Audience

This site was created for kids by kids! Our audience is children ages 9-16+ who are interested in stopping bullying, promoting tolerance, and learning about different cultures and religions.

We believe that kids can't stop bullying from occurring all by themselves, so we also included a special section on the Stop Bullying page for parents, law enforcement officials, schools, and community members. We believe that everyone needs to part of the solution to this global problem.

We created the Promote Tolerance and Think Globally sections to inspire kids to accept people from different backgrounds, races, religions, lifestyles, and cultures. We want kids to understand that it doesn't matter what you speak like, what you look like, or whether you have a disability. We're more alike than we are different, so we should learn how to treat each other with respect.

We designed this site to appeal to kids who are interested in taking action to make changes in their schools, homes, and neighborhoods. We took many steps to spread our message, and we have shared our ideas in the Take Action page of this website.

We also added special media to our site that kids would like. For example, we created a Flash introduction to our site, a storybook for kids called The Witness for Truth that shows bullying strategies in action, a slideshow about promoting tolerance, a slideshow about stop bullying, and a Poster Gallery that even has music. We also created many games on our Activities page that will help kids learn even more about our topics.

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Goals

Our goal is to help kids get ready to live, learn, and work in a diverse world and to help them understand both the causes and effects of bullying. We take this goal very seriously. It is our mission to promote tolerance and to stop bullying around the world. It begins with one person at a time. Then it spreads to friends and eventually our actions can help to build a more peaceful world.

We believe that due to breakthroughs in communication the world is becoming smaller everyday. Kids need to know how to get along and how to appreciate differences, because someday we may be working alongside each other!

In order to help kids stop bullying, promote tolerance, think globally, and take action we have included information about:

• Types of bullying
• Causes and consequences of bullying
• Symptoms of bullying
• Strategies to stop bullying
• Why it's important to accept people for who they are
• Tips to promote tolerance
• What it means to live in a diverse world
• World religions
• A variety of cultures
• Lessons in intolerance
• Famous people who have fought for justice, equality, and tolerance
• Organizations that promote tolerance
• Action steps kids can take to make a difference

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Collaboration

This year, our team worked together to make an awesome website on tolerance. We picked tolerance as the topic for our website because it was, and still is, a major issue. We worked together at all stages of the project, starting from choosing a theme all the way to writing this description of our website.

Everyone helped to design our website. Since our audience was children, we decided to use bright colors and images that would appeal to kids. We chose the tolerance superheroes as our mascots because we thought other kids would like them. We created many different backgrounds, buttons, and banners to create a site that kids would like.

We collaborated mainly over e-mail. Arun had already met our coach and one of our other teammates, Meredith. To divide up the work, the teammates in Wisconsin planned the website and came up with the topics that each of us worked on. Knowing that the Wisconsin part of our team usually met on Tuesdays, Arun tried to send in his content, as well as his ideas for the website, on Monday nights or Tuesday mornings. That way, our coach, Ms. Paulus, was able to give Arun's Wisconsin teammates his materials at the Tuesday meeting in Wisconsin.

At first, most of us didn't know much about computers. After this experience, we know lots more about them. Ben, Isaiah, and Olivia had never created a website before so they needed a lot of help in the beginning. We also divided up some of the work. One of our teammates, Ben, was really good at catching things that were hard to see, so he was our editor. Some of us created the buttons and banners and things like that. We all researched and wrote reports, too. Whenever someone didn't know what to do, the other members of the team would try to help him/her. Our teammate Arun made a survey, and he got people to take it who live all over Asia, and we also had kids from Wisconsin take the survey too - true team work in action.

We also worked together on many projects at school. We made presentations on tolerance and bullying in many classrooms. We also held a poster contest and a Mix It Up At Lunch Day. We worked together and made all the presentations together. There are many things that you may want to try at your school that are listed on our website like the poster contest or the Mix It Up at Lunch Day. This experience was one of the best times of our lives!

Our team really got to know each other by making this website. We helped each other learn how to do different things on the site like putting in pictures, animated bullets, etc. One of the Wisconsin teammates, Meredith, entered the ThinkQuest competition last year and remembered how to do many of the things to create a website. That helped everybody because if our coaches were busy working with someone else, she could help anyone who needed help.

Throughout the year, we spent a lot of extra time working on this site, which allowed us to learn more about each other. We worked together before school, during some of our class time, on half days, on days when we didn't have school, and even during spring break. By working together, we were able to get our site done on time.

One of the things we loved about creating this website was that we made lots of new friends, including international friends! We learned so many things including how to make and design a webpage, how to make buttons and backgrounds, and that we can accomplish almost anything by working together. We are very proud of the hard work we put into this site.

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Diversity

We are a diverse group. Arun is Indian and lives in Singapore, so he focused more on issues and topics related to the Asian region. But he also worked with his teammates on more general topics such as apartheid and genocide, which affect the entire world. Being from Asia, he wrote about the religions practiced in Asia, as well as Tolerance Superhero Mahatma Gandhi.

Early on we decided to split up the work. Arun focused more on Asia, especially the tolerance amidst the huge cultural diversity on this vast continent. Being from Singapore and India, he wrote about the religions of Asia (Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Sikhism), famous people from Asia such as Gandhi who promoted tolerance, and the problem of bullying in Singapore schools.

For our survey, Arun tried to get his friends from Singapore and India to answer our questions. He also goes to an international school in Singapore, so his classmates who filled out our survey turned out to be from eight different countries! For the report on Sikhism, Arun actually consulted a family friend who is a Sikh to verify the information in his article.

The Wisconsin buddies wrote about tolerance in general, and how it is practiced in America. They wrote about the American Civil Rights Movement and Rosa Parks. They included information about anti-bullying strategies used in the United States and in other countries around the world. They also wrote a special section on how to involve parents, community members, and schools in solving the bullying problem. Meredith even interviewed a school guidance counselor to gather more information about bullying.

One of our teammates, Isaiah, is African American. He wanted to include issues and information related to Africa, and he also wrote about African American issues in the United States. For example, he wrote about Martin Luther King Jr., The Civil Rights Movement, Nelson Mandela, and a page about African culture. His viewpoint also helped to bring different ideas to our website.

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Challenges

Our team has gone through a lot to make this website. There were difficulties at times. Sometimes the program Arun used to create webpages inserted extra line breaks. Then there were more serious troubles, like when all of our Wisconsin members (including coaches) were sick at some point in the months before our site was due. The sickness seemed to jump from one person to another because one member would be sick, and then they would come back to school, but then somebody else would get sick and miss school. There was a time when we didn't have our full group together for at least a month! To overcome this challenge, we all had to step up to the plate. We had to help out by putting other people's reports onto the site. When everyone had recovered, one of our teammates had to leave the project, as he had fallen too far behind in school work. We had to remove the work he had contributed, and then together we took over all of his work and slowly regained our momentum.

By working together we were able to overcome our difficulties. Whenever we needed help, our teammates were always there for each other. We always thought about our team, and tried not to let them down. And gradually, page by page, after months of work, we finally finished this amazing site.

Even though we had many challenges, we seemed to find a solution for all of them. At the end of our project, we made one awesome site! We hope that many people will use our ideas and learn a lot of information on how to stop bullying and promote tolerance.

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