CyberFair Project ID: 2351

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International Schools CyberFair Project Narrative
Title: Wu (Chinese Martial Arts)
Category: 8. Local Music and Art Forms
URL: http://aero.spss.edu.hk/~cyberf
Bibliography: No bibliography page cited

School: St. Paul's Secondary School
    Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

5 students, ages 17-18 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on March 14, 2003. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 2003

Classes and Teachers: Mr. C. Lin (teacher), 6AArts and 6B (classes)

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://www.spss.edu.hk

Project Overview

1. Description of Our Community

City of Life – Hong Kong is it!

We are five youngsters from Hong Kong. Let's take this chance to introduce our little city to you all!

Hong Kong situates at the southeastern tip of China. It has a total area of 1100 square kilometers, which covers Hong Kong Island, the Kowloon Peninsula, the New Territories and 235 outlying islands. Though our city is small in size, we have one of the finest deep-water ports in the world, the Victoria Harbour. Besides, Hong Kong is also an international financial, trading and business center. It is also well known for its efficiency, transparency and fairness.

ong Kong was once under British administration for nearly one century. On 1 July 1997, the sovereignty was returned to People's Republic of China and became a Special Administrative Region. Therefore, Hong Kong is now enjoying a closer relationship with China in all aspects.

To us, our community does not confine to our small city, Hong Kong, but also to a wider and broader sense as our motherland China!

2. Summary of Our Project

Want to learn more about Chinese martial Arts? Don’t hesitate to visit our site! Our fascinating site contains lots of information relating to Wushu – Chinese Martial Arts. This webpage give a brief introduction about the history and stragtegies of Wing Chun, Tai Chi, Jeet Kune Do and Shaolin KungFu. While you are reading the content, you can feel and understand the spirit of Chinese Martial Arts through appreciating the dynamic photos. Moreover, there is a video clip about our interview with Mr. Louis Cha, one of the most popular Chinese Martial Arts novelists in eastern Asian. Apart from the interview, we cordially invite you all to visit the “Outstanding Personage”, you can understand more about him. Besides, by visiting the “Outstanding Personage”, you can understand the life-stories and contributions of two super Martial Arts stars, Mr. Jackie Chan and Mr. Bruce Lee. At the end of the page, you can share feeling and process of doing this project through viewing the project narrative.

3. Our Computer and Internet Access

A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:more than 50%

B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:1

C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection

D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:2-3

E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):

Our school has over 200 computers provided for students to use during the lunch time and after school. The speed of the Internet Access is quite fast if not all the computers connected to the net. If wireless internet access can be provided, then students can be benefit more because we can access the internet wherever we want.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

When we have decided to participate in this competition, it's already December 2002. Actually, we started our project as late as February 2003 since we all have examinations, which lasted for the whole January. We have to do the project against time. We tried our very best to do research instead of having family days in the weekends. We even "scarified" our free lessons and Chinese New Year holiday to discuss the project and write project narratives.

Apart from the problem of limited time, we also had problem on choosing the topic. To decide an appropriate topic is very time consuming. At the beginning, we would like to introduce some special foods in HK style restaurants, so we select "local specialties" as our topic. However, we also found the topic "local leaders" very interesting. Yet, we understood that we didn't have enough time to interview so many outstanding leaders in Hong Kong. At last, we sat down together and made comprises. We finally decided to work on a very fascinating topic "local arts". We would like to introduce "Chinese Martial Arts" to people from all over the world. We are sure that this topic would make others understand more about our community.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

The project aims at increasing the interest of Hong Kongers to learn martial arts as Hong Kong citizens seldom do exercises and so cause deterioration of health. Besides, Chinese martial arts focus highly on self discipline and endurance thus giving ways on how to be more endurable to unfavourable situations such as the economic recession.

6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?

Our project is about traditional Chinese martial arts. This is closely related to our curriculum as the culture of our country, China, is studied through a subject called Chinese Language and Culture. Besides, "Eagle-shooting Heroes", a book written by the writer whom we interviewed, Mr. Louis Cha, is part of the curriculum of the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority in A-Levels.

The group concepts that we learnt include effective discussion, workload distribution, communication and project planning. We learnt how to distribute work evenly to our members and how to communicate in a more effective way as we are busy bees and have only limited time and in different classes. These made us need to learn how to have better cooperation together. We also learnt the correct way to skim through books or articles quickly to find materials that we need. We discovered that knowledge attained from books in libraries and interviews are more unforgettable.

Our school always encourages students to speak in public so as to make us more presentable. Through this project, we were trained to overcome stress and nervousness in front of strangers. Besides, we have learnt how to do things in an alternative way when a direct way to do the job cannot be achieved. This happened when one of us has a program or hardware that the others do not. This fits the school theme of this year- resilience.

Skills that we have learnt in the technology criteria include the use of digital cameras and video recorders. We also become more familiarized with web page editing software such as Dreamweaver and Flash. Besides, we have learnt how to use the school’s virtual drive to store pictures and share files among our team-mates.

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Project Elements

1) What information tools & technologies did you used to complete your CyberFair project?

In the stage of research, we went to the Hong Kong File Archive to find information about Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, and the Hong Kong Central Library for the information about Tai chi. These libraries help us a lot. By searching from books, our information will not be limited.

Besides the libraries, we have an interview with Mr. Cha (also known as Jin Yong), we use sound recorder, video and digital camera to record the process of the interview. By providing part of the interview, it can enrich the content of our web site. Among these tools, the digital camera is most useful. It is provided by our school. The photos in our web site are taken by it, therefore the quality of the photos is very good. And we can save a lot of time, because we don't need to print and scan the photos.

In the stage of making web site, we have used quite a number of software – Dreamweaver, Flash, Firework, Photoshop, etc. We use the Dreamweaver to build the site so that it is well-organised. And the beautiful design is made by the Photoshop. These softwares help us a lot.

2) In what ways did you act as "ambassadors" and spokespersons for your CyberFair project both on-line and in person.

We have chosen Chinese martial arts as the topic of our web project and would like to invite some distinguished persons in this field to be our guest patrons. We try to contact Mr. Louis Leung-yung Cha who is a prominent author of Chinese martial art literature and Mr. Jackie Chan who is a super action star of Hong Kong both through mails and phone calls. In the letter, we introduce the competition we join, Cyberfair and express the aims of this international and meaningful events.

And surprisingly, we are given the chance to interview Mr. Cha at his office in late February. We are sure that Mr. Cha was really impressed of the idea of Cyberfair for he accepted our invitation and be our patron. This was like a dream for we are just normal students in Hong Kong before but the Cyberfair linked Mr. Cha and us together!

On that day, we firstly introduced the Cyberfair to him, then we asked him many questions about Chinese martial arts and his literature. The interview was really enjoyable and we got his autograph and shot a great group photo with him! The process is so memorable and valuable for all of us!

3) What has been the impact of your project on your community?

Undoubtedly, our project does make a difference in our community. It is so unique in a way that we have included different kinds of Chinese martial arts in one web page, namely Wing Chun, Shao Lin, Tai Chi and Jeet Kune Do. Moreover, so creative are we that famous people relating to Chinese martial arts are introduced and even interviewed and have been shown in our page.

By viewing our work, people in our community can have a deeper understanding about our valuable Chinese culture – martial arts. They can also learn how different people incorporate the ideas of Chinese martial arts in their work. For instance, our brilliant Chinese novel writer, Mr. Louis Cha, has incorporated martial arts into his martial arts fictions. Mr. Jackie Chan, an internationally well-known action film actor, has demonstrated the power of martial arts through his movies and people from all over the world admit his effort.

Not only the people in Hong Kong benefit from viewing our work, other people around the world may also learn that our treasurable martial arts has positive impacts on practicers' health, and it will surely encourage them to have self discipline and endurance. Practicers can even acquire an additional skill to defend themselves by learning Chinese martial arts. By interviewing Mr. Louis Cha, we have established a working relationship of interviewer and interviewee between our group and Mr. Cha. Surely Mr. Cha and our family members and friends will have a look at our web pages and appreciate our effort.

4) How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?

Our project is many people’s heart of work . And we would like to take this chance to show our gratitude to them for they have helped us a lot in doing this marvelous web project.

First of all, the guest interviewee, Mr. Cha who spared so much of his precious time in sharing his experience in martial arts and literature with us.

Then, a great thanks should be given to the staff of Centre for Enhanced Learning & Teaching in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. They promoted this international event in Hong Kong and provided workshops for Hong Kong students and teachers during December and January. The staff gave us many helpful advices and assistance in preparing our web project.

Last but not the least, our principal and teachers in St.Paul’s Secondary School. Thanks for giving us this golden opportunity which broaden our horizon and enrich our life experiences. Our computer teacher, Mr. Lin played an important role in technical support for he assisted us in taking and amending photos and videos. Also, our English teacher, Miss.Yam helped us to amend all the error in our English essays. Moreover, we would like to thanks Mrs. Ling, our teacher who teaches Chinese Culture and Chinese History. She gives us many useful advices before we interviewed Mr. Cha.

We are lucky to have so many people helping us to complete this marvelous web project. Hope other teenagers in the world could feel this web project is our work of heart and enjoy every word while you’re browsing this web project! We strongly believe that the result is not really crucial as we are united through the Cyberfair. The process is always more important than the result.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

When we were doing researches, we discovered that there are many types of Chinese martial arts. Each type of martial arts had its own history and story. We knew some cases that patients were able to recover after practicing these Chinese martial arts such as Tai chi.

By doing this project, we learnt from our English teacher how to write a formal and proper invitation letter. We would like very much to interview Mr. Jackie Chan, the super star who is one of the most distinguished representatives in the field of Chinese martial arts. We desired Mr. Chan to share some of his expertise insights regarding martial arts. Although we failed to interview him, we have already learnt a lot from our English teacher.

To our surprises, we were given a chance to interview Mr. Cha Leung Yung (Jinyong), one of the most popular Chinese martial arts novel writers in China. The first impression Mr. Cha gave us was that he was a very nice old man. We found him really a learned man. Though Mr. Cha is now 80 years old, he has a very good memory that he was able to remember all our names after the interview which only lasted for an hour.

We highly recommend this project to others. Despite knowing and understanding about Chinese martial arts, people could able to share our joy, discoveries and surprises from this project.

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View our CyberFair Project (Project ID: 2351)

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