COLLABORATION
It was hard work putting this site together, that too with a small team of three. We split the work as follows: Arun for the common metals, Shayak for the history bit, and Aaheli for the dark side. With our coaches, we drew up a detailed Site Map, so that we could write our articles by ourselves. On everything else, we helped one another whenever needed. Our coaches helped us gather information for the site and choose suitable graphics. They also read our writing many times and suggested ways to improve it.

Two of us live nearby, while the third team member lives further away. We met every two weeks to review our work together. We marked on our Site Map what we had to do before the next meeting, and tried to finish our work before the next meeting. We were friends before we became team mates, so we could be frank with each other when we talked about work.

During the course of this project, we got to know one another much better. We learned that different people like different tasks. Some enjoy gathering information from the Internet, some enjoy writing, and some enjoy drawing. We tried to give each person work that he or she enjoyed. Our project is done completely outside school time, so we wanted the work to be fun. We also had to make sure that we did not fall behind on schoolwork working on our ThinkQuest project.

TEAM DIVERSITY
We have two boys and one girl on our team. We go to three different school systems. Shayak, who moved here from the US less than a year ago, goes to the American School. Aaheli goes to a Singapore school, and Arun to a school following the British curriculum. We know different things, work differently, and have different calendars. Weekends were the only time we could meet and discuss things, when all of us were free. Even then, we had different interests and activities that we are involved in. In the last few weeks, many of these activities had to make way for ThinkQuest work.

We have different skills that went into our website. One of us draws well, while another learned Adobe Flash just for this project. One of our team members played music on her piano for the animation, while another collected tons of data on metals, their properties, their sources, and their uses. Two PC users struggled to keep up with one Mac user.

CHALLENGES
Our coach was planning to get some children from Peru to join our team, but that did not work out, leaving just the three of us on the team. We waited a long time, hoping to add more members to our team, before we decided that we just had to go ahead on our own. This delay in starting work meant that we had to work super-hard in the later stages.

Our coaches made us rewrite our content many times to weed out sentences or phrases that came from our readings. Writing so many times made sure all our content is original, but it sure took a long time. We had our share of technical problems, but our coaches saw us through. Next time we work together, we will start earlier, so that we have more time.

We hope you enjoy viewing our website.