AUDIENCE
We are the "Smiths", we work on metals! Like goldsmiths, and blacksmiths, we are wordsmiths. We made this site to help children between nine and fifteen learn about metals. Our history and modern life depend heavily on metals, though most of us have not thought much about them. While doing our research, we saw that most online writing about metals is hard for children to read. Some require you to know the science of atoms, and others have complicated chemical formulae in them. So we decided to create a resource for children our own age. The youngest of us is nine, and the oldest twelve.

By looking at many (twenty) metals, we learnt what metals have in common, and how they differ from one another. We have put all this information in simple articles that we wrote by ourselves. To encourage children to read, we built little interactive quizzes based on the articles. Knowing how children like pictures with their words, we also drew graphs and charts whenever we could. We looked around ourselves to see metal objects in our daily lives, and also read up on other uses from books and websites. With this information, we made a video showing how children use metals in their daily lives.

We found some good websites showing where metals are mined. We took this information, and put it on a map, so that children can "mine their own metals". Our "Metals in History" section shows children how metals supported human civilizations through the ages. We made a funny video that we hope children will enjoy.

We looked far and wide for images and textures that match our topic of metals and give our website a nice look. When possible, we used original artwork. Everything in our site is built with standard templates and features within Dreamweaver and Flash (e.g. layouts, quizzes, ...), without any programming. Ours is a site for children, by children.

OBJECTIVES
The main goal of our site is to help children understand what metals are and why they matter. That's why our site is called "Metal Matters". We point out the use of metals in our daily lives, to show how it is useful to learn about metals. But metals have their "dark side" too. Extracting them often hurts the environment, and many of the weapons used in war are made of metal. Even machines with peaceful uses break down and the metal in them must be disposed of safely. We encourage recycling of metals to save our environment from further damage.

It took us a long time to find the information we put on the site. We hope readers of our site will get the same information faster and more easily. We have also tried to organize the information so that it is easy to read and remember. Above all, we want our readers to have fun while learning about metals! That is why we have put in graphs, an interactive map, timelines, movies, quizzes, and puzzles. So, welcome to our site, and have fun, dear reader.