Team

DavidSANTA RITA ELEMENTARY, CA, United States

AnsonSANTA RITA ELEMENTARY, CA, United States

NathanSANTA RITA ELEMENTARY, CA, United States

Age Range

12 & under

Coaches

Diane HutchisonSANTA RITA ELEMENTARY, CA, United States

Mrs. Doris LeungCA, United States

Category

Math

Audience

Ages 9 and up

Language

English

Site Features

Online Activity / Game

Reading Guide / Book Guide

Quiz

Teacher Resources (Lesson Plans, Worksheets)

Photo Gallery

Video / Sound

Team Collaboration

Math is one of the most essential skills for getting a job. It is also one of the topics that students hate the most. Our goals was to make it fun, and prevent people from thinking that math was so difficult they shouldn’t even try it. After someone looked at our website, we hoped that they would look at math differently. We all had different strengths. Anson was like marbles dropped in a jar. He could make many problems. He was almost bursting with ideas. David was like sand dropped after the marbles. He could make lots of the programming to make our site more noticeable. Nathan acted like water poured into the jar. He filled in the cracks. What David and Anson overlooked, Nathan found and fixed. While they had the truck ready to roll, Nathan filled it up with gasoline. After the gas was in, the website roared into life! We offered so much friendly criticism that we couldn’t pass it all around. We talked about everything from David playing math games to Anson making word problems. Mrs. Hutchison was our coach. We had meeting times every Wednesday and Friday where we all got together to discuss and create our website. Whenever we had a problem, we voted to find out how many people favored one of our ideas. I felt that we didn’t really have the best team spirit. We had quite a few challenges that were quite difficult to overcome. We had to look each other squarely in the eye and tell them sternly that we had to work or we wouldn't be able to continue. We could figure out how to fix things that went wrong, because we had a lot of experience. We learned how to use Flash CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4. We all sort of went our own ways at first. It took time before we were able to pull ourselves together. We all edited the work we had produced. It took time to finish what needed to be done. We all paid attention frequently in math class in case if we found something that would fit on our webpage. Mrs. Kirby gave us info about proportions, ratios, probability, algebra, and countless other topics. She helped us more than anyone would think. We were already friends when we decided to start a ThinkQuest project. This chance let us know who was a good person to team up with on future projects. It let us balance our pros and cons. We were able to justify who was best for doing what. We designated time for working on the project. We worked whenever possible, every day if we could. We spent a lot of time making this project. This project was very fun. We always could find something we liked to do. It was an experience that all of us will never forget.

Team Diversity

We are all Asian. David and Nathan are Chinese. Nathan is also partly Dutch. Anson is Vietnamese. David worked on our actual site as we were generating content. He found a couple of sites with math games. Anson focused on word problems. He came up with quite a few challenging problems. I focused on writing the "about our site" work. I also found a couple of sites with math games. We all originally worked on different things. David kept on wanting to do work on the animation and html on the site. Anson kept on making math problems and print outs. I focused on the writing part of our site. David researched Flash CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4 the most. He kept on testing out Flash CS4. He spent long hours working on templates. He found out how to string things together. He put in scripting and made the animation work. Anson generated math problems and printouts faster than you can say, "Wow. That is a ton of math problems focused on the different areas of math". Each one challenged a different area of math such as algebra, proportions, ratios, pi, and much more. Nathan worked on all of the writing that needed to be made. He had created the team collaboration and diversity pages in only 3 days. The typing came naturally to him. He could type faster than you could mutter, "Pi is long, but this is longer!". All the typing he could make would fill a beanbag.