|
1. Description of Our Community
Singapore is a small city-state of a land area of about 752 square kilometres. In fact, she is ranked the 44th smallest nation in the world. The population of Singapore is about 5 million. A huge population in a small land area inevitably causes heavy urbanisation and even overcrowding. The island is a 'concrete jungle', as many people refer Singapore to be. Oh, did we mention jungle? To many people, Singapore has no jungle nor rural areas, but if you were to look deeper, you would not only find a few, but you would find very good, well-managed and well-maintained rural areas in this densely populated island.
2. Summary of Our Project
This project will first introduce you four fine places of rural areas in Singapore, namely Hay Dairies, Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve, Bollywood Veggies and Kampung Buangkok. These places have their common characteristics and charm but also have their differences in terms of operations and management. We will then look into the specific purposes behind their establishments, the background of their owners or management teams, their contributions to the society in general and what many visitors have said about them. These attractions help greatly both in the educational arena and the tourism industry, and they are part of a greater effort to preserve rural areas and to slow down the urbanisation in Singapore. The project will then take a closer look at Bollywood Veggies, as it has many varieties of local plants and fruits and the place is well-managed.
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
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
Our main problems were the formation of our team and shortage of meeting time and project time. As we were all in our first year of secondary schools, we had just joined this new School. We like to do this project because we were interested to work on a project and we liked the project which is about rural areas in Singapore, which we feel we seldom had the chances to experience. As we had volunteered to participate in this project, we had to commit our time to ensure we complete the project. We feel that when we attend school, it is not just the academic study that is important, the other aspects of life, for example, helping other people who are disadvantaged, appreciating people who have different background from we. We also want to contribute something to the school as well as to the wider community. The team members met to discuss the project only in January 2012 (because we joined this school only in January 2012). Our project team members put in a lot of effort to this project. We often worked over weekends to do research. We came from different classes so we hardly meet each other during school hours. We have to meet after school hours which are in the late afternoons and weekends. We have to allocate tasks to the team members fairly and quickly. We learnt that teamwork is very important as everyone must do their part. We learnt technology skills like Photoshop and Flash. We had endured through major problems and we are proud of what we had achieved at the end of the day.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
We are very interested in the content of this project, which is why we could continue to do the project even though there are many obstacles before us. We have learnt many things when working for the CyberFair Competition that we could not do so in the normal classroom like teamwork, research skills, communication and IT skills. We learnt a lot from the organisations we are working on the project. We visited the Bollywood Veggies Singapore and Kampung Buangkok. The staffs in Bollywood Veggies are very friendly; they brought us around the place and spoke to us. When we visited any farm, we learnt to pay attention to details as we need to observe the many different vegetables and fruits and to remember their names. We learnt to get information from different available sources like the internet, newspapers, people working in the farms, books, food labels, even TV and radio commercials. We learnt technical skills like Photoshop and apply the skills immediately on the photographs taken.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
In Singapore, the Ministry of Education recommended the Baseline ICT Standards, which is a comprehensive list of ICT skills competencies, to be integrated into core subject areas and project work. In participating in the CyberFair Competition, the pupils were able to accomplish the following skills areas such as (1) Learning to operate in an interactive media environment, (2) Learning internet navigation and use search engines independently, (3) Learning to create, edit and format text with word processor, (4) Learning to produce and manipulate multimedia content like flash and Photoshop, and (5) Learning online communication skill like wiki. At the same time, they learn to respect Intellectual Property and practice safe and responsible use of the internet.
| 
