Overview of the Special Topic Project  

Our locality is:
Mucha Region, Wenshan District, Taipei is the major locality for our research. The Wenshan District was originally divided into two parts, namely, Mucha and Jingmei, the former includes the Shihyuen Street, Huahsing Street, Mingyi Street, Minghsing Street, Mucha Street, Muhsin Street, Shunhsin Street, Chungshun Street, Changlin Street, Changhsin Street, and Changchiao Street at the centre of Mucha, the Wanfang region, and the Wanhsing Street, Chihnan Street and Laochuan Street, in the region of Er-ge Mountain. A multitude of talented people flocked and a number of schools stand in Mucha, a culture-intensive region, with the well-known Mucha Zoo and Maokong area within its jurisdiction. Forty to fifty years ago, the noodle makerss moved from Fujian to the vast and out-of-the-way region of Mazha, where the industry of handmade string noodles thenceforth boomed for a long time and which became the source of a majority of the string noodles in Taipei, whence the title of "string noodle granary" for Mucha. •

Outline of our Special Topic Project:
In the past, Mucha was called the "string noodle granary" owing to the flourishing industry of handmade string noodles there, but in the change of times, the city development has taken the bloom off the string noodle’s rose, leaving only a few workshops of handmade string noodles remaining the old flavours. Through tracing the history of the handmade string noodles, reporting the status quo of the surviving workshops in Mucha and comparing the machine-made string noodles with the Mucha string noodles in terms of production and taste on the basis of people’s recollection, we wished to understand the development and the wax and wane of Mucha string noodles and demonstrate the value of indigenous education through our study on this special local product, in the hope that more people will know about Mucha string noodles.

Our internet facilities:
Our school has exclusive computer classrooms, each of which is equipped with its proper network facilities, and the school uses the 2MB/512Kbps ADSL line. In addition, since we each have computers at home, the data were for the most part processed with computers at home.

Difficulties we encountered and overcame:

1. Time: the greatest difficulty is time constraint. Insomuch as most of our team members are six-grade students, who take full-time schooling and for the most part have extra-curriculum lessons or other activities arranged for us after school, we do not have much time for discussion meetings and interviews. Therefore, we had to sort out the available time of the members, and accordingly scheduled a one-hour meeting on every Tuesday after school and the interviews on every Wednesday afternoon. Any team member who have to take remedial classes either requested leave for the interviews or was assigned another errand if the request for leave was turned down.
2. Language: since the old workers of the string noodle workshops and the aged respondents of the questionnaire for the most part speak Taiwanese, which we may speak but are likely to stutter when keyed up during the interviews, we must, before the interview, practice Taiwanese again and again till we are able to fluently articulate questions.
3. Interview: the interview is very tight, in that the workshops and luncheonettes of string noodles are fairly busy. In consideration of the time constraint, we must interview them during the intervals between the busy hours, asking questions and recording answers in haste, and some questions had to be asked several times as a result of frequent interruptions. All these made us really nervous, and sometimes we even misplaced the recording pen and could hear nothing when we returned to school, in which case we could only work out the answers by recollection and by reference to the simple notes taken. In addition, the interviews with the merchants based on the questionnaire further tensed us up, in that sometimes we were frustrated by the interviewees’ refusals to respond or requests to repeat the questions when we did not get them across, but after several tries, we overcome the feelings of tension and embarrassment.
4. Techniques: it is not easy to collate the information and sometimes, we could only work out a small portion after a long discussion. Moreover, we only know some simple webpage techniques, and therefore must rely on the teachers to work out a simple tree diagram from which we could develop a simple website.

Reflections: In spite of all difficulties, these interviews not only strengthened our techniques in respect of interview and information collation, but also helped us understand more about the special local products of our hometown, and we all feel that we have made a lot of gains from these experiences.