Iraq - Voices of the Children

Layout and Home

We started this site in January of 2008. We came across the idea of Iraq because every kid in the group knew someone or had a family member in Iraq. We started with getting the home page layout. It took three group work days to find a layout that had the feeling of Iraq. We had to find one that had the right colors and set up. We thought that olive green and desert tan were sort of the right colors. The home page took a longer time to do but only because we continued to change what we wrote. When one thing sounded alright, we found information to make us write something else. The information basically depended on our research. Once we found everything that we needed for the website, the home page was easier to work with. Still, it took a long time. We wanted to keep it non-threatening.

Research

We tried to get equal amount of information from both sides of the issue. But when we tried to get research done, all the pages that we were finding were copyrighted. We started by trying to be unbiased, like take sides of pro and con. We found some sites that offered free information, but not a lot. Also, all the sites we found that we could use were very complex, and complex things are usually hard for kids to understand. All the sites we found were also mostly all military sites. So that was kind of biased to the pro side. We needed to get both pro and con sides. We spent about five group days trying to get research on the ethnic groups in Iraq. Also some of the sites that we found were newspaper sites. It would've been taking someone else's work and taking credit for it. We didn't really have the time to send e-mails out to the sites because we started in January. We sent an e-mail to site and we got it back and the response was that we could use the information on the site.

The Glossary

The glossary on our website was easy, but a pain to create. It as It felt amazing to get it done and paste it on the site. We hope the glossary gives you a better understanding of the words on our website that are related to the Iraq War.

Interviews

Once again the interviews didn't take that long but took some thinking. We were interviewing people that went there and their family. We were worried that are questions might bring up bad memories. So we tried to make the questions suitable for the soldiers and their families.

What We Learned

We all learned that is was brutal to be in Iraq during the war. Also that Iraq had kids fighting in the war. We learned that Iraq had three sections. Sunnis, the Kurds, and the Shiites. It was a lot of hard work to do this, but it was a lot of fun.