1. Description of Our Community
Taiwan is a small island located in the southeast of the Asian continent, west of the Pacific Ocean with rich resources. Special cultures and traditions are the most striking point in Taiwan. Indigenous people were the first group of people that settled in Taiwan, nowadays, there are 16 groups of indigenous groups left in Taiwan. The Amis, Paiwan, and Atayals made up most of Taiwan’s indigenous population. They each have different cultures due to the different physical features of their land. All groups of these indigenous people are facing the same problem, cultural loss and their traditions aren’t able to pass down to the new generation successfully.
2. Summary of Our Project
The indigenous people were the earliest people who settled in a country or land. They are divided into different nations based on their living area, and traditions. In Taiwan, there are 16 indigenous nations, and the Atayal are the ones we are going to focus on. Among the 16 others, the Atayals' distribution is the largest, covering one-third of the mountains in the middle and north of Taiwan. Like all other indigenous nations, they also have the tradition of weaving, represented by their unique patterns and meanings. At first, they weave because the technology wasn’t developed, so they need to make their daily needs by their-selves. Their technique has become great, which allows them to create their kind of art. But through time, technology is developing, people no longer need to weave by themselves. Meanwhile, this tradition is being forgotten. Few people still want to replicate their traditions due to carelessness or hassle. Yuma Taru, who wants to bring the Atayal weaving culture back to the public, is whom we are going to interview. She has started to work in this field at 29, till now, it's been almost forty years. She has always been trying to bring the weaving tradition back to life. To understand more about the distinctive weaving culture of Atayals, we are going to explore their specialized crafting mastery in this project.
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:more than 6
C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dial-up modem
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:more than 6
E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):
Our percentage of using the internet at home is more than 80%, we often use them for research. We have 7 workstations with internet access in our classroom. Our connection speed in our classroom is 10.58mpbs, the speed of downloading is 2mpbs. We connect to the internet more than 6 times in our classroom.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
After deciding our topic, we searched a lot of information about the Atayal weaving tradition online, including whom we can interview. We successfully found Yuma Taru, who was famous in this field, tried to contact her. We found plenty of information about her and found her email. We sent an email inviting her for the interview. We sent 3 emails to her, but she didn’t reply to any of them. To overcome this problem, we decided to call Yuma Taru. We called her based on the contact information online, but those were all found out wrong. To overcome this problem, we looked at videos and articles about her and found that she worked in Lihang studio. Therefore, we called the studio and finally were able to contact Yuma Taru.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
Participating in the international cyber fair means allowing ourselves and others to learn about a topic that is important to our community but that we rarely explore. We may learn about Taiwan and individuals who have sacrificed to make the community a better place, and we can share that information with others, allowing the tradition of action to be passed along.
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
After the process of choosing a topic, researching, interviewing, and organizing the information we get is different from the school’s original way of teaching, we learn from the procedure until we finish our course work. It was a precious experience. Teamwork had taken up a big part of our project, we were able to collaborate and work on different parts each of us is good at, and splitting jobs made the whole process of finishing the project easier. The internet provides a huge amount of information so we can ask more detailed and direct questions about the procedure and process of weaving. We also had an opportunity to interact with Yuma, the interviewee. From setting up interview questions to asking and taking notes of the answers made great memories and connections to people but not only the internet and already written information. These interactions are not found in our normal curriculum but in this competition. The surveys reflected that students and adults do not have the chance to learn about traditional weaving mastery and we were able to share the wisdom of Atayals as a learner and provide information and knowledge and reach certain standards of work and advanced tasks.
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