Project Overview
1.Category: Community Groups & Special Populations
2. Description of “Our Community”
The commercial area behind Taipei Station was Taipei City’s first wholesale commercial area, with closely packed stores primarily selling luxury apparels and accessories for wholesale and retail. On Yanping North Road, there are many handicraft material stores selling various types of materials and packages of materials, even providing DIY instruction. It is quite unique in the commercial area behind Taipei Station, a well-known distribution center for handicraft materials and leading in the DIY trend.
Taipei City also has creative markets such as Red House in Ximen, Tianmu commercial area, which provide a channel for the sale of DIY products. They inspire DIY experts to express their infinite creativity and talent, and aficionados can look for treasures. There are happy handicraft lovers everywhere, and DIY has continued to expand into a fashion trend.
3. Project summary:
In recent years, intricate and cute accessory charms have become popular attachments to cell phones, purses, or even pencil boxes. Some of these are purchased, and more are made through DIY. Craft creation has become a fashionable wave, and there are many DIY workers and aficionados near us who lead this fashionable trend.
An intricate and beautiful grape bead charm led us to join the handicraft arts, so we visited craft materials stores to understand DIY categories. We met DIY experts and found the joy of DIY; we visited creative markets and know about the channels and platforms for crafts; we even used our warm hands to participate in DIY activities, making craft artworks from clay, beads, perler beads, rhinestones, hair ties, wool felt, and other intricate and beautiful items in pursuit of the DIY trend as we discovered the beauty of DIY culture.
4. Our internet environment:
Our school provides ADSL for linking to internet with an upload speed of 100Mb and download speed of 100Mb. We have completed a wireless internet in 2004 and can receive the internet message in the campus everywhere.
There are four computer classrooms and a multi-media center for making teaching materials in our school. In each computer classroom, there are 35 computers for the students to have the computer class. Also, the school provides every teacher a notebook for teaching use. The staff is more than 200 people. So, approximately, there are more than 350 computers in our school, including the computers for the administrative use. Every computer can use the wireless internet in the campus. The administrative departments still use the desktop computer which is provided with an exclusive line for connecting to internet and various web services are available for application through the server. The school’s servers include Web Server, Mail Server, DNS Server and Proxy Server that provide convenient online application environment. Every student has his or her own E-mail address and has the capability of web making.
5. The problems we encountered and coped with:
（1）Busy Students, Not Easy to Arrange the Schedule
Our team members were outstanding in many extra-curricula. They were the members of the Chinese orchestra, the chorus, the sport team and the language association, also. Our team members were always too busy to attend the research activities. Therefore, the research progress often got behind. We encouraged students to attend the research because they could learn a lot of knowledge and skills from the research, such as the skills of interview, interpersonal interaction and result presentation.
(2) DIY materials are quite expensive
Even though we only made a few items by hand, each small item required materials, and others even required hiring craft teachers for instruction. All these things cost a lot of money, but fortunately we have a dedicated parental support organization that ultimately resolved the problem of money.
(3) Students were unfamiliar with needle and thread
The craft teacher taught us how to make scrunchies, and needed to be sewn with needle and thread. It was extremely difficult for students who had never worked with needle and thread before. Many people had to give up after trying for a whole hour. Fortunately, there are still people who learned it and become more interested, even finishing the work of others.
(4) Difficulty in classifying DIY types
There are many types of DIY, from small and cute charms, practical and lovely leather sculpting, colorful decoupage, to healthy and environmentally-friend handmade soaps, even handmade cookies; all these can be called creative craft works. We only introduced the types most commonly encountered, best understood, and most easily done by children.
6. Maxim in our hearts
Although we can buy the small charms everywhere, we would rather do it by ourselves because from DIY there was a sense of achievement. The DIY charms are not only cheap but also one and only. We can hang the charms on the bags or take them as gifts to our friends. The DIY charms are unique to be the gifts to express the good faith. That’ s the great benefit of DIY gifts. |
