Local Leaders

In short, our project is about the story of an ex-criminal, An-Pong Cheng, who believed in god, reformed, and established an organization helping other ex-criminals who suffered similar fates as he does. We interviewed An-Pong Cheng, learned about his story, and made this website. Apart from the life stories of An-Pong Cheng, we also introduced the other organizations that he founded, such as Electrotherapy Pavillion, Beef Noodle Shop, and even nursing homes for the elderly.

Through this project and interview of An-Pong Cheng, our visions were no longer limited to the discriminated traditional belief that all ex-criminals are still evil and will commit crimes as soon as they can since they're just evil deep inside. This project showed us that many people aren't committing crimes just for fun: some are forced by others, some are forced by the environment, and some are forced by additions.

Our project addresses 'Number and Operations' and 'Data Analysis and probability' as our content standards. This project fits into the 'Effective Communicator' and 'Data analysis' school curriculum guidelines: 'Effective Communicator' expects us to talk to other people and effectively share information; 'Data analysis', as its name implies, expects us to analyze data in-depth, including predicting the future growth of the current trend. After this project, our interview skills certainly improved a lot. From gathering information, creating interview questions, setting up meetings, to the actual interviewing, our efficiency and accuracy improved a lot. By being a good communicator, we students often share knowledge in groups to improve efficiency in learning, which applies to understanding specific ideas. After this project, we discovered that our school does not involve in many competitions like the CyberFair; most of the ones we participate in are sports-related or purely knowledge-based, this made us realize we're quite special in our school community. Personally, I believe using the Internet for teaching and learning has been more effective than the traditional book and paper method. On top of typing being faster than writing and keeping documents online being more secure, there is a tremendous amount of information on the Internet for us to learn; the amount of information we could get from the Internet is a hundred times more than reading a textbook.

Tools used: Laptops for every student ; Phones for contacting ; Cameras for recording and picture taking ; Computer Softwares: Adobe Dreamweaver for website making, Google Docs for documenting, iMovie for video editing, Adobe Photoshop for picture editing ; Oral Interviews ; Internet.

All these tools were necessary for us to complete this project; without them, we couldn't document, edit, or even get our information. The school donates most of the software to us, while we prepare the hardware. The most valuable tool in this project, however, would probably be Adobe Dreamweaver, without it, we couldn't even have made the website. Also, the Internet has been the most helpful, since we had to do almost all of our background research online, plus, without the Internet, we probably wouldn't even know the organization we interviewed exists.

After a complete discussion, we set the topic of this project. First, we use phone and email to contact An-Pong. Then, after confirming the location and time of the interview, we plan a very thorough topic for better data of our project. Lastly, we actually interviewed and collected data for our project. Through this process, we properly acted as 'ambassadors' for our school as we are the ones who contacted and represented our school when interviewing. An-Pong Cheng is actually not the first person we contacted for this project, at the beginning, we decided to contact a rehabilitation association for criminals that is established by the government since it's safer to go for official organizations. So, we sent an email asking if we could have an interview and that we will call in to check 3 days later. However, the secretary, who we sent the email to, is in charge of only a branch of the organization and did not forward it to the main organization, therefore when we phoned them they absolutely lost it on us, saying how we didn't contact them before and is rude to just call in. After that, we decided to drop interviewing the official organization and went to look for others, which is why we came upon Rumah Victory even though it's quite a small organization.