School: Uzhur School #6
    Uzhur, Krasnoyarsky krai, Russian Federation

3 students, ages 14-17 worked together to complete this Doors to Diplomacy project on March 16, 2012. They have participated in Doors to Diplomacy in the following year(s): N/A

Classes and Teachers: Maria Altunina, Maria, Irina, Ilya

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://schckola-6.narod.ru/

1. Description of Our Team

Our team includes three students: Maria (16 years old), Irina (17 years old) and Ilya (14 years old). We joined together as a team, because we study at the same school and go to extra English classes together. World Demography is very interesting for us, because population one is important factors of international affairs and diplomacy. Our teacher is Maria Altunina helped us with English grammar and finding information.

2. Summary of Our Project

Our project is devoted to the problems of world demography. It covers population situation and policies of five countries: China, Brazil, Russia, the USA, the UK. Why are these countries? Because these countries reformed very interesting population policies in their states. We would like to know more about these population policies. One more important point is that these countries located on different continents. Our purpose is to identify the demographic problems and suggest our solutions.

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:4-6

C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection

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

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

As we live in a small town the Internet access is not always stable. So sometimes during the project we had to stop our work or online discussion because of the connection problems.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

The biggest and most difficult problem to solve was the lack of web design skills. All of us are just the beginners with technology so we were working hard to learn how to create web sites during the project. The other thing is it was difficult to analyze and summarize huge amount of material that covers the topic. we had to spend a lot of time finding, sorting out and choosing resources appropriate for the research.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

Demography is about us - people of the Earth. Population is growing and it’s influence on the environment is constantly growing too. People all over the world have to work hard to set up the reasonable balance. And we understand that our generation will have to be solving these problems.

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

The project content covers some important topics from Geography and Biology classes, some issues from Human-Society Interaction (social science). We were also working a lot on improving our English language. And we get skills on information technology in particular web design that we had to learn practically from scratch. We also improved our skills of working with graphics, maps and statistics. Collecting information for our project we became more aware of the huge influence of demographic situation on international affairs and development of diplomacy. Internet helped us to compare different points of view on this issue in different countries and gave us the opportunity to use the resources from all over the world.

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

We used 4 computers in the classroom and computes at home connect to the Internet.To discuss things we often used skype. Some books from the library were also very helpful to raise our awareness on the topic.

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

Demography is about everybody. It has being discussed for several recent years all over the world. Our study of this very important topic is devoted to looking for the balance between the people's influence and the environment. So the message for a potential visitor of our web site is to make him/her think that our surviving on the Earth depends on how well we will be able to solve this problem.

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

To understand the attitude of people from our local community on the topic we carried out a discussion in one of the classes. We also discussed that a lot with our families and friends. The feedback was really diverse. Some people said that there was nothing that could be done to improve the situation. But others supported us. Some of them were saying 'thank you' for the new interesting information and food for thought.

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

Our teachers, our parents and friends volunteered helping us at the stage of brainstorming. We shared a lot of ideas and chose some. Our teachers helped us with finding the information. There was also some voluntary help with explaining web design technology to the members of our team.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

It turned out that there are different points of view on this topics. Different countries have really different approaches to solving this problem. It was very interesting to compare those,