OrcaCredits1

Collaboration

Why We Chose This Topic And How We Organized Our Team

Our team is comprised of three home schooled students, and a student from Laukkoski, Finland attending the Jokimaki school. We have worked diligently from October 2005 through to the beginning of May 2006. Because of the long distances between the homes of our three Canadian team members, and the language, cultural and distance barriers with our international partner, it has sometimes been difficult to communicate as a team. Perhaps this was the greatest challenge we had to overcome. We adapted by having online meetings and using e-mails to efficiently share ideas and files. Sometimes we also used a translator to effectively communicate with out Finnish team member! As well, we have utilized the powers of the internet to communicate at a distance, using programs such as Macromedia Breeze, which includes a set of powerful online classroom tools. Using this software we were able to share our computer screens, allowing one member with their mouse to control another member's desktop. We also sent hundreds of emails and shared files on an FTP server to which we all had access. Typically Caleb would create the code for an activity and send the file to the rest of the team to be reviewed and developed. Abigail would usually take charge of the research, with Madeline and Viola dressing up the files with striking graphics. Usually the files would be sent back and forth several times for corrections and enhancements before we were all satisfied. Some files have more than a dozen separate versions before they were ready for publication. For every challenge, we implemented a collaborative process to design a solution.

The website development challenges we had to overcome included selecting a topic and finding the most efficient way to incorporate bundles of content within a highly interactive format. We chose the topic of killer whales as they are truly global species. They inhabit all oceans on the planet and are a popular subject in the art of many cultures. In addition, there is an ongoing worldwide debate about the wisdom and ethics of keeping killer whales in captivity. Also, there is a significant amount of new research about killer whales that hasn’t been presented on any of the websites we encountered. Also, wanting to emphasize interactivity, our team spent countless hours brainstorming ways to create educational games with audience appeal. We compiled our thirteen games, demonstrations, and two interactive debates with the goal of facilitating user response and action. We also included dialogue on our web pages using the two Poser characters we created.

Our team members have grown tremendously in their website creation abilities. We have had a chance to put our knowledge to the ultimate test with our amazing but small ensemble. We have enjoyed the privilege of creating a website for Thinkquest and hope you will enjoy reviewing our site as much as we did developing it! It has been an incredible educational opportunity.

Title l Introduction l Orca Info l Legends l Activities l Debate l Quizzes l Credits