Overcoming Challenges

Many obstacles were faced in the creation of this site.

Challenge: Meeting together with each other was difficult as Anurag was in Grade 11 (The Matric year is in Grade 12), whilst Shikar and Kumeren were in Grade 11. Kumeren also went to another school and commitments meant that the whole group could never meet together.

Solution: The way to solve this challenge was just to discuss together in pairs. Anurag would discuss things with Shikar in school while he would go home later and phone Kumeren to discuss the same topics. Break times also had to be sacrificed as the only place Shikar and Anurag could meet was at the media centre or computer lab. This is because different grades have different break areas.

Challenge: Internet connectivity in South Africa is not even comparable to that of developed countries and no member had internet access at home from the beginning to the ending of the project. The factor that attributed to this was the astronomical prices of broadband in South Africa where a 1 GB monthly cap with a 384 kbps line costs R200 ( approximately US $ 20)

Solutions: When Kumeren got broadband, he sent emails of completed work. Anurag and Shikar could only access the internet and email from school, or at their father’s offices. The speed of the internet at school was bound to be slow, as there were over 100 workstations, and so it was sometimes necessary to use the internet of a neighbour, internet café or father’s office when he was not too busy.

Challenge: Anurag was the only one that had designed a website before for an art project two years ago. The others had very rudimentary knowledge of building websites.

Solutions: The way to combat this obstacle was simply for Anurag to compile all the webpages. Although this was a lot of extra work, this was actually a deliberate ploy. If there were others that were also competent at designing webpages, everyone would prefer to rather design the webpage than actually research

Challenges: Cross-browser support was harder to achieve than expected and webpages did not display the same in Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

Solutions: The only way to fix this was to alter some coding to get cross-browser support. Internet Explorer was usually the browser that did not display pages as intended although on occasion, Firefox did provide some niggles. Safari was tested after the site was completed and there were no issues.

Challenge: Time was a valuable commodity and after school, homework and extra-murals; sometimes one just doesn’t feel like doing even more tedious work. Anurag studies three extra subjects: IT, Additional Mathematics and Italian while Kumeren also studies IT as an extra subject.

Solutions: There was no real solution to this, all that could be done was to persevere and follow through.

Challenge: Interactive content was difficult to create as authoring Flash content is very difficult.

Solutions: A free version of iSpring, iSpring Free was used to help create the Flash content by converting PowerPoint presentations to Flash. Games would have been incredibly complex to make as games based on global warming are not usual ones. To do this, games were found on the internet and were simply linked to.

Anurag

Shikar

Kumeren