The ThinkQuest Process

In these pages we will discuss our process. In order to figure out what part of the process we would each write up, our coach, Ms. White, started a list of what we had done and we finished it. we each chose a which things we would do. Here is what we did:

We began by reading Grandpa’s Mountain by Carolyn Reeder. This introduced us to the displacements, and started our entire study of the Shenandoah National Park’s history. Ever since reading this book, we have been completely fascinated by this study.

Ms. White told us about our P.E teacher getting moved through eminent domain because of a new road. At first, we thought what we were studying was eminent domain, until Dr. and Mrs. Perdue told us it was blanket condemnation.While we were reading Grandpa’s Mountain, we saw the WVPT video, The Iris Still Blooms. This video also interested us in the displacements. However, the view that the video presents is perhaps not whole. It shows the park as something that should be fought because of its history, while actually it is pretty cool. However, we might have started thinking that the displacements saved the people from carrying on their lives in a poverty-stricken fashion if we had read or heard something else. At one point we searched the web to find out about Eminent Domain. This is the state of Virginia’s Constitutional right to take people’s private property for a government project. It was Eminent Domain that allowed the Blanket Condemnation Act, which was used in the Shenandoah National Park’s construction.

We had invited our P.E. teacher, Mrs. Walker, to the Tech Lab for a video interview. Ms. Walker was herself displaced for a road being built here. Once she arrived we had to wait a while for Ms. White to get the camera up and working. We had already made up some questions to ask her. Soon we had her talking and barely even needed the questions to go by. Pretty soon all track of time had disappeared. When we had run out of time, we had to reluctantly stop.

Soon we had a lot of video footage we had to go through and edit. The tapes took forever to go through. Once we took a whole class period just to work on the iMovies. When class was over we only made about three good minutes of footage. That was the first video footage we had of anybody for our ThinkQuest project, so we didn’t know how to run the iMovie program at all. We were creating an iMovie and learning the program at the same time.

We needed to call the Perdues to ask if we could interview them. So, Leah and Travis were assigned the job of contacting them and asking them for and interview. When they couldn’t find a way to get a hold of them, Mrs. White tried to ask. It took quite a while but we finally got a hold of them and set an interview time. But we still had to write the questions for the interview yet-to-come.Since we had two people to interview, we had to think up questions they both could answer or think up equal questions for both of the Perdues. Even once we had all the questions written, we still had to edit them, make sure we could understand them. Even after we did that we had to order them so they would be easier to ask and to answer.Finally, it was the day we were going to interview the Perdues.

Becky Fisher, our assistant coach, had volunteered to let us ride in her Durango to Brooks Hall. It was very neat to talk to people that knew so much. When we left, we were seriously stricken by what we read in Hollow Folk, a book that helped to create the classic hillbilly image by showing the mountain people as completely ignorant of nearly everything. We liked the census records they had. It was neat that they had individual information about the displaced people and we wish we had more time to look at them. Sarah read a bit of Hollow Folk in the interview and was outraged by the rudeness in the book.

On one of the ThinkQuest Saturdays Ms. Fisher, our assistant coach, brought in this sticky wall for us to brainstorm on. First we looked at a adult-made web site and wrote down things that were included in this site on a note card. Next we did the same thing with a kid-made site. After we did that, we sorted the cards on the sticky wall. Ms. White was filming us and she put that in fast motion, making it look really funny when we got to see it.

After the sticky wall we finally got the feel of how our web site would work. All of us walked over to the computer and watched Ms. Fisher pull up Inspiration. When we got the Inspiration thing done, we had the outline of the site ready. Before we did anything else, we had to write the dreaded thank you letters. Ms. White had us write them over a million times at least, until they were perfect. When they finally were, we put them in an envelope, but we haven’t sent them yet. Then Leah wrote up the Perdue interview.

Leah and Amber made the first iMovies. They made the movies and made little clips of them. They named the clips and put the title so we could go back and look at them.

We E-mailed Carolyn Reeder, the author of Grandpa’s Mountain, the book that practically led us to the subject of our web site, to come to Red Hill and talk to us about the subject of the displacement. On February 5, Carolyn Reeder came to school. We got a lot of information out of that day. We got some about her and some about the Shenandoah National Park. Both definitely helped in our web site.

Amber went to the Library of Congress site and picked out some pictures to make our banner graphic. Travis and Monica put it together. That is now what you see at the very top of each page in our site.

We each wrote our answers to the interview questions and then we put the questions and answers together. It was REALLY boring to have to sit there and write the answers over again. It was MUCH more fun to listen to what they had said. We didn’t really write the answers later, we wrote them in our own words to make the story sound better. Having the answers in front of us helped us to remember what we had heard from the Perdues and write the information down without really having to look at the paper.

We had a long ride to Luray to interview the Lamberts. Since we had a lot of work to do for ThinkQuest, we all brought i-Books for the trip. All of our documents were on our server which needed our Airport. The Airport would not reach
us in the Durango on the way to Luray, so we had to drag the things we were working onto the desktop.

When we got to the Lambert’s house, we interviewed him and his wife and visited the cabin that was being built nearby. His view was very different from the Perdues’, and was therefore very interesting. The log cabin was also a very exiting touch.

Afterwards we wrote up our answers to the Lambert’s questions and wrote a story about what happened the day we visited them.
Then we really got started on putting the web site together. We started to put the content we had up on the web and making the iMovies we needed. We also edited what we put up on the web, even though it had been edited already just after we wrote it. Interestingly, we found lots of mistakes.

We met almost every odd day, and those days we met were almost all work, with hardly any breaks. The workload was amazing. We are glad we are nearly done.

Return to our ThinkQuest Project page