Description of the team
Our team consists of two boys and two girls. The four of us are Alvin, Exilia, Faye and Patrik. Alvin and Patrik are both 15 years old, while Exilia and Faye are 14 years old. We decided to join together because we believed our skills were a good mix of high-level students, and we would be able to have a good sense of teamwork. We divided our work with Faye and Patrik doing most of the writing, while Alvin would revise and edit everything. Exilia, on the other hand, handled the setting up of the website, photos, and the action page. Overall, Patrik drew two original drawings for the website, as well as customizing the theme for the website. Faye made sure everything was cited and cited correctly; she was in charge of organizing the 'Works Cited' page. She also downloaded the videos on the website. Our group communicated mainly through Skype, and we have held at least one meeting per 2 weeks to get our organization right. Although we could never put on a straight face when we met, we somehow always got to the point at the end of the meetings. Our team made some progress over time, and after each day, we would add a little more information. Alvin, however, did not do much work until the last day, since it was his custom to leave most of his work until the last day, but once he got started, he did an unbelievable amount of work that one would not expect after seeing the work he had done previously.
Summary of the Project
Our Doors to Diplomacy project is all about the migrant children of China. There are a great number of children who are left behind in their own villages without their parents. The lack of parents often times causes psychological problems, leaves the children vulnerable to sexual predators, causes them to hold grudges and leaves them with heavy responsibilities. However, children that do follow their parents to cities often face discrimination there (imposed by both the Hukou system and their fellow citizens), particularly in the schooling system. Either way, migrant children that are left behind or follow their parents both often times lack much needed attention from their parents. Their parents work hard in cities just so the family survies. At times, they risk not getting paid or worse, their lives. We want to make known this issue so bigger measures would be taken to solve it. We want the vicious cycle to end.
Computer & Internet Access
Technology wasn't a big obstacle, although the firewall that China put up has caused some slight frustration. Google would work perfectly fine one minute, then completely shut us out the next. Thankfully, a member in our group had a VPN, so we could get information that we needed. We also ran into some trouble as we were trying to publish our site. Weebly had a few glitches that didn't allow us to 'verify' our accounts. We ended up copying everything from one website onto another newly-created, successfully published site. This whole process took us a few hours, resulting in all of the members of the group finally going to sleep at midnight.
Problems We Had To Overcome
During the time we worked on our Doors to Diplomacy project, we faced a number of problems and several other difficulties. There were quite a few problems that we had to overcome by ourselves, such as having to get videos for our project as well as making sure the said videos were in English. Almost everyone's first reaction would be to head on over to YouTube, where any video is a quick search ahead. We, however, did not have that luxury since China decided to block a number of sites that had “incriminating “media about the Chinese government. Sites include popular ones such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Quite a few users are very savvy in the process of getting past the infamous Great Firewall of China, however, and use VPNs. A VPN (Virtually Private Network) connects the user to a server outside of the blocked zone, allowing the user to access blocked sites. Good VPN’s aren’t free, but Faye has an Astill account on her computer, allowing us to gain access to the YouTube videos now on our website. Another problem we encountered, one that took a while to surpass, was publishing. The idea was simple. We'd create our site first, and once most of the changes and ideas had been posted, we would publish it. However, we encountered a problem in which the website just wouldn't publish. This resulted in us copying and pasting our whole website onto another newly created website that worked. The copy-pasting procedure was not easy, and Weebly did not make it easy for us. Each element we had created before had to be redone after copying it over to the new site, each background re-selected, each image reposted, each font redone, and each page recreated in a painfully slow process due to the slow Chinese connection.