Award
2009 12 and Under: 2nd place
Team
ArunChatsworth International School, Singapore
ShayakSingapore American School, Singapore
AaheliRaffles Girls School, Singapore
Age Range
12 & under
Coaches
Debashis TarafdarSingapore
Amit DasNanyang Technological University, Singapore
Category
Science & Technology > Earth Science
Audience
Ages 9 and up
Language
English
Site Features
Online Activity / Game
Quiz
Teacher Resources (Lesson Plans, Worksheets)
Video / Sound
Team Collaboration
It was hard work putting this site together, that too with a small team of three. We split the work as follows: Arun for the common metals, Shayak for the history bit, and Aaheli for the dark side.
We came up with some simple but effective ways to work together. With our coaches, we drew up a detailed Site Map, so that we could write our articles by ourselves. We also came up with a common Dreamweaver template for all of us to put content into. This way, each of us knew what we had to do, and where it would fit on the web site. We did the research for our own articles and wrote them by ourselves. After our coaches read our articles, they suggested changes that we made.
As soon as the articles were written, they were posted on a server run by our Assistant Coach. This made it possible for us to see the progress that we made every day, as well as the work left to be done. Seeing the web site grow day by day gave us the will to work even harder. We read one another's articles to find typos and grammar errors that we could fix. We made lists of such errors and sent them to one another by e-mail.
Other than writing our own articles, we helped one another whenever needed. Our coaches helped us gather information by pointing us to educational sites about metals on the web. They also helped us find images that are free for use.
We met every two weeks to review our work together. At these meetings, we spent many hours together looking at our site. We marked on our Site Map what we had to do before the next meeting, and tried to finish our work on time. We were friends before we became team mates, so we could be frank with each other when we talked about work.
During the course of this project, we got to know one another much better. We learned that different people like different tasks. Some enjoy gathering information from the Internet, some enjoy writing, and some enjoy drawing. We tried to give each person work that he or she enjoyed.
Our project is done completely outside school time, so we wanted the work to be fun. We also had to make sure that we did not fall behind on schoolwork while working on our ThinkQuest project.
Team Diversity
We have two boys and one girl on our team. The youngest of us is nine, and the other two twelve. The 12-year olds did a lot of research and writing, while the youngest member contributed more art, cartoons, and funny videos. There were times when the 12-year olds had to edit the articles written by the youngest member to make them more business-like. But they could not match the wacky humor the 9-year old brought to the site.
We did this ThinkQuest project completely outside our school time. What made things hard was that we go to three different school systems. Shayak, who moved here from the US less than a year ago, goes to the American School. Aaheli goes to a Singapore school, and Arun to a school following the British curriculum. We know different things, work differently, and have different calendars.
Our schools had their term breaks one after the other. Weekends were the only time we could meet and discuss things, when all of us were free. Even then, we had different interests and activities that we are involved in. One member of the team had to spend a lot of time practising for her dance performance. Another had to train for taking his Taekwondo test. The third member had to go for his Kumon Math lessons. In the last few weeks, many of these activities had to make way for ThinkQuest work.
We have different skills that went into our website. One of us draws well, while another learned Adobe Flash just for this project. One of our team members played music on her piano for the animation, while another collected tons of data on metals, their properties, their sources, and their uses. The third member spent hours drawing and painting. Two PC users struggled to keep up with one Mac user. Movies made on the Mac would often not run on the PCs.
