Barrier Free - Happy Work, Happy Life

Project Overview

Our Community

           Taiwan, a beautiful island with ecological diversity and various ethnicities. Taiwan is surrounded by sea in the Eastern part of Asia and the Western Pacific Ocean. Located on the boundary between the Eurasian Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate, Taiwan is extruded by the plates. The standards of health in Taiwan are impressive, having been improved considerably since the beginning of the 20th century. As known as the “castle in the mountains', our school, Kang Chiao International School, pays a lot of attention to students' core character education, there are many opportunities for us to serve and give back to society. For instance, we have a fundraising activity every year. Our school collaborates the fundraising activity with “Genesis Social Welfare Foundation” and “Taiwan U-Life Association”, allowing us, students and teachers, to participate and concern about groups that need help in society. These activities can draw the attention of Taiwanese society to help and develop empathy in individuals. Therefore, we are going to introduce people to know about “Happy Work” and the disables condition in Taiwan through this project.

Project Summary

           Handicaps account for 5.1% of Taiwan’s population, making them an important group of people in Taiwan. However, the disabled often are treated unfairly and have poor caring systems to sustain their lives. Therefore, many local organizations are formed to look after the disabled. Happy Work Organization, an organization that supports handicapped families, looks after adult handicaps and provides work opportunities to these disabled. Happy Work has been an important handicap organization in Taiwan, and the founder believes that handicaps not only need physical caring, they also need mental caring and career support, therefore, she founded this organization. Our project will introduce the Happy Work Organization and will further discuss the difficulties the disabled face in Taiwan.

Cyberfair Theme

           The theme for CyberFair 2022 is protected and unite. Our project involves an association, Happy Work, that helps the disabled and protects their rights. Our team is uniting to protect our community by informing the topic of disabilities to more people. During this project, we looked up information about the topic and made a questionnaire which we received 305 responses — this means that more people are aware of this topic which is beneficial for the community.

Problems We Had to Overcome

           During the CyberFair project, we face and confront many challenges, including: 
1. The majority of the members are attending the Cyberfair club for the first time, and are unfamiliar with the project creation. As a result, three members with prior participation experience took on the roles of leader and guided us through the project. 
2. The topic we were researching was a disabled social organization, in which the staff and the chairman were usually busy taking care of the disabled. Also, due to the privacy of the disabled, the organization hesitated for us to visit and interview the care center. Lastly, because of Covid-19, especially in the Taoyuan care center, which was a serious epidemic area in Taiwan, the organization considered the health and safety, once again delayed the actual interview. Eventually, we both agreed on a virtual meeting and interview. 
3. Our team members' computing abilities were insufficient, particularly in the area of web page creation, due to difficulties in knowing settings and programming the website fluently. Therefore, we spent our vacations after the Chinese New Year holidays for additional training on improving our skills. 
4. To get enough legitimate surveys, we spent a lot of time making sure individuals filled out the survey we passed through the school email. We put the link on our instagram profile, also pleased parents and cousins to pass the survey to other social media groups, which successfully helped us reach our goal of receiving at least 300 responses to our survey.

Our Project Sound Bite

           This project did not only bring awareness to the people with disabilities in our surroundings, but also well communicated with others through technology to disseminate the awareness to the public. What we’ve learned by participating in the CyberFair far exceeded my imagination.

Our Project and Content Standards, Required Coursework and Curriculum Requirements

           We learned new skills and practiced group concepts during the activities and research for this International Schools CyberFair Project. We learned strategies of efficiently collecting information, analyzing data thoroughly, organizing the information correctly, and presenting and communicating it clearly to people. These skills are all important either in school or in real life. We could not have done this project without these skills. Kang Chiao International School applied for an IB learner profile, in which we all become thinkers, risk-takers, communicators, and inquirers in this year’s CyberFair. Our topic this time is one of Taiwan’s associations for the disabled, in which we learned more about disabilities and became more caring. We understood more related knowledge about disabilities, including the categories they’re put in, the government’s incentives, how people treat the disabled, and the difficulties they encounter. We used the internet to make our website to introduce Happy Work, which allowed everyone to see it. If we do it in a traditional way of printing them out as hard copies, it might not allow as many people to see as on the internet.