Team
YiingMarc Garneau Collegiate Institute, Canada
OliviaDon Mills Collegiate Institute, Canada
EdwardMarc Garneau Collegiate Institute, Canada
JiunrueyMarc Garneau Collegiate Institute, Canada
RosieMarc Garneau Collegiate Institute, Canada
KamakshiMarc Garneau Collegiate Institute, Canada
Age Range
19 & under
Coaches
Steven JayMarc Garneau Collegiate Institute, Canada
Category
Science & Technology > Astronomy > Space Exploration
Audience
Ages 15 and up
Language
English
Site Features
Online Activity / Game
Quiz
Video / Sound
Team Collaboration
Space Exploration is a result of the collaboration of six Toronto high-school students. Jiun Ruey, Yiing, Edward, Rosie and Kam are students of Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute. Olivia is a student from Don Mills Collegiate Institute. Inspired by our school mentor and famous Canadian astronaut Marc Garneau, as well as the fact that our school held one of ten Space Resource Centers in all of Canada, we found ourselves very interested by the concept of outer space exploration. The Marc Garneau C.I students collaborated with talented artistic designer Olivia, from a nearby high school. And thus, the Space Exploration team began their journey.
Originally, team collaboration presented a problem due to the fact that Olivia did not attend the same school as the rest of the team. We later found it effective to use scheduled group chats as a way of communicating and set personal deadlines for certain parts of the site. Time management was crucial to the development of our website.
We were able to use each of our group members' individual strengths and talents to create the best web site we could create. Olivia, part of the well-respected CyberARTS program at her school, and Rosie, a former member of the CyberARTS program, were assigned a large portion of the designing/graphical work due to their talents. Jiun-Ruey and Edward have significant experience and interest in programming, and were assigned the tasks of coding the designs and taking care of the JavaScript aspects. Yiing and Kamakshi are very talented writers, and contributed most of the content of the site.
Together, we made quite the team. There were two people assigned to each major task, and at the end, everything was put together. Our collaboration was a success.
Team Diversity
The team featured members of various ethical backgrounds: Jiun-Ruey and Yiing are Malaysian, Olivia is Vietnamese, Edward is Taiwanese, Rosie is Chinese, and Kamakshi is Indian.
Although each group of 2 were assigned separate tasks, we felt that we should all contribute some content to the web site. We felt that due to our team diversity, it would benefit the web site to have contributions from different point-of-views. For example, Rosie felt strongly against the prospect of further investment in space travel due to her experiences with poverty in China. As a result, although Rosie was responsible for the designing of the web site, she contributed a great deal of content to the "Arguments against" section of the site.
We didn't always agree with each other on the issues of space exploration, but we felt that instead of debating about them with each other, putting the arguments on the web site would enhance the richness of the content. Thus, the debate section was born.
Despite differences in opinion, we were still all able to get along and collaborate well. We feel that this has been a great experience and that through this experience, we have truly learned how lucky we are to be among people of so many different cultural backgrounds.
