About Our Project

    This project has been a challenging, yet fun experience.  We began to work on the site in October and it has taken about six months to finish it.  Our web club meets once a week, but we did TONS of work in between.  This is the plan we used:

  • We took the ThinkQuest categories and thought about subjects that interested us.  We made a list and then voted.  It was unanimous.  We all wanted mining!

  • Our coach said that the best way to get information was to visit a couple of area mines.  She found two and planned the trips.  It was so much better to see it in person rather than in a book!

  • We all did research even though we didn't all like it very much.  We wanted our site to give kids all of the info they need to do rock and mineral assignments.  We needed lots of understandable facts on each page.

  • We took most of our own pictures.  Our pictures come from visits to mines, jewelry stores, and even Ebay!  Some mineral pictures were hard to find and we emailed some very nice people that were selling chunks of them on Ebay.  Then we had a problem with Caterpillar, Inc., a company that sells mining equipment.  We applied for permission to use some of their graphics on our site.  We received permission but we found out it was only for a year.  Our coach said that we couldn't take them off the site after a year.  We couldn't use them after all.  Then we emailed a used machinery website and they let us use any pictures we wanted!  That was great!

  • We created the website layout, design, and theme. We wanted an upbeat site that wasn't like the dark ones that we found on the Internet.  We had to make ours different from the ones we were seeing and we think making it more kid-friendly did that.  We voted when there were disagreements and everyone accepted the results of the vote.

  • We split up the jobs based on our strengths.  It didn't take us long to figure out that some people did research very well.  Some were good at taking the information and putting it into their own words.  One of us was a GREAT artist!  We were lucky enough to have a few team members who took good notes and others who took good pictures.  We assigned tasks based on strengths AND whether we were available when a job needed to be done.

  • Editing.  We really don't like to edit.  That didn't matter, though, because it had to be done.  Everyone was assigned pages to edit and we were surprised to see how many errors there were even though we thought we were careful.  A couple of team members came in every day to make corrections.

  • Finally, the site is done.  We feel that we met the following challenges:

1. We took a major topic and narrowed it down so that it would fit the needs of a younger audience.
2. We took a topic that was hard to understand and made it understandable for our younger visitors.
3. We worked through problems when we disagreed or when we just weren't able to get info we needed.  We didn't quit looking for good machinery graphics when we had problems with Caterpillar's.  We just kept looking until we found someone else who would help us.  When we couldn't do a job alone, we looked for [and got] adult partners to help us.  We included them on our Citations page.
4. And, when we wanted a more global view, we searched for a long time to find a team member who could help us.  It took us four months to find Kris and he is truly a member of our team!

  • Caley took notes and pictures on our trips.  She wrote some of the mineral and trip reports.  She also helped design the website, find missing graphics, transfer typed information into the website, edit, and get our email permissions.  She worked on the survey, too.

  • Jennifer took notes on one of our trips.  She wrote a LOT of our longest reports for the site.  She also helped design the website, find missing graphics, edit, and add hyperlinks to the site.  She also worked hard on the survey and added tables to the site. 

  • Shaun took notes and pictures on our trips.  He helped design the site and choose its theme.  He is responsible for all of the navigation, mine, and miner graphics on the site.  He also did reports on rocks and minerals and edited the site.

  • Kris became a member after the design had been chosen.  He lives in Bulgaria and has researched and written reports for the site.  He visited a quarry for more info and lots of videos.  Kris wrote several pages.   He helped the team by giving us a more global view of mining and the environment.  He also edited site pages.

  • Marlin did reports on rocks and minerals and is responsible for adding all of the pages to the website.  He helped search for graphics and links and did all of the text tags for the pictures.  Marlin edited the site, too.

  • Charlie took pictures on the trips and did reports on rocks and minerals.  He helped choose the design and theme of the site.  He helped edit and find missing graphics. 

  • Our Coach helped us find research sources.  She arranged [and went on] all of our trips. She helped us find our team member from Bulgaria.  She advised us but let us make our own decisions.  She gave us "brain food" when we needed it and pushed us when we slowed down.  She taught us how to use FrontPage and Photoshop and helped us find errors in our site. 

This was a team effort and everyone added their skills and talents wherever they were needed.  We worked very hard on this site so that at the end we could truthfully say:

We did our BEST!