How the team worked

Making a team
We, Renate and Nienke, had joined the Dutch Thinkquest Competition for several years now.
But we had never joined the International Competition.
We thought it would be a new challenge to join the International Competition.

We both asked a good friend to join the team.
Laurette had joined the Dutch Thinkquest Competition last year, together with Renate.
Naomi had never ever made a website before.

In the beginning Laurette and Renate had their doubts about joining the International Competition because they are not so good in English, and attend a school at a lower level.
Renate and Laurette are in the last year of MAVO (which is called VMBO nowadays), Nienke is in the 4th year of HAVO, Naomi in the 4th year of VWO.
But then Renate and Laurette realised that they were good enough in using Dreamweaver and let Nienke and Naomi do the translations.
Nienke and Naomi on the other hand didn't had too much (or even non) experience with Dreamweaver but are good in English because they follow a bilingual education.
On this site: www.rc.an/rceng.htm you can read a description of the Dutch secondary school system.

Choosing the subject
Since Renate and Laurette are not so good in English we found it difficult to choose a new subject.
Two years ago Nienke and Renate submitted the Dutch Thinkquest with a site about people who are mentally disabled.
Because we were two years younger then and had less experience, we were not satisfied about the layout anymore.
You can see how it looked like at: www.hoezo.nl.nu

We chose this subject because they realised that they knew almost nothing about the subject.
Every year Renate and Neinke are ‘Zwarte Piet’ , a tradition in the Netherlands.
Sjoerd, a boy with Down syndrome, is a Zwarte Piet as well.
You can see us in this movie.

We met Sjoerd more often when we walk in town. And we realised that we knew nothing about him.
That’s why we wanted to know more.
We wanted to learn how people with a mental handicap live. Do they go to school? Do they work? What are their hobbies?

We want to show people of our age what we have learned because we think that most of the teenagers know less about people with an handicap than we do. Maybe some of them have prejudices.
And we hope that we have made them disappear.

So the 4 of us agreed upon re-designing the previous site.
We thought that the subject was still very up to date and illustrative.
We also agreed upon searching the net to find some English or other international sites about the subject, so that we could add these links and new information to our new site.

Dividing the work
All four of us searched the internet for extra information about the subject in English.
We also searched for scripts of simple games.

Renate and Nienke are the personal coaches of Thiandi since last year.
Thiandi is a girl of 15 years old who cannot speak and can not use her muscles very well. She communicates by using a sign board.
The mother of Thiandi gave much information about the school system that does not accept Thiandi.
Renate looks after Thiandi two times a week, after school.
She helps her with feeding and reads her stories. She goes for a walk with her or does a lot of other things.
Nienke looks after her once a week after school.
She does the same things as Renate. She reads her stories too, but in English this time.
Because Thiandi has lived in England for a while she understands the English language.

Two years ago Renate and Nienke visited several groups of mentally disabled people.
They interviewed them and made pictures.
This time they scanned the pictures of Thiandi.

Renate and Laurette built the new site in Dreamweaver using a template.
They totally changed the layout of the template by themselves. Creating the lay out took a long time before we were satisfied.

Nienke and Naomi translated the Dutch text into English.
And although they attend the bilangual school, English is not their mother language.
So sometimes it was difficult to find the right words about the subject.
We used a dictionary to search for words that we could not translate.
And we used Babylon to translate those words that were not in the dictionary.

Since we are not in the same class, we communicated by email most of the time.
Renate and Laurette spend most of the time together at Renate's place behind the computer.