Who are we?
Adam, Matthew, Simon & Daniel
Coaches: Warren & Kevin
Difficulties
Audience
Objectives of the website
My name is Adam and I am in Grade 7. Some of the things I like doing are: taking apart computers, putting them back together again (!), cycling, tennis, computer programming and playing the saxophone.
I have been involved in the content and design of pictures on this webpage. My strengths are that I can stay focussed on what we are doing and come up with clear ideas for the challenges.
Hi, I am Matthew and I am in Grade 6. I enjoy: working on the computer, reading, swimming, photography, playing the trombone, Maths & reading the “Business Report”.
My involvement in this webpage is: designing & researching. I also write a lot of the content. The energy audit was done last year as part of the First Lego League. I spoke for the recordings of the audit. I am really good at learning how to use new programs quickly (eg. Dreamweaver), so when our coach explains something, I can start to use it more quickly than the others. I get a bit irritated when the others don’t understand as quickly as I do. I was the photographer as I had recently got a really good camera. The flash indroduction was done by Daniel and me.
My name is Simon. I am in Grade 5. I enjoy Art and Maths and I find school work easy as I am really clever. Sports that I am involved in are Karate and Waterpolo and I sing in the choir. In my spare time, I enjoy playing on computers, particularly gaming software. I have really enjoyed working on Thinkquest, and I come up with the really good ideas. I also wrote some of the articles.
Hello, I’m Daniel. I am in Grade 4. I am the second child in my family of four and we live in a big house with my grandparents. My hobbies are swimming and playing on the computer. I also enjoy building and playing with Lego.
I have helped with odd tasks for this webpage. Mainly I research content for the pages. The others shout at me a lot because I like to play and not work all the time. I am also not good at interpreting what I read, but I find the information and give it to the older boys. My spelling is not good so I do not type the information. I was the voices of the Winks Family and enjoyed annoying the rest of the team with my funny accents.
Although Warren Sparrow is currently the Head of Information Technology for Rondebosch Boys’ Preparatory School, his life in IT only started once he had completed school. The main reason for this was that this was the era before the personal computer and very few schools offered any form of computer education. It was only in the year 1990 that he started working on his first computer, an IBM XT machine. During his third year of studying, he started lecturing both first and second year students in computer education. Warren completed his FDE in 1993, obtaining an academic distinction. During 1996, he left the formal classroom and started working for Futurekids, an international computer training centre. It was during this time that Futurekids signed a contract for Warren to teach computers and mathematics at Rondebosch Boys’ Preparatory School. In 1998, he completed his FDE in Computer Assisted Education through the University of Pretoria, receiving both an academic distinction, as well as Academic Honorary Colours. The following year he lectured the course part time for both Futurekids and the University of Pretoria, from Cape Town. In January 2001, Warren started working for Rondebosch Boys’ Preparatory School full time. During this time, he has taught computers to all grades from grade one to grade 7. As head of Information Technology, part of his job includes being responsible for designing and implementing the curriculum for all learners, always keeping the content up to date and keeping abreast with the ever increasing speed of IT.
Kevin Poulter has been interested in computers since the age of 14. By the end of that year, he was already writing his own games using Basic on a Spectrum ZX. After school he pursued this interest in computers by doing On the Job training at Old Mutual. By the time he left there in 1993, he had progressed from plugging in the computers to developing Systems Management Solutions! After moving through various companies which kept being bought out by other companies, he is now employed by TuringSMI, a UK-based company. He implements IT Sytems Management Applications. In his spare time, he runs the local cub troop, trains teams for the First Lego League Robotics competition, is a keen Lego collector and helps his wife with four busy children!
Difficulties:
We are obviously all boys and we have decided that next year we should try to get some girls involved because we think girls would think and plan differently, whereas we were all trying to think the same way. Writing the content was very hard to do because we have only just started learning how to change things we read into our own words. Because our team was very young, we sometimes found it hard to focus on what we were needing to do, and just wanted to play. We struggled to find time to get together to work as a group because we are all quite involved in sports so our afternoons are busy. We could not use some times because we are different religions, so we could not meet on Friday nights because of Schul and we could not meet on Sunday mornings because of Church. This made it difficult to plan things.
Another big problem we had was learning all the programs we needed to set up our page. We got the Software quite late, so we were always aware that we had lots to do in a little time. Luckily our coach had used some of it before and he helped us understand. A big step forward was where we wanted to be able to have one page that changed 21 pages when it was changed. Our coach luckily knew about Custom Style Sheets (CSS) and so we used them. One disastrous session was caused by a complete crash of the internet when we were trying to gather information. We had to change venues to use our coach’s internet, but it was so slow! We also were often distracted by Matthew’s baby brother who started learning to crawl and messed with our computers.
Audience:
This website is aimed at everyone over the age of 8 who is concerned about the future of our world. We have presented a diverse range of opinions on the topic. We have tried to be both simple and practical so that it is not difficult to understand. We do not only set out the problems that our world is facing, but we have tried to give everyone, young and old, an opportunity to play their part in changing their tomorrows and their children’s tomorrows.
This website is about Global Warming. We have tried to educate the reader about what Global Warming is and how it is effecting the environment. We have also shown what we do to make it worse and how we can improve our lives to help future generations.
Each member of our team has different strengths and interests. Matthew was most interested in understanding how the webpage could be put together and the underlying code. He was also the photographer and Flash designer. His strengths lie in the actual computer programming side of things. He also takes the lead in assigning jobs and planning sessions. Adam created many images and worked on content as, being the oldest, he could interpret and transpose the information the best. Daniel is the youngest and did the fun bits - voices and singing are his particular strengths. He also did picture editing. Simon's strengths lie mainly in encouraging the team and seeing the overall picture of what was needed. Much of the information and websites were found by him. A typical work session would see Simon producing wild ideas, Adam focusing on the task at hand, Matthew trying to do a bit of everything and overseeing everyone’s work, and Daniel singing or talking in funny voices that drove everyone mad!
We all come from much the same sort of backgrounds and are all the same sex. One of the main differences between us is our religions, with both Jews and Christians on our team. This did not make a difference to our viewpoints on any details, but it did mean there were difficulties in finding time to get together as Sabbath observances are held on different days.
As we researched this topic that we had chosen, we found it really interesting how many different viewpoints there are on Global Warming. We had only thought there was one school of thought, but there are such vastly different ideas. We thought maybe some of the ideas came from nutters, but then discovered that some of the very diverse ideas come from highly educated, qualified scientists with top qualifications. We have tried to explore some of these diverse ideas in the In the News section. We have taken the opinion that Global Warming is harmful to the planet, but many of our ideas are also ideas of steps that can be taken to improve our environment and quality of life, even if global warming is a good thing or a natural phenomenon, as some of the scientists hypothesize.
References:
Picture:Star of David: http://www.tpub.com/content/religion/14229/css/14229_72.htm
Picture:Cross: http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/carolrb/christianity/christian_symbols.html
Picture:Credit to Internet Explorer 7 and DreamWeaver CS3 for their logos
Picture:Burning Earth: http://www.uwm.edu/~kjoboyle/GWhomepage.html