CyberFair Project ID: 8627

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International Schools CyberFair Project Narrative
Title: Barrier Free — Happy Work, Happy Life
Category: 2. Community Groups and Special Populations
URL: http://app.kcis.ntpc.edu.tw/Cyberfair/2022cyberfair/Barrier/index.html
Bibliography: http://app.kcis.ntpc.edu.tw/Cyberfair/2022cyberfair/Barrier/narrative/index.html

School: Kang Chiao International School
    New Taipei City, Taiwan R.O.C, Taiwan R.O.C

9 students, ages 14-15 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on March 22, 2015. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 2007~2022

Classes and Teachers: Shi-Hsuan Hsiao, Ying-Tsong Peng

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://www.kcis.ntpc.edu.tw/

Project Overview

1. Description of Our Community

Taiwan, a beautiful island with ecological diversity and various ethnicities. Taiwan is surrounded by sea in the Eastern part of Asia and the Western Pacific Ocean. Located on the boundary between the Eurasian Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate, Taiwan is extruded by the plates. The standards of health in Taiwan are impressive, having been improved considerably since the beginning of the 20th century. As known as the “castle in the mountains', our school, Kang Chiao International School, pays a lot of attention to students' core character education, there are many opportunities for us to serve and give back to society. For instance, we have a fundraising activity every year. This year, our school collaborates with the fundraising activity with “Genesis Social Welfare Foundation” and “Taiwan U-Life Association”, allowing us, students and teachers, to participate and be concerned about groups that need help in society. These activities can draw the attention of Taiwanese society to help and develop empathy in individuals. Therefore, we are going to introduce people to know about “Happy Work” and the disables’ condition in Taiwan through this project.

2. Summary of Our Project

Handicaps account for 5.1% of Taiwan’s population, making them an important group of people in Taiwan. However, the disabled often are treated unfairly and have poor caring systems to sustain their lives. Therefore, many local organizations are formed to look after the disabled. Happy Work Organization, an organization that supports handicapped families, looks after adult handicaps and provides work opportunities to these disabled. Happy Work has been an important handicap organization in Taiwan, and the founder believes that handicaps not only need physical caring, they also need mental caring and career support, therefore, she founded this organization. Our project will introduce the Happy Work Organization and will further discuss the difficulties the disabled face in Taiwan.

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:more than 6

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

During the CyberFair project, we face and confront many challenges, including: 1. The majority of the members are attending the Cyberfair club for the first time, and are unfamiliar with the project creation. As a result, three members with prior participation experience took on the roles of leader and guided us through the project. 2. The topic we were researching was a disabled social organization, in which the staff and the chairman were usually busy taking care of the disabled. Also, due to the privacy of the disabled, the organization hesitated for us to visit and interview the care center. Lastly, because of Covid-19, especially in the Taoyuan care center, which was a serious epidemic area in Taiwan, the organization considered the health and safety, once again delayed the actual interview. Eventually, we both agreed on a virtual meeting and interview. 3. Our team members' computing abilities were insufficient, particularly in the area of web page creation, due to difficulties in knowing settings and programming the website fluently. Therefore, we spent our vacations after the Chinese New Year holidays for additional training on improving our skills. 4. To get enough legitimate surveys, we spent a lot of time making sure individuals filled out the survey we passed through the school email. We put the link on our instagram profile, also pleased parents and cousins to pass the survey to other social media groups, which successfully helped us reach our goal of receiving at least 300 responses to our survey.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

This project did not only bring awareness to the people with disabilities in our surroundings, but also well communicated with others through technology to disseminate the awareness to the public. What we’ve learned by participating in the CyberFair far exceeded my imagination.

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

We learned new skills and practiced group concepts during the activities and research for this International Schools CyberFair Project. We learned strategies of efficiently collecting information, analyzing data thoroughly, organizing the information correctly, and presenting and communicating it clearly to people. These skills are all important either in school or in real life. We could not have done this project without these skills. Kang Chiao International School applied for an IB learner profile, in which we all become thinkers, risk-takers, communicators, and inquirers in this year’s CyberFair. Our topic this time is one of Taiwan’s associations for th disabled, in which we learned more about disabilities and became more caring. We understood more related knowledge about disabilities, including the categories they’re put in, the government’s incentives, how people treat the disabled, and the difficulties they encounter. We used the internet to make our website to introduce Happy Work, which allowed everyone to see it. If we do it in a traditional way of printing them out as hard copies, it might not allow as many people to see as on the internet.

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Project Elements

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

Throughout this project, we are required to search information online, paraphrase information, create web pages, and publish the website. In order to complete the data collection, nine of us used a laptop per person to reach search engines such as Google and Safari. For additional data gathering, we used Google Form to create a survey about Happy Work and people with disabilities and send it to others through G-mail. Since our project includes interviewing the Happy Work Association, we also use iPhone and G-mail to contact the association to arrange an interviewing time. Our instructor, Bear Shaw, used a digital camera to record the whole interview and take photos of our team visiting the Happy Work Association. For creating and publishing the website, we used an online resource called Nicepage and the guidance under instructor Mr.Wings Peng. However, the wi-fi connection is important throughout this whole project since we reached out for information online. Thus, we used the school wi-fi with a dedicated connection. Lastly, we used Google Doc to type in every piece of information and Google Drive to organize every resource for this project to prevent us from missing any document. Overall, the most helpful and valuable tool is our personal laptop. During the project making, the laptop is the tool we use most of the time. The search engines we used to reach for online tools such as Google Form, G-mail, Google Doc, and Google Drive are included in the Google search engine. Therefore, laptops play an important role in helping us to reach the search engine and the majority of additional information tools.

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

In order to collect more information about charities and people with disabilities, we decided to interview the founder of Happy Work Association. Our team leader took the responsibility to contact Happy Work. She used G-mail to contact the association to arrange the interview time. However, she did not get any replies from the association for a period of time. Therefore, she used an iPhone instead of G-mail and called the association to contact the association for checking whether they received her email. After nearly four months of adjustment, we finally got the opportunity to interview the founder. Through the interview, the founder patiently answered our questions and provided us with additional knowledge about charities’ development and people with disabilities. As the ambassadors of our school, Kang Chiao, we showed great manners and stayed polite during the visit. In addition, we reached out to our friends, families, and even strangers we do not know through online communication software and in-person speech to ask them to fill out our survey. Although we did not get any visitors or donated services, people are impressed with our work. Not only the people who filled out our survey, but also the founder of Happy Work who we interviewed praised our hard work and can not believe a group of senior students were able to complete this much work.

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

The influence of our study based on the CyberFair project is not restricted to the community aspect; it has the potential to extend throughout society, even worldwide. The initiative taught individuals on fundamental disabled related knowledge; this is also a chance for those who are interested and needed in this field to learn more about the topic. We make every effort to distribute this knowledge, such as creating social media accounts, releasing websites, uploading the interview video with both Chinese and English subtitles. Since then, our team believes the information will be spread to no matter students or adults when they need the information for help or support. Yet, we do not expect the potency and result to be discovered immediately, implying that the initiative might have no impact on anybody. Our project is on the Cyber fair website, which means we are able to raise awareness of this topic around anywhere in the world. We are sure that more than 300 people have already seen our project and learned more about this topic.

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

Firstly, we would like to thank the Happy Work Association and its founder who we interviewed. We are really grateful to Happy Work in willing to rearrange the schedule for our interview. We especially thank them for patiently answering every question we asked to provide us with a large amount of additional information. Secondly, we would like to thank the 305 people in our community who filled out our survey. We send the survey link to many different groups of people, thankfully, most of the ones are willing to fill out our survey. Some of the ones who filled out our survey did not only patiently go through every question, they even gave us some advice and praises for our work. This advice and praises turn into motivation for us throughout this whole project making. Lastly, we would like to thank two of our instructors, Bear Shaw, and Wings Peng. Whenever we face any challenges, they are willing to guide us through. Also, processes such as website making are not able to go this smoothly if we did not have guidance from these two instructors. Therefore, we are grateful to them both for guiding us and bringing the whole group together.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

This year, due to the 2019 Covid pandemic, it made it difficult to go to the organization and directly interview the founder of Happy Work. In addition, since the objects of our study project are highly sensitive people, we thought that visiting in person might be an irritation to them. As a result, to overcome this problem, we use the advanced technology we have nowadays, using online meeting (Google Meet) to interview the funder Ms. Chen and the PR team leader Mr. Chen. Throughout the process of solving this problem, we learned to use different technologies in order to make the best of our project.

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