Extras
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About UsExtras > About UsThis is the breakdown and information of our group members. Click on the names in the table to look at our personal reflections on the topic and on the process:
Our team members are diverse in many different ways. We come from different cultures, religions, and socio-economic backgrounds. However, instead of letting our diversity hinder our work, we made it work for us, utilizing our different viewpoints influenced by our different environments to explore Visual Learning with more breadth and depth. This helped to enrich and enhance our project, especially in development of our website content. Mario’s parents came from financially troubled families and at times, internet connectivity is poor in Indonesia. As such, this opened our mind to visual learning not only in the form of computer visuals such as videos, but also of mindmaps and drawings. This enhanced our project by increasing the breadth of our topic as we explored other different kinds of visual learning. Kenneth grew up in a family and environment where literature and the English language were heavily emphasized on. Thus, this also enhanced the breadth of our topic as we were prompted to venture into finding ways through which visual learning could be integrated and applied to linguistic disciplines. Shi Jie came from a background where books and notes were heavily emphasized and utilized. As a result, he felt that the use of visuals could shorten the attention span of students, and this viewpoint was also further emphasized and explored during the interview with Mr. Dean Ang when he mentioned this possibility as well. Joseph grew up in an environment in which the Sciences were very heavily emphasized and thus he suggested conducting an interview with Mr. Fernandez, CEO of a leading scientific company, to get a perspective on the topic from a representative of the scientific community. Through this, we gained new insights and we broke free from our own thinking, accepting the other viewpoints and exploring them in our website. We are also diverse in our strengths, and this was definitely integral in our website development, making it more all-rounded. For instance, our strength in content generation and information technology enabled us to make such visually pleasing videos while maintaining the strong impact of our content-rich information presented. Our strengths complemented each other and contributed largely to our project. Apart from our team diversity, we conducted our pre-project surveys with not only people from different schools, but even of different countries. Surveyees include people mainly from Singapore and Indonesia. We also did surveys but with fewer students from China, Malaysia, America, Canada, Czech Republic and Scotland. This was to get an international view and in comparison between the results, we discovered that results from different countries are all very similar. Our journey was also definitely not a bed of roses and we encountered many problems along the way. For instance, there was a barrier of inaccessibility between different countires as the Indonesia side of the group could not meet up with the Singapore side of the group. To overcome this problem, Joseph set up and maintain an online project platform, where milestones were closely monitored and opinions were shared on the wiki. We had also planned to do a field test with students from a local primary school (Nanyang Primary School) and our application had been approved by the Ministry of Education, but the primary school already had many field tests being conducted in it and rejected our request. We had not planned for a replacement and thus were unable to conduct a field test - this is one of the areas we can improve on in the future. We count ourselves as very lucky that this was a group project. In conclusion, our different strengths, cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds and even nationalities were not only integral in the overall creation and development of content on our website, but also in provision of different perspectives. This diversity and the different perspectives were well utilized to explore and present the topic. Our teamwork and mentality of sharing responsibilities based on our different individual strengths saw us through this project and allowed us to jump over every hurdle we faced. We all had a common goal, a common vision, and worked towards it as a team, putting in our very best. Ultimately, our efforts paid off and we are proud to say that this project could not have been done with one member less. Click here to view our reflections. |