School: Pioneer Secondary School
    Singapore, N/A, Singapore

11 students, ages 16-18 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on March 13, 2007. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 2007

Classes and Teachers: Ms Soh Geok Lan

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://www.pioneerss.moe.edu.sg

1. Description of Our Community

Singapore is by far one of the fast growing countries in Asia. It is an international hub for the sciences and information technology. The life in Singapore is fast paced; we have state of the art technology in Singapore in which Singapore uses its people to harness their ever growing quest for knowledge and self betterment.

The computer friendly community in Singapore has given birth to many self blogs which are a great way of communicating and portraying themselves as individuals. Not only has that, these people also helped to exercise our talents in the IT sector. Not only that they portray information about Singapore. Such as its history, its development, what’s “cool about Singapore” and stuff like that. This is a great in whereby people can learn about Singapore without even coming down here in the first place. Further more, it would encourage them to come to our country, as these bloggers post such innovative and interesting forums. Which just goes about to show you about the talented Singapore youth in Singapore.

Singapore is an ethnically diverse place, a great mixture of religions and races are found here. Singaporeans pride themselves about their harmonies communities and their strength lies in their racial harmony. Singapore lacks the resources in which developing and developed countries capitalise upon. The only resource Singapore has is its human resource. This is our greatest asset, the people of Singapore.

Though small in size, Singapore is often regarded as the chilli padi, its small size may lead to believe it to be harmless, but anyone who has tasted it would have told you about its amazing punch. Likewise in Singapore, what it lacks in size it makes for itself in other sectors. Home to the busiest port and the best international airport and airlines. Singapore is the ultimate chilli padi in this world.

2. Summary of Our Project

Singapore got its independence in 1965 but before that it was under the colonial rule of the British and later went through the hardships during the Syonan years under the Japanese. Today, Singapore maybe a small red dot that is really advanced compared to many other countries but it was not the same during the Japanese occupation. All of the Singaporeans struggled but some survived and others died during the occupation. Our project discusses about the landmarks that had played a great or even a small part during the occupation. However one thing is for sure, these landmarks had played a significant role by either defending Singapore before the Japanese occupation or is playing the role of a memory ground for the victims after the Japanese occupation up to today.

Today, these historical landmarks are serving all Singaporeans as a ‘Time Portal’ where all of us could go back into time and see the happenings of the occupation. These places have been turned into exhibition halls or memory grounds so that anybody could go and view the past to understand Singapore even more. Currently, these places not only serve as a learning point for Singaporeans but also create a better understanding for each Singaporean and their home, Singapore. These historical landmarks have developed a better bond for Singaporeans in loving their homeland.

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:2-3

C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection

D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:4-6

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

There were numerous problems that we had to overcome during the process of completing this CyberFair project. As our CyberFair group is fairly small and made up of only graduating students. i.e. Secondary 4 and Secondary 5 students, our stress level was at its peak. We had to complete tasks within a short period of time and at the same time make sure that our studies do not suffer. Sometimes we had 2-3 tests in a day and other projects popping out which only helped us increase our stress level. We overcame these problems by managing our time well and efficiently. To decrease our stress level, tasks were assigned to us based on our interests and capabilities ensuring that the project was enjoyable and not just any other piece of work. Team members also encouraged each other along the way. Another problem that we encountered was that data was lost when sometimes our computers hanged making our task even more difficult. On top of that computers took a long time to return back to normal. To prevent this from reoccurring, data was constantly saved in thumb drives other than hard disks. This eased our problem greatly.

By overcoming all these problems, we managed to complete our project on time.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

Our main objective of our participation in CyberFair is to seek knowledge and preserve our history. We are taking every extra effort to gain knowledge from this project as we want to develop an inward drive and curiosity to learn about our history. Seeking knowledge has been the critical source of progress since the origins of man hence we want to seek knowledge in order to strive towards success. We want to preserve our history as it is important to remember the hard work and determination put in by our ancestors to bring up Singapore to a high standard. Preserving Knowledge is also essential as it plays a significant role in building national identity and cohesiveness.

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

Our Cyberfair project is to create a website on Historical landmarks. We did a lot of research on the Historical landmarks and the values each landmark has preserved. However according to rules of the Project, we cannot use the copyright information from the internet. Hence we rephrased the information in our own words to show the originality of our work. And we also went to River Valley High School for a meeting about the Cyber-Fair project on early- February and we made a presentation on our progression of our project. We used the checklist in the cyberfair website to help us further enhance our website. As we rephrased the information from our sources, we also gained knowledge on the historical landmarks in Singapore that will be useful in our subjects such as history and social studies.

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

Our group used various types of tools and technologies to complete the CyberFair project. These tools and technologies helped us to finish the project on time with good qualities. The tools and technologies we used were things like video and digital cameras for us to capture any useful information from the places we went during the entire project. And, the internet of computers to find the relevant information of places such as the Kranji War Memorial to add in other interesting facts. Also, the computer software like Dreamweaver to create our group's web page, Macromedia Flash to design the layout. Plus, the Photoshop to create and edit the pictures to create a better and pleasant webpage for our viewers' to browse around. These tools could be found in our school's computer labs and it's very convenient for us to do the project anytime, after school. The most valuable tools would be the digital camera because it helped us to capture good photographs so much so that it would make the whole web page look more interesting. And with the help of these photographs, our viewers will be able to know exactly how the places look like, without using their imagination.

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

In the project, we, as the representatives of Pioneer Secondary, interacted with various people whose expertise lies in the field of historical knowledge. The contacts gave us an insight on the rich history and culture of Singapore.

As ambassadors, we brought out the message to the people that teenagers are aware of their cultural roots and want to bring the erudition to the more ignorant among us.

Through the creation of the website, we want to be the proud ambassadors of Pioneer Secondary School, or even the entire Singapore, to make other teens conscious of what they had constantly neglected, the things which had happened in the past. It is a very important lesson taught that none of us would ever want to forget.

We want students to learn about this important history of Singapore, how and why our forefathers suffered in the past. Without that knowledge however little, the danger that the past exists will be equivalent to the present, and we will observe the repetition of our past mistakes.

Members of the public and students from our school provided us with promising comments and feedback, which helped us to make useful amendments to accomplish the task of fulfilling an ideal website which would bring about the attention of young people.

With support, our group strongly believes that we have the ability to do so through our interactive site and make them learn lessons from it.

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

Working on this project strengthened our relationship between our school and our community. It also taught us to cooperate so as to complete the project successfully. It also helps us to realised that there are many historical landmarks in our surrounding and also helps us to know more about it. We know how to create web site by using Dreamweaver software.

Our project will have a profound impact because we will be able to reach teenagers with our website, and they will learn about the new things about the historical landmarks of Singapore and hopefully pass this information on to others. We hope that the impact will be an increased awareness of the historical landmarks in our surrounding. The Project was created to link students to community and history. It has brought the community closer to the educational process. It also provides information about a place that we never had been before. It has allowed us to realised that our community has an interesting history. The project has provided a way to collect historical information and present it in a usable format for students and teenagers as well as interested community members. It provided a way to document and preserve information about our local past.

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

Basically, for our group sometimes we do face serious difficulties and problems in which we ourselves don’t know how we should handle. In order to ensure our group goes on the right track and carry out the right task we had approached other members of our community as our guide angels. Some of the example would be our media club teacher Ms Sharmila who aids us in media problems and Ms Soh who had accompanied us to the respective venue and outing in order for us to complete our research successfully and not to forget at the same time to gain some useful knowledge. Fengrun also helped us in ensuring that our project meets the criteria. Examples of other useful resources would be like the school or the National library where we went to borrow books to get a better conclusion on the historical site. After all the outings and the useful resources we got, we had learnt a lot on the historical sites of Singapore. Not only that we had indeed a lot of fun through every outings we went and we really had benefited a lot from all these. Last but not least to send our thanks to all our teachers and to every one of us who had helped in this project. Lastly we wanted to thank the school for supporting us to go further on with our projects. Without them we won’t be able to work successfully in this project.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

During this project, we really had a lot of great time going for outings and at the same time, we seemed to be having chemical reaction between our members in this group and no one would be able to break this strong bond between us. We got to know each and everyone of us better, knowing each other talents and we are really honored to say that we are really happy with what we had progressed so far. From a group with lack of team spirit and communication to a group with full of strength and most importantly our group was filled with joyfulness and happiness. We had also learnt one thing that’s we not only learns from what we are told to do but we had also enjoyed a lot at the same time. This project not only allows us to have a better understanding on the historical sites of Singapore but also that it had strengthened our friendship to another level.