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1. Description of Our Community
Hong Kong is an international city, undergoing urbanization. With hundreds of skyscrapers in its city hub and plenty more surrounding it, Hong Kong can easily be called a modern city. But there are many parts of Hong Kong that differentiates it from other cities and one of the things that makes Hong Kong so unique are the street-side cooked-food stalls. These stalls, as their name implies, are located at the side of the streets, and sells street food, but are located only in developing parts of Hong Kong, such as Mong Kok. This makes the area special, because the place is not developed enough for large corporations to step foot in it which also makes the price of the street foods cheap as they aren’t really affected by the economic tides brought in by the corporations, which is quite extraordinary as Hong Kong is more of a business oriented area. But what makes it so unique isn’t mainly because of the economic differences, but actually by the food themselves. The street-side cooked-food stalls don’t really sell normal food like rice, spaghetti or sandwiches. They sell local snacks such as fish balls, shumai, octopus legs, fried eggplants, stinky tofu and even pig intestines. The food sold is mostly deep-fried, making them so delicious and popular, especially during winter. They are served mostly in Styrofoam cups or skewers, so that people can walk around the old streets while enjoying the delicacies served to them. Street-side cooked-food stalls are considered a cultural part of Hong Kong, as most Hong Kong people, no matter rich or poor, would come from all around Hong Kong just to enjoy the atmosphere of eating delicious treats while roaming around the old streets, which makes it a very unique and mentionable part of Hong Kong.
2. Summary of Our Project
Adults usually think that youths these days are getting less and less reliable, maybe they are right, maybe we are, but we if we choose not to be, we can do many meaningful things and one of the ways would be to make a website which helps reflect Hong Kong’s culture through food. Not to brag, but we think we did quite a nice job in making the website. Our website talks about Hong Kong’s street side food, which we chose as the topic because we know that what inspires people most to learn about ones cultural would be the food. We chose to make this website because we know that Hong Kong is becoming more business-oriented, people would rather choose to make the rents really high and have large enterprises rent them instead of keeping low-profiting food stalls around, choosing money over culture preservation. Of course we youngsters are going to be the ones who are going to lose that part of Hong Kong’s culture and we wouldn’t want that, so what better way to raise awareness than making a website describing the food street stalls sell. We youths will be the ones to shape the future, but why not shape it now, before what we want to preserve disappears. We think that this future is preventable and we will try to do as much as we can to prevent it, and the first step would be to raise awareness.
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:1
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):
Internet access in Hong Kong has a very high coverage. Almost the entire Hong Kong has Wi-Fi access. There is free Wi-Fi access in the streets as well, thus Internet Access is not an issue in the making of the project.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
We had quite an amount of problems in the process of making this website, but of course, we were able to overcome the difficulties, sometimes with help from the coach and other times, we did it on our own. There were a quite an amount of problems like when collecting data or trying to keep the website as original as possible, sometimes it was quite minor, but sometimes it was quite serious, and we had two major problems. The serious problem was that more than half of us were in form four; this meant that we didn’t have much experience for webpage authoring, such as the HTML syntax. We were in a frenzy because our coach was out of time for a few days, it was terrible, but eventually the form four managed to learn the basics from the form five and we were back in the game, but even more determined to win because we all worked really hard in the crisis and we didn’t want it to go to waste. The second major problem we dealt with was the video part, which was a very problematic because first, it was too large and we had to reduce some parts. We then added subtitles, which of course wasn’t a huge problem with some help from our coach, but then we noticed that the sound was really soft, so we had to look for the original file, which was buried very deep in the school server and do the work again, which was exhausting because we all thought that the work was already done. The barriers we encountered were quite troublesome and made us all exhausted, but we all agree it’s good that we encountered the problems now, when young, so we won’t have the same problems when older.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
The participation in CyberFair has made us understand that there is so much to know about our field(Hong Kong's street snacks) that it takes lots of dedication to the matter to make the webpage nice.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
We did this project as an interest group. We assigned different tasks to different members, some members updated the webpage, some had to collect and organize the data, some members were tasked to take photos, record the video and also edit them, graphic design and layout deign were tasked to all members because we all had training for graphic design and layout design beforehand . Although we didn’t know all the skills for making a website beforehand, but we learned lot of IT skills in the process of creating the website. The skills learned would come in handy in the future and for future ICT projects. Of course, not all students joined the interest group because they were interested in making the project, but because joining the project would help fill the requirement of joining an IT-based competition. But things changed a few lessons later where we were determined to win instead of just participating. In the process, we were able to enforce several group concepts too, such as splitting up responsibilities, and not blame a member when he makes some mistakes, but instead find solutions together. The nice thing was that no one had to remind us that such rules existed; we were able to enforce it ourselves. As I mentioned above, we all had training for graphic design and layout design, which was actually taught to us purely by using the computer. We found that this method worked better than the traditional method, this would be because we were all more focused when computers were involved; the next reason would be that when computer skills are being taught, the best way to learn them is by using a computer to actually try, instead of just being described the effects.
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