Beyond Beauty-Taiwan from Above
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 diversity of the geographical environment creates extraordinary views in Taiwan, drawing tourists and experts around the world to explore this exceptional island. Also 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 or the environment. For instance, we have beach cleaning activities every year. In addition, our school draws focus on the beauty of the environment, hence, we have photography and drawing competitions each year. These activities can draw the attention of Taiwanese society to learn more about the beauty and knowledge regarding Taiwan’s environment. Therefore, we are going to introduce people to know about “Chi Po-lin Foundation” and the geographical knowledge of Taiwan through this project.
Taiwan, an island country, has a rich culture and geographical diversity. Yet, due to overexploitation, pollution and other damages, Taiwan has slowly lost its beauty. Furthermore, Taiwanese citizens lack the knowledge and realization of the worsening circumstances in Taiwan. Hence, many individuals and organizations have been trying to promote the environmental problem in Taiwan, drawing focus to protect the beauty of this island. Chi Po-lin, a prestigious director and photographer who passed away due to helicopter accident, was passionate about using videos and photos to demonstrate the beauty and damage the environment has faced. Therefore, Chi Po-lin foundation has extended the legacy, promoting environmental protection and photography to the Tawianese community. Our project will introduce the Chi Po-lin foundation and will further discuss the danger Taiwan’s environment faces.
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: Since the internet is becoming more inventive, we can now work in class while using the internet. Throughout class, all of the team members are using the internet for more research and websites. We utilized the internet in school to help us improve with our work while we were at school, and continued using the wifi in our house to work after going back home. The upload internet speed utilized in the school is around 10.58 Mbps, and the download internet speed is approximately 2 Mbps. As our school is located in the highlands, the internet speed is inconsistent. When the wifi goes down, we use cable internet to do our tasks.
During the cyber fair project, we have endured and encountered several challenges including: first, not enough participants for our survey. As we have been doing this project for about 3 years, people around us will do our survey for us. However, as they know from past experience that our survey is especially long, the respondents express lower willingness to fill out the survey. Hence, we only receive 160 at first. Instead of shortening the survey and affecting the validity of research, we utilize each member’s connections with others, spreading the survey to other organizations or surroundings where they never fill out our survey before. As a result, we recognize the significance of having connections in our lives. Second, due to the app we use for creating our website, only one person can access the working page. Therefore, the responsibility of creating the whole website lands on one member. This makes the process less efficient, time consuming and creates more burden for certain members. Third, as we have more homework and extracurricular activities after we came into tenth grade, it is harder for us to find time to work on our cyberfair project. Hence, we are required to improve our time management, spending time during the winter break to come back to school and work on our project. Even though this limits our leisure time, however, as long as the final product is well-done, then every hard work is worth the price. Lastly, as the COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing issue, we encountered several rejections or delays of interview. Nevertheless, we manage to utilize online tools or obtain the maximum amount of information in a single meeting, allowing us to finish our website with thorough introduction of the Chi Po-Lin foundation.
This project did not only bring awareness to environmental issues in Taiwan, but also well communicated with others through technology to disseminate the awareness to our homeland. What we’ve learned by participating in the CyberFair far exceeded our imagination.
Our project has made a great impact on the community for advocating the problem and knowledge on our own environment. Our web pages include information related to the geography of Taiwan and the environmental issue that’s currently happening to our habitat. This web page can make others understand the beauty of Taiwan and the severeness of the environmental issue in Taiwan. In addition, we’ve shared our survey to the students in our school and people around us, including our family, friends and other relatives. They have given us a lot of positive feedback about the questions we asked and the information included in our website, which they believe they’ve learned a lot about Taiwan and environmental problems.