Our Mission
The goal of Young Blood: Children of War is to raise awareness and educate people about child soldiers in the world today. Our target audience is anyone ages 15 or older because we feel that as a person gets older and older, that person should be gradually exposed to the true world we live in. In exposing people to the realities of the world, the use of child soldiers is not very well publicized. People always hear about the ongoing wars and humanitarian crises, but they never seem to hear about the 300,000 children that are participating in them. We hope to change that. We hope that by visiting our website, you have gained new knowledge about child soldiers that you never knew before. We hope that our presentation and images have made a profound impact on your view of the world. We hope that you have found a wealth of important information that is relevant both to you and the world today. Above all, we hope that you have learned something and that you will share your new knowledge in order to help stop the use of child soldiers today.
Why we chose this topic
We those to make our website on the topic of child soldiers because we believe that it is a topic that deserves more attention. Too many child soldiers exist for a problem this serious to be news only on a slow news day. We truly believe that raising awareness about child soldiers is the key first step to preventing the use of children altogether. In addition to creating a website, our team has made a presentation to a middle school about child soldiers and wrote letters to our Congressmen telling them about child soldiers. We believe that this is a topic that anyone can relate to, and that this topic has some information that is new to everyone.
Meet the Team
Thomas
Tommy, looking sharp.
Tommy is one of our two main content writers. He grew up as an American boy in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he has spent most of his life. Tommy brings the American perspective into the writing of this website. He has done extensive research on child soldiers, including attending a World Affairs Council seminar on "The World's Endangered Children" and reading Ishmael Beah's book A Long Way Gone, and he has conducted research for our country dossiers. Tommy is an excellent writer of the English language. He wrote and proofread the majority of the content on this site along with Parth Shah.
David, caught in an intersection in China.
David
David is the web developer in our team. He is a Chinese-American who was born in Norfolk, Virginia, but has spent about a year of his childhood in China, where he now frequently visits. Growing up in America for him was also a challenge due to language barriers, as when he started preschool, he could only speak Chinese. David is experienced in many programming languages including, but not limited to, XHTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and ActionScript. He created this entire website along with the Flash content. David brings into our team a developer's point of view, often raising concerns about how the user will experience our site and how the content should be presented to the eventual reader. Along with Krista O'Connell, he created much of what you see and how it is presented to you.
Krista
Krista, showing off her graphic design skills.
Krista is our graphics designer and team organizer. She is an American that has spent the larger part of her life so far in America. In addition to creating from scratch nearly all of the graphics on our site, Krista organized team meetings, set deadlines, and made sure we always had a goal. She proved to be an invaluable member of the team when she obtained permission to use photographs and graphics from other web sites dealing with child soldiers that we could not have used or obtained otherwise. She also conducted a tremendous amount of research, including buying three books on child soldiers. She always has the gravity of our topic in mind, as she is a person of humanity. In the future, Krista plans on joining the Christian Coalition for Children and helping the world.
Parth, ready for anything.
Parth
Parth is our other main content writer. He is an Indian born in Bombay, India, but brings an interesting perspective to our team because he spent his childhood in Uganda, a nation currently with 25,000 child soldiers. He brings first-hand perspective and experiences to our team. Although not a former child soldier himself, Parth has seen actual child soldiers and can relate to their terrors and mindsets. He knows what it is like to live in a nation with child soldiers and undergoing civil strife. Using these experiences, he wrote all of the country dossiers for our team, as well as conducting research with Tommy. Parth is also an excellent English writer and along with Tommy, wrote and proofread much of what you read on this site.
John Harrison
Mr. Harrison is the team's main coach. He is the AP/IB Computer Science and AP Statistics teacher at Princess Anne High School. He helped assemble the team and collaborated with the assistant coach, Ms. Camper. During our team's presentation to a middle school about child soldiers and ThinkQuest, he helped out by organizing transportation and bringing equipment to make our presentation on.
Beth Camper
Ms. Camper is the team's assistant coach. She is the MYP English 10 and IB English 12 teacher at Princess Anne High School. As an English teacher, she proofread the vast majority of the content of our site, making sure its grammar and style were acceptable English. She also helped organize our team's presentation to Kemps Landing Magnet School by being a liaison between our team and the teachers at the middle school. She offered her classroom as a meeting room after school for our team to meet and always offered words of encouragement. The entire team appreciates her efforts and is greatly thankful for them.
Our Work
The Site
This site uses many cutting-edge technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML for content navigation, which allows the tabs to work, and uses many JavaScript frameworks, such as the Prototype framework, under MIT licenses, which means they are free for use to the public for both commercial and non-commercial uses. In addition to looking good and performing well, this site sticks to strict HTML standards set by the W3C by adhering to the "content separate from style" principal. This site validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict as well as CSS, although the mandatory ThinkQuest banner is what causes our site to fail the W3C online validator for XHTML 1.0 Strict.
This site gives the user options to change settings such as font size and styling in order to appeal to a large audience. Even if a person is on an old computer with low resolution or is on a browser unsupported by our main website, that person will be redirected to Lite Mode, which displays properly on all web browsers and computers.
Our Collaboration
Our team has logged over 68 hours of internet messenging, sent over 119 emails, and held over 10 meetings to work. Working on a team is always challenging no matter what situation it is, but our team has done a phenomenal job in collaborating, staying organized, and making sure our tasks are accomplished. We all conducted research and then worked together to make sure the content turned out correct. To help us out, we utilized an online organizational tool called Basecamp to help us stay organized. Basecamp turned out to be a remarkable tool that allowed easy collaboration, milestone setting, and discussion.
Our Reflections
Each day, you wake up and live through your day, unaware of the unspeakable atrocities occurring around the world. You give no thought to such things as child soldiers, child trafficking, or child labor.
Each day, more children die in armed conflict.
Each day, a sadly small number of people strive to do something to stop the terrible practice of child soldiering.
Each day, a little more of the world’s future is killed or mentally transformed beyond saving.
The children of today will be the leaders of tomorrow, and we must do all we can to preserve our future. The significance of child soldiers is that the people who are in power in those countries now are perverting the minds of the children to accept and embrace violence, to fight to the death, and to forward the cause of their faction. Once these principles have been burned into the minds of the children, the process is nearly irreversible, and evil will have succeeded in preparing a new generation of hate for the world. The significance of child soldiers goes far beyond the deaths of a few or the kills that some children make. It is the mental process, the ingraining of perverse principles, which will only serve to continue war in the future.
To those people advocating peace and all those who wish for war to end, we tell you to look at the children. In order to stop war, you must catch the problem at its roots. To stop war in the future, you must teach the children of the war-torn nations that war is not the answer, and to do that, you must stop child soldiering.
Until recently, the four of us were just like you, oblivious to the horrors that children around the world are forced to endure. The four of us are eternally thankful that it is not us in the place of those children who are fighting. One of us nearly became a child soldier in Uganda, but luckily, his family moved to the United States. Now that we are aware of the problem and we have gotten past realization of the terrible lives of child soldiers, it is time to act. We have been changed forever in our perspectives on the world, and we hope that this website has had the same effect on you.
About ThinkQuest
The motivation to create this website partly comes from an organization called ThinkQuest. While the idea and the desire to make a difference were firmly planted in the minds of all four of the members on our team, a website with no funding, no syndication, and no name recognition would get nowhere. When we heard about ThinkQuest from our teacher, we became determined to make our website about child soldiers to raise awareness. ThinkQuest is a great organization that inspires students to think, connect, create, and share, stimulating them to make websites concerning any issue or topic they desire. These websites then become a resource for all students coming after them, and each year more ThinkQuest participants add to the already enormous knowledge database. ThinkQuest offers students across the world the opportunity to connect with one another and to learn together with people of different cultures and points of views. This expansion of their thinking and learning is able to help them through life’s journeys.
