About Us

Background:

Satvika and Shelby are 10 years old and in fifth grade at Silverbrook. Keertana and Akshith are 12 years old and in seventh grade at Robert Frost Middle School and Joyce Kilmer Middle School respectively. We are all in Virginia.Keertana and Akshith attend math sessions together for over a year. Keertana and Satvika have been friends for a long time. Satvika was considering the thinkquest competition with Keertana and invited Akshith and Shelby to the group.

Choice of a Topic

We came together in January 2009 to brainstorm a topic for the website. Akshith's idea of a website on "NOISE" was unanimously acccepted by the team. We felt that there was ever increasing noise around us and growing by leaps and bounds.We also felt there was no significant awareness about the effects of noise on health. Satvika's was learning about Greece and admired Socrates. Her idea of Socrates Thinkers and slogan for "Noise: Not Music to our ears " was approved by all. We thought that noise and its impact was neglected and not given enough importance.

Skills and Expertise:

Everyone knew there was not much time and only 3 months to complete the project but were determined and enthusiastic about the topic.We had a good combination of different skills and expertise. We all loved to research and had good scientific skills, and sufficient technology expertise. Our love for technollogy helped try out several cool tools. Keertana, Akshith, and Satvika had constructed websites before and science and technology was a passion to them. Shelby was the writer and an animal lover in the group. Shelby and Satvika were good at design and color. All learnt several applications like Dreamweaver, Swishmax, Photoshop, Flip Video, FTP. We successfully managed to photograph all images, create a website, use javascript, Macromedia applications, record a movie and create a powerpoint application.

Communication and Collaboration:

We met every week and communicated twice a week by email. There were times when they had to sacrifice leisure activities and weekends to work on the project. There was constant interaction, reading, exchanges of material on the topic between members. We listed subtopics and each member decided to cover subtopics individually and received feedback from rest of the group.We used Google Documents to post our files and shared good links to Websites. We also shared reading and research papers with each other. The main topic “Noise Not Music to our ears” was divided into several subtopics with each member working on some subsections.

Challenges and Obstacles:

We faced many challenges when Satvika had to travel to a family emergency to India. Satvika first created a template for the site. Keertana created a cool navigation bar which everyone liked. She used the free code from Dynamic Drive, http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/ddlevelsmenu/index.htm, to develop the navigation bar. But the template did not work together.The team faced major challenges integrating Javascript with Dreamweaver. We had to do without a template. This was a big problem and we realized that the work involved in making changes involved twice the work.

In the process of researching on noise, Akshith and the group faced several challenges. In the researching phase, for example, we had to find sources that gave information. Then, among those, we had choose the most reliable sources. While conducting our research, we found it difficult to find information specifically on regulations regarding noise pollution.

Akshith built the experiment and encountered many challenges in building the mechanism to record sine waves. The lego structure needed to be built so that it was sturdy but allowed the pencill lead to move freely. The structure fell many times before it was finalized. We also had difficulty in determining the write type of writing utensil to use in the experiment. We first used a ballpoint pen but later changed it to a pencil.

Keertana with help from the team worked many many hours on trying to convert the movies that Satvika made of the demo in to flash to make it web accessible. The group spent a long time to make it work. Satvika, Shelby and Keertana did the photoshoot for all the images for the site. For the banner, the team played an audio file in a media player and took a screen shot and manipulated it in Photoshop and were excited with the result. This was the first milestone.

Lessons Learned

We learnt about noise, its fundamentals, properties, noise pollution, its imapct on various communities. We improved our design skills, graphical skills, programming skills and writing techniques. We also researched and learned to use several tools like Ispring and authorpoint to convert powerpoint presentations to the web.

Looking back, it was a fulfilling experience and the team hopes noise is given importance it deserves.