pride. But how did Dong-Guang have this achievement? Is there anything special to talk about? The answer is in our research.
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:2-3
C. Connection speed used in the classroom:not sure
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:more than 6
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
The obstacles we faced were as follows: 1)Time Pressure We suffered from intense time pressure. Since we instructors guided the students to conduct four projects during the same period of time, we had limited time for this project. But the students were so sweet and responsible to finish the assignment in time! 2) Tracing the Unknown Past When our creativity curriculum was first implemented in 2005, those kids were still preschoolers. So they didn’t understand the history of creativity curriculum. Fortunately, Directors Chen and Jiang gave students assistance and Miss Yang gave them guidance, which enabled them to know the whole development process. Through interviews and research, they accomplished the research. 3) Difficulty in Website Construction Our students lacked prior experiences and skills to design of website, so they spent much time learning. Fortunately, with the assistance from Mr. Tung for instructing students to design the animated film with Flash, help from Miss Shih-Wen for guiding students to make 3D graphics using PhotoImpact, assistance from Mr. Zhong for instructing students to learn Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Hence, our website was successfully completed. The animation effect on our website was the hard work by the a student Han-Jie using Flash. He was called a potential big star.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
Through the dream of invention, we unite. Our dream is to invent something distinctive from the simplest for the well-being of all humans.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
Our research is in line with the guidelines of national 9th-Year Curriculum, which emphasizes the integration of different learning areas and the integration of self-designed curriculum into school-based curriculum. Through this research project which allows our students to explore the history of creativity and innovation at our school, they learn a lot by doing. They learn to collect data, read books, communicate with others, interview relevant people, operate computer software, do statistical analyses, design animation, construct a website, and so on. What they learned most is the from the whole research process. All of the participating students found that learning by doing is an impressive learning method which is in accordance to the national curriculum guidelines.
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