About the Project

We began this project in October and finished it at the end of March. At the beginning, it seemed as if we had lots of time to finish but it turned out that we needed all of that plus about a week more. The coach picked the team from names in a hat. Our group in the United States all knew each other but only one person had worked on last year's team. We were lucky enough to get a team member from Great Britain and can she ever draw!
     It didn't take us long to find out each other's strengths...and weaknesses.  Sometimes we could do work that we were good at, and sometimes we had to do assignments we didn't like.  We split the work as evenly as we could.

  • Isabella:

    • Found that Isabella, from a ThinkQuest team last year, was great at making links

    • Was part of the decision making on the design of the site

    • Made the banner and helped to write the song

    • Was a researcher (Boring!) and report writer

    • Went to the bank and to the Philadelphia Mint

    • Was an enthusiastic team member

  • Lillie:

    • Found out that she works well as a team member. She offers her opinion but will accept it if the team votes differently.

    • Was part of the decision making on the design of the site

    • Was a researcher and report writer even though she thought it was a chore!

    • Made quizzes and worked on the money game

    • Note-taker on trips.  Went to the bank and to the Philadelphia Mint

    • Had a positive attitude and had a creative approach to website development

  • Alix:

    • Found out that she is a great artist--both in drawing and in computer graphics

    • Was our team artist.  She learned a graphics program in order to make our 3-D graphics.

    • Was part of the design decision-making for the site

    • Took a trip to the Bank of England Museum and reported on it

    • Made the graphics for the money game

  • Kelly:

    • Found out she is creative and always had great ideas for the site

    • Did research and reports (and hated every minute of it!)

    • Helped design the money game

    • Did definitions for money words

    • Edited pages and cut and paste them from MS Word into the webpage

  • Mickey:

    • Found out he is a great photographer

    • Researched (and hated it) but wrote amazing reports

    • Worked on sizing graphics

    • Made web quizzes

    • Edited pages

When we started this project, we had a culturally diverse team. We had 4 team members from the United States, one from China and one from England.  While we had our language in common with our English team member, she surprised us with how she spelled words because they were different than in the U.S.  In the end, Alix seemed very much like us even though she was so far away.  Email is great and we had a wonderful time learning about our faraway team member and sharing ideas.
     As we look back on it, our very diversity split the team.  We had a very nice 10 year old girl from China on our team.  Everything started out well with her offering ideas for sites and then for site titles. She didn't speak English but we had a teacher in China who was helping us communicate.  When we sent an allowance survey for her to give her classmates, we were told that--in China--these things were not done.  That was interesting to us since we have the freedom to do these things. 
    The girl was given an assignment in October and she never completed it.  When we contacted her teacher, we found the reason why.  It seems that there is a lot of pressure on students in China to excel in school and in test taking.  She had no time to devote to this project because all of her time had to go into schooling.  We had come face to face with cultural differences that would affect the team and our ability to get assignments done.  With regret, she was removed from the team. 

Challenges:

    It seemed that this site challenged us at every turn.  Every idea and plan (for awhile) seemed to fail.  Here are some examples:
 

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We wanted to visit a bank and the Philadelphia Mint. Our coach began to make plans to visit our school's bank so that we could see how it worked and take pictures and videos. The bank said we couldn't take pictures or videos because of security issues. Then our coach went to her own bank and was REALLY lucky! That bank was closing down a branch and we would be able to take pictures of the vault and anything else we needed! Then she contacted the mint. Yes, security again was causing us problems. They wouldn't allow pictures or videos. Our coach contacted 3 different people from October to February before we were able to get permission to take pictures. The conditions were that we couldn't take pictures of the production floor on our guided tour by Mr. Grant. After we went, Mr. Grant was nice enough to take some pictures for us so things worked out in the end!
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The team sent letters to some of the richest people in the country. We figured that if they were rich, they had to handle their money well and might be willing to answer a couple questions about their jobs when they were young and advice they would give to young people.  No such luck. Out of 15 letters, we got two responses (Warren Buffet and Michael Dell) to let us know that these people are too busy to answer letters like this anymore.  It was disappointing because we thought advice from these people would be really cool for the site.

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We decided to sign up for Epals, a secure online community.  After having done that, we posted a question about allowances around the world. We read that allowances were given mostly in North America but we wanted to see if this was true.  We submitted a post and waited for answers. The post was deleted by Epals with no explanation. This happened 3 times until we found out that our profile wasn't complete.  By that time, it was too late to get the results we wanted.
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The team was working really hard on a Flash introduction. This is the first page of a website. The introduction was looking REALLY good and our song was half made when a student told us that he didn't like Flash introductions and left the page when there was one. This made us think: Were we making one because it makes the website better or just because it seems like everyone is doing it in ThinkQuest. We had never thought about what our AUDIENCE liked or disliked.  Since our audience is sixth grade to about eleventh grade, we figured that asking sixth graders might be a good idea. If anyone is going to like Flash intros, it will be the youngest kids who like things to move and jump on a website.  We explained what a Flash intro was, polled the whole sixth grade and these are the questions we asked:

  • How many students love Flash intros and watch them?

  • How many like them a little?

  • How many dislike or hate them and click on 'skip' rather than watch them?

  • How many hate them enough to leave the site if there is one?

The results were unexpected with 25 out of 36 students saying that they hated them.  The rest said they only liked them a little.  When we saw these results, we asked the classes if the intros were or were not worthwhile for a site.  Thirty five students said that Flash intros are not worthwhile! 
   
We had to make a decision.  Should we throw away all of the time and work we put into an Flash introduction or should we choose to make the site reflect what our audience wanted?  Since the main goal, as our coach says, is to make the best site that we can--even if we don't win the competition--we chose to get rid of the Flash intro.  Alix made so many GREAT graphics for it that we did feel regret that no one would see them.

    We think that, in spite of these things, our site is going to help teens and soon-to-be teens manage their money better.  With the economy in worldwide recession, our future may depend on our knowing about responsible handling of money now.