I used to avoid troublesome matters whenever I can, but my participation in the Cyberfair Project has enabled me to experience the sense of accomplishment that follows engaging in teamwork and completing a project in spite of obstacles and hardships. For example, in order to participate in the Cyberfair, we had to take the time to interview and research, such as interviewing audiences at the Lantern Festival evening gala on their opinion and impression of lion dance. We also had to go through the process of editing photographs and video footage, writing reviews, as well as other things I had always wanted to avoid. But after taking part of all of this, I realized what it felt like to reap the fruits of hard labor. The project took up much of my time, but now I am in possession of valuable and indelible memories. If I had refused to participate, I would not have gained such valuable memories, have not met so many good friends.

  Now that the project is done, I find myself recalling the various occasions of labor and hardship as well as the moments of happiness. I will cherish every memory, including the first time we made lion headpieces, the first time we interviewed an artistic, and the many other first times I experienced. The Cyberfair Project was a competition, but during the research process, we felt like the competition had been especially designed to bring the members of the Bo-pi Lion Dance Troupe together. We not only met many interesting people, but gained a lot of funny memories. I can see bygone memories as clearly as if they were photographs in front of me. My former self would have felt glad to be done with the project, but now I feel reminiscent of the experience. I hope I will meet with similar opportunities in junior high school, and now I am sure I will never find the work to be a burden but will gladly embrace any chances I meet with.

  Within any team, the most important thing is mutual understanding and trust. i experienced that feeling in my participation of the event, how much fun it was to complete a project together, and the importance of unity. We could never have done any of this alone, but together our powers were great. We are like ants, if one of us discovers food, he or she would call on the entire troupe to bring the booty home together. Division of labor and collaborative efforts are what the Cyberfair project has taught us. We also saw how it was that divided we were weak, while united we stood strong. The reason for our success was that we cooperated with each other, never underestimated others or disrespected others that were slower and weaker than ourselves, but took the time to teach and help them to work together.

  We experienced some unpleasant moments during the time we worked on the Cyberfair Project, but everything was resolved amidst laughter and mutual understanding. We might have not got on well together at times, but all misunderstandings were forgotten with the completion of the project. What gave me the greatest happiness was neither our success not the rewards we received, but the feeling of collectively doing the best we could. We experienced much anxiety, a feeling I do not miss, but after all, what matters most is not whether we won or lost, but whether we will have the chance to get together again and preserve these beautiful memories together.

  Due to our participation in the Cyberfair project, we had the opportunity to visit and interview troupes at neighboring schools, such as the renowned Hakka Box Lion of Xipan Branch. The mouths of Box Lions may be opened and closed, and because of the resemblance of their mouths to matchboxes, they are also called Box Lions, something I find very interesting. There are not many students at Xipan Branch, but their dance troupe is much distinguished in competitive events. The dance troupe of our school has not participated in competitions, but we practice just as hard and endeavor to build a unique style of performance. We also visited Cheng-gong Elementary School to interview them on their Guangdong Lion Dance. Guangdong Lions are very cute, with mobile eyes, ears and mouths, giving them a very lifelike appearance in their performances. In our interviews, we learnt that Xipan Branch belongs to the Hakka community, therefore their traditional somewhat differ from ours. We also learned that each lion dance troupe in neighboring school had their own unique style and that each school boasts a different cultural characteristic.

  Out of my class, five students participated in the Cyberfair Project, and I was fortunately enough to be one of them. We worked with some school brothers and sisters from the lower grades. We conducted project research at school during winter break, we took advantage of morning hours to hold meetings, and it was during the first of these meetings that we decided on the project theme. Our title of choice was “The Extravaganza of Classical and Samba Lion Dance.”

  Out of all the activities we participated in during the Cyberfair Project, what I found most interesting was the process of making lion headpieces. Our project theme concerned lion dance, our street parade props were lion masks, then towards the start of school we made traditional lion headpieces, and aside from gaining much knowledge on lion dance in general, the fun part was that we were able to jump in and make the props ourselves and use them for our street parades. It was not until we interviewed the big sister that taught us how to make street parade lion masks, that we found out how she had gone to great trouble in discussing with her team on determining what style suited our dance troupe best, and why she ended up teaching us to make lion masks out of recycled materials.

  A short period thereafter, we distributed questionnaires to parents who attended our parent-class meeting and asked them to provide us with responses. Then we interviewed the Dean of Cheng-gong Elementary School. A few days ago, we interviewed the former Chief of Council, and now we are obliged to write down our experiences of the Cyberfair Project. Although all of this took up much of our time, we successfully completed the project, and I am glad to have participated and learned so much.

  Participation in the Cyberfair Project required that we give up our lunch break hours to research, processing information and typing and editing, all of which required a lot of effort, but at least I can type a lot faster now. During this time, we were also obliged to undertake promotional events, so the Dean brought the nine of us to Cheng-gong Elementary School to take part in the Lantern Festival evening gala. I was responsible for taking the stage and introducing the audience to our project, and was so nervous I lost my place in the script quite a few times, but fortunately Shao-tang Cheng kept his head and gave me reminders, and so we successfully completed this promotional effort. Later, when we distributed questionnaires in our community, I learned how much time and effort went into the gathering of data, and that research was much more than going online and finding a few pieces of material. Our webpage is upon completion as of now, and although we met with many obstacles, we luckily overcame them all, and sincerely hope to be well placed in the competition!

  I was chosen to take part in the Cyberfair Project because our teacher thought I wrote well and would be able to undertake the job of script writing. It was only after I joined the team that I realized journalistic writing was much different from the creative writing we learned in school. For example, I thought interviews were as simple as asking questions then writing down the answers, then I saw the recorder and camcorder our teacher had prepared and realized it wasn’t as simple as that. We were to both record in audio and video formats, transcribe the interviews, and if the interviewees answered in the Taiwanese Ming-nan language, we must also translate it into Mandarin. If some phrases or word usages were beyond us, we had to seek advice from the Ming-nan instructor at our school, which is why I felt that one of the most difficult parts of the projects was in compiling written records.

  I was most impressed by the promotional efforts our team made, because not only did we advocate our project to the entire school, we also did promotional events for the parents to see. Most especially, we made one such effort at the Lantern Festival evening gala, and it being the first time of being onstage and speaking publicly, I was very nervous, but after the event concluded successfully, I experienced a great sense of achievement, and have felt much more at ease onstage ever since.

  I feel that out of all the skills we acquired in this project, the most notable is our computing ability, we not only learned how to research for information and compile data, we also learned how to produce videos. It is no easy matter, and we have yet to fully grasp some of the techniques, but with the help of our teacher we managed to complete both our video and our eBooks. I would gladly participate in similar projects if the opportunity arises in the future.

  Ever since we joined the Cyberfair Project, we have been spending our lunch breaks doing research, compiling date or writing articles, and because of this we sometimes doze off in afternoon classes. Nevertheless, we still very much treasure the time we spent together during these lunch break hours.

  In the whole course of the project, what impressed me the most was when our Dean took us to Cheng-gong Elementary School, Xipan Branch to interview their Southern Lion, Guangdong Lion and Hakka Lion dance troupes. Their lion headpieces and performance styles greatly differ from ours, something I found curious and interesting. The dance troupe at Xipan Branch was also outstanding in that even though they had only 30 students in total at their school, they demonstrated great diligence in their practice, and thereby displayed great superiority.

  One of the most difficult parts of participating in the Cyberfair Project was when we had to come up with interview questions, because it meant that we had to have a basic understanding of the subject and the theme in order to come up with more questions to ask. More often than not, we didn’t have enough questions, or else they weren’t specific enough, and it took the joint effort of the entire team to construct a well designed interview. The process of transcribing the content of the interviews was also, in my opinion, one of the harder things we had to do.

  When we first joined the Cyberfair Project during winter break, on the first day we were very nervous because we didn’t know much about what we had to do, but then our teacher explained to us how we could come up with a research theme, how to use computers and the internet to our advantage, also how to put data together, and that was when we began to feel we might just be able to do accomplish our goal.

  Within the entire project, the part I found most interesting was when we interviewed the big sister from Tainan University of the Arts who taught us how to make street parade lion masks. She was full of fun, and even thought we were the ones who were supposed to interview her, she ended up asking us a lot of questions, and she also told us a lot about how to took classes, lead in events and made works of art as well as other equally interesting things, and we learned a lot from her.

  While engaged in the project, I encountered hardships that caused me much painful thought when I didn’t know how to overcome them but nevertheless had to find a way out. Sometimes, when I didn’t know what to write and lost sleep because it that, then with a struggle, fulfilled the assignment, the sense of achievement felt very sweet. It was great fun and a novelty to have made lion headpieces and masks with my schoolmates, I learned a lot of computing skills by participating in the Cyberfair Project, and I gained much knowledge on the traditional culture of lion dance, all of which made me treasure my friendship with my schoolmates even more than before.