The purpose of this website

This website's purpose is to provide ecological awareness about Ecuador, using Internet tools that propitiate a better understanding. We cover the different national parks and ecological reserves of the country, including not only their flora and fauna but also their physical and social aspects, such as life zones, climate, places of interest, ethnic cultures, tourism, environmental problems, conservation attempts, etc. The site tries to educate through the promotion of interactive user participation, with a game, message boards, user contributions, quizzes, printouts for teachers, etc. Our final objective is to become a contact center for ecologists, students, tourists, organizations and any others interested, not limited to being a database but also a place that influences people and where ideas are generated.

For this reason, we need to be of interest to every possible audience. First, the site offers a wide range of information about each park and reserve, so that teachers and students can learn about any ecological aspect of Ecuador, including life zones, flora, fauna, comparisons with other countries, etc. There is also information about ecological problems and conservation attempts to attract ecologists, including information about how to contact other ecological websites and organizations. Tourists can learn specifical instructions about how to tour each protected area, the places of interest they would want see, fun activities they can do and even recommendations about what to bring, wear, be careful about, etc. Another interesting aspect of our site are the photographs, that allow people to learn visually how Ecuador, its plants and animals look like. The game, quiz and teacher printout section are other interactive and funways to learn about the country. The site is able to bring the world closer to Ecuador and Galapagos through the use of all these different tools, which attract many different target audiences.

Who we are and what we did

The three team members are David Puente and Alvaro Jarrín, who live in Quito, Ecuador and graduated from the same school, and Chin Wei Min, who lives in Malaysia but travels daily to Singapur to study. It was only in July that he moved to a hostel in Singapore. David, who wishes to dedicate his life to computer programming, saw in Thinkquest a great challenge. He asked Alvaro to join in, who is interested in education and research, and saw Thinkquest as a perfect opportunity to put in practice his abilities. Both came up with the idea of the subject when they realized through some book and newspaper articles about Ecuador's ecological importance and the great percentage of its area that is protected. They wanted a partner from another country to share the experience and to learn to collaborate with an invisible friend. Wei Min was perfect because he was very interested and Malaysia, his home, is only second to Ecuador in the density of biodiversity.

The three spent a lot of time sending e-mails back and forth to plan carefully the objectives, audiences, information coverage, ways to interact with the user, etc. They also divided up the work accordingly to what each person did best, and planned beforehand how the website would look and feel. They picked a physics teacher whose hobby is to design websites, Richard Sherry, as the first coach to help David and Wei Min in the design of the website, and an environmental systems teacher, Pablo Saenz, as the second coach to help Alvaro in the research about Ecuador’s biological importance.

As a team leader David not only had to work on his part, but he also had to give a hand to other team members' work to synchronize the whole project. His part is to make sure all the web programming works in different platforms, computers, and the server itself, building the site structure, writing html, configuring cgi and image editing.

Alvaro was in charge of researching, typing, editing and organizing all the information available about the national parks, reserves and species of Ecuador. He also helped creating essays and a poem for the site, and testing the website and commenting about its design to help David and Wei Min in their work.

With his self-taught skills, Wei Min was in charge of the layout and presentation of the website, and to look over some minor but important aspect of the website, such as font and link colour, banner etc.

How we did it

David and Alvaro looked for books with information on the subject early on, but some days it was impossible due to strikes in Ecuador. David, as the team leader, kept all the information, photographs and design, in his computer. As Alvaro did the research, typed and organized all the information, David received it and kept building the website in the Thinkquest server, making it possible to surf through the parks and reserves and see photographs of sites, flora and fauna. Wei Min helped decorating the website with banners, colors, fonts, etc. Contact became somewhat difficult with him due to phone problems in Ecuador and hour differences, since at our sleeping hours he was awake and viceversa, and e-mails took a whole day to be answered. However, David and Wei Min arranged a system so that when one worked on the website, the next day he would get comments and improvements. We also used the new universal Internet Time, so that we would not worry with time zones.

The problems we faced

The three members had access to Internet connections in their homes, but of a limited speed. David and Alvaro some months did not even have phone service, due to problems in the Ecuadorian phone company. David and Alvaro’s school had only one Internet connection for many computers, making the speed slow and problematic. There are about 200 computers for 2000 students in their school, but they were allowed only to use 40, which were occupied most of the time. David is the only one who owns a fast computer, and he had access to good design software but Wei Min did not. Wei Min has only a Pentium-100 at home, making most modern design software unavailable for him. But since July Wei Min is not living at home, instead he is living in a hostel where there is no computer access. He had to rely more on the school’s computers, but they were not always available either, and he could loan a laptop but only for three days. David and Alvaro also had trouble finding the needed scanners for photographs, since their school closed their facilities during vacations.

. Wei Min had a very difficult schedule before July, because every day he spent four hours traveling back and forth between Malaysia and Singapur to go to school, leaving him with very little free time. Luckily he was able to move to Singapur in July. Since Alvaro and David were in the last year of school, they had to worry with IB, final and graduation exams, at the same time dealing with college applications and entrance exams. This left little time to do the necessary research, which was made more difficult when the economic crisis started in Ecuador and strikes paralized the country for many days. Most organizations were also unwilling to colaborate with photographs and dicounts in books and CDs we needed for research. It took Alvaro and David a lot of work to convince the photographers Anhalzer and Tadder to let us use their pictures, while we came up with pictures of our own too.

Communication between Wei Min and the other two members was difficult, due to hour differences. When Wei Min was awake, the other two team memebers were asleep, and viceversa. This meant e-mails took a whole day to be answered and we were never able to chat directly. This was solved using universal Internet time and creating the system that when David woke up he would check, comment and improve Wei Min's work that last day, and the same happened the other way around, giving quality to both their work and making the job faster.

Another problem was that one coach only spoke Spanish and the other was not very fluent in Spanish, so we could never meet with both at the same time. One left for vacations and afterwards left the country before we finished the website, and the other was busy most of the time so we met with him very few times. Wei Min could never find a coach that was willing to him in his job either.

When we started the website, none of us had any knowledge about ecology, so we had to start from zero understanding what a life zone was and matching animal pictures with their respective names. However, since then our knowledge has increased incredibly, and enhanced greatly our interest in conservation. David and Alvaro have been able to take many trips into national parks and reserves of Ecuador since then to experience personally the ecological wonder they did not know they were living in.

How to collaborate

The site has a discussion board where many different topics can be chosen. These topics are contemporary important issues that have created heated arguments inside Ecuador and in many environmental organizations, which still have no solutions. The objective of the discussion board is that people may teach each other about the subjects, argue about them and then try to create solutions for these problems. The site also offers links to other ecological sites, and if the person was moved by the need of conservation in Ecuador, he can offer his help to many environmental organizations. Finally, we will always be open to people wanting to give their opinions through our e-mail, because we are subject to errors and may need to change some wrong information. We are also interested all who want to collaborate with their own investigations, trips, recommendations, discoveries, etc. in Ecuador and Galapagos: A Legacy of Nature to theWorld.

Our e-mail is 27995@thinkquest.org.