School: Hualien Da-xing Primary School
    Hualien, Taiwan, R.O.C.

7 students, ages 10~12 worked together to complete this CyberFair project on March 24, 2009. They have participated in CyberFair in the following year(s): 2009

Classes and Teachers: Tseng Lang Rung

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://www.dsps.hlc.edu.tw

1. Description of Our Community

Hualien is located on the East coast of Taiwan, facing the great Pacific Ocean, having abundant nature resources and beautiful scenery and unique landforms and geology, and forming the spectacular scenes. Therefore, it gained its fame as “Taiwan Carrara” and “Eastern Switzerland”.

Dasin Village is one out of nine villages governed by Guangfu Township in Hualien County. Head south along Highway No. 9, turn right at the sign at about 255.5km, drive through the culvert under the railway, drive 500 meters and then you can arrive in this village.

“Christian Prison Fellowship Youth Academy” is located in Dasin Village in Guangfu Township, Mt. Maxi in the north and Nanqingshui River. The whole building is on the mountainside with wide view and the spirit of great land and people.

In order to find lost lambs, Prison Fellowship established Youth Academy on the foundation of the mode of Caffery farm. Hoping that by growing faith, opening hopes, counseling with love, those lost lambs in their adolescence can have the opportunities to turn over.

2. Summary of Our Project

Life History of Minister Huang Mingzhen Minister Huang Mingzhen’s Philosophy How Minister Huang Counsel Prisoners Cases of those who have been counseled by Minister Huang

Prison Fellowship is a religious service group which aims to redeem prisoners. It was founded by a retired warden Lu Guodong. In 1988, Minister Huang Mingzhen gave up his well-paid job and came back in Taiwan to be the Chief of Prison Fellowship. For twenty years, he has been to all prisons, cared about prisoners and rehabilitated people, assisted victims to go out from the shadow, and rebuilt victims’ family. He has even counseled condemned criminals. By the questions above and taking students to understand practically, we have interviewed relevant people in the community and units. Students were in charge of planning interviews and research activities. They interviewed and made records of learning reports; in the meanwhile, they also collected paper information and resources on the websites. They sorted all the information they had collected and then finished designing the site. They wish those who didn’t participate in this research can have deeper understandings of Minister Huang’s social service work.

We wish that the society can understand how difficult doing social exclusion work is and how urgent it is to do this work. We also wish that our society can care more about this important issue while they are uncertain which agenda is vital.

3. Our Computer and Internet Access

A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:less than 20

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:1

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

School Internet Environment

Currently, our school internet environment is ADSL broadband. The facilities in the computer lab are AMD-Sempron-3000+ computers for students of 12 and two for teachers.

Domestic Internet Environment

A few of the team members have dial-in lines 56k or ADSL broadband. They can only discussed at school or used email, MSN messenger, FTP and exclusive forum to send files or exchange thoughts.

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

Not familiar with the place and people: the Principal and administration unit assisted and helped to contact relevant units and people. Students’ parents helped to contact narrators and interviewees. Activity budget was financed by administration units and instructors. Every one supported each other. Teachers drove school van to take students to each interview place. Not familiar with the content of the project: students searched information and read relevant books offered by Youth Academy. Not enough time: using lunch break and Saturday.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

Using technology to understand the environment we live in is our greatest happiness. We visited our community during this time, going to Youth Academy and Zihciang Minimum-Security Prison. We know more about how the society is changing and the assistant Minister Huang has contributed to delinquent juveniles and prisoners. We really don’t have much energy and power to change our society, but we hope that by the little seeds we planted, we can make more people understand the contribution Minister Huang made to the society. We can not accept the idea not caring about others. Therefore, after knowing the importance of the work Minister Huang does to the society, we all hope we can be social workers or volunteers in the future. We even hope that there will be the second or the third Minister Huang to make efforts to Taiwanese society.

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

During the research process, we have learned to gain some important basic abilities, such as browsing websites, reading relevant books. By reading a lot and sorting data, we finished our learning notes. When we were taking notes, we reviewed our learning process. While making interview records, we learned how to behave and use proper wording to ask our interviewees and write important points into our writings. Combining 5th and 6th grade encouraging and social care topics in social science and languages, we experienced and utilized in life and stretched into extracurricular references. We have developed research spirit and abilities to utilize the methods we found during our research to solve problems in our life. We have developed our appreciation to society and humanities. We can preserve our memories to our community and our feelings by oral expression or cameras and spread this beauty by Internet. During the process of searching data and interviews, we have learned how to solve the problems we encountered by peripheral facilities, such as Internet, digital cameras, recorders and computers. We have also learned how to integrate these skills to be a information creator instead of information plagiarists. We get to know the beauty of our nature, learn how to appreciate and respect the gifts of nature and sustain this wonderful land.

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

We used “computers” and “internet” often. They ware used in writing and uploading our daily reports, searching information, making website, and emailing to each others. Appropriate “software” is needed at the same time. During the interview, we used “digital cameras” and “tape recorders” to get the materials that we want. When we make the webpage, we used a “photo scanner” to input our pictures and a “printer” to output the results we made or searched. Totally, we had used “computers”, the “internet”, some “software”, a “digital cameras”, “tape recorders”, a “photo scanner”, and a “printer”.

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

Besides letting others know Minister Huang, purpose of this project is also to let everyone know that counseling prisoners is really a difficult work and that prisoners are expecting everyone to accept them.

Minister Huang has been to plenty of prisons and interviewed all kinds of prisoners for these years. We hope that our project can help everyone understand the hard work of counseling prisoners.

Each team member shared work load and cooperated together in order to accomplish all tasks. By dividing into groups, mutual discussion, collecting and sorting data, interviewing, we could use the knowledge we had learned into life. Life testifies our learning. On each interview and field trip, our attitudes have become more concentrated and our skills of asking questions have improved. Team members also encouraged each other to make things work more perfectly. More importantly, we now care about every detail, but we used to be careless. Our interviewees could feel that we worked diligently and sincerely.

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

Many parts of this project were learning activities outside of school, like researching, sorting and discussing data, interview skills and planning in advance, writing reports and making web pages. We all expanded our abilities through this process. It really was a precious experience. During our interviews, our interviewees gave us positive feedbacks on our vision. They thought our publication could help more people face prisoners with positive attitudes. And for future generation, they will give more efforts to protect this land.

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

We want to thank our principle and all the teachers who have helped us in our schools. They spent lots of time to give us information and to help us to finish all the works we need to do. Teacher Tseng he teach us using the computer skillfully. We also want to thank all the people with whom we had the interviews.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

Although we don’t know relevant skills and knowledge to do this project, we grew our enthusiasm for this project through teachers’ instruction and trainings. We have better understandings that changing one’s heart cannot only rely on prisons which are not enough. We have to prevent bad things happening before they might happen. We also appreciate those who devote their life and energy to do social work in order to help those teenagers return. We hope we will be able to contribute ourselves to accomplish this impossible mission in the future.