2016 CyberFair Category

Local Music and Art Forms

Description of Our Community

Changhua County has a long history. When it holds large and small temples celebrations or welcomes blessing tours, we can hear the performance of traditional music. Changhua City Office established CCCO in 2004, which provided the opportunities for several elementary schools of the county to form Chinese orchestra clubs and for students to learn traditional music. Community and elderly colleges also offer courses of traditional music for the public. It can be seen that traditional music is integrated in the life of the citizens of Changhua.

Summary of Our Project

After several discussions, we decided to set CCCO as our research subject, interview its members, appreciate traditional music performance, and recognize the musical instruments. We then designed several questionnaires related to traditional music and asked the students of five elementary schools which have Chinese orchestra clubs, namely, Changhua County Chung Shan Elementary School, Ding Fan Elementary School, Hai Pu Elementary School, Jing Siou Elementary School, and Yong Jing Elementary School, to fill them out. We distributed the questionnaires to 376 students and collected 255 valid pieces for analysis.

Our Computer and Internet Access

Our school has two computer classrooms. The teachers' offices also have computers. In addition, there are several laptops available. Our school has academic network system, while the team members have ADSL network at home. Therefore, no matter at home or at school, we have fairly robust and convenient network.

Problems We Had To Overcome

(1)Confirmation of the topic, category, and questions of the Cyberfair.
After the establishment of the team, with the introduction by our teachers, we met Mr. Chun-yen Huang, the Music Director of CCCO who welcomed us to interview and visit! We thought it was a great theme and rare opportunity of interview, so we defined our Cyberfair project in the category of "Local Culture, Music, and Art Forms". We decided the name of the team as “Heroes & Traditional Music” and the project title as “A Journey to Traditional Music”.

(2) We had limited time together so we needed to identify our consensus and target and work together to overcome any difficulties.
We had to attend school on weekdays and a few teammates went to cram schools after class. Thus, we could only discuss in the library during our noon break or holidays. Since we have ten members, it was easy to have different opinions and complaints of unequal workload. Due to our common goal, that is, the completion of this Cyberfair project, we reached agreement and overcame all difficulties. We were touched and grateful when we saw the completion of our website.

(3)We made use of the practice time of CCCO to conduct interviews and got required data.
Since none of us, the 10 teammates, had learned musical instruments and we were unfamiliar with traditional music, we did not know how to ask at our first interview with CCCO. We were divided into four groups according to the musical instruments. Each group looked for the information related to traditional music and designed questions. In the next few interviews, we got closer to the members and asked the proper questions corresponding to the topic. Through effective interviews with the members of CCCO, we obtained the data we needed and took appropriate photos.

(4)We took the initiative to contact Mr. Chian-fu Chiu, the Mayor of Changhua and General Director of CCCO and successfully interviewed him.
General Director of CCCO and successfully interviewed him. Through our teacher's contact with Ms. Chi, the Mayor's Secretary, it was confirmed that the Mayor could accept our interview at 5:00 P.M. on November 4, 2015, which was really great news. But we faced the headache of what questions should we ask during the interview, so we consulted many teachers and searched information online. We designed five questions, sent them to Ms. Chi, the Mayor's Secretary, and asked her to see if they were appropriate.

(5)We add questionnaires to enrich website content.
In order to increase the richness of the website, we decided to design questionnaires to understand the current situation of the Chinese orchestra clubs of elementary schools in Changhua. Through phone calls, we finally chose the students of five elementary schools as our survey subjects, namely, Zhong-Shan, Ding Fan, Haibu, Jin Shou, and Yongjing elementary schools. The directors of the schools reminded us to add pinyin in case the children could not read the characters. We racked our brains to think up some questions, typeset and printed them. We also bought small gifts for them. And we sent out the questionnaires before their final examination.

(6)We organized the questionnaires and analyzed and compared the data via the statistical software.
After we collected the questionnaires of the five elementary schools, we were puzzled by so many pieces of feedback, a total of 255 copies. We did not know where to start. Our teacher suggested that we create a table. We conducted statistics of each school's questionnaires according to questions, analyzed the learning situation of the students of Chinese orchestra clubs by the pie charts produced by the statistical software, and made simple comparison among the data of the five schools.

(7)Lack of computer skills.
We were somewhat familiar with office software except website software. Thanks to the guidance of our teacher, we made use of noon breaks, class meetings, and co-curricular activities to learn how to make a website. Because Tzu-wei and Cheng-en were interested in making a website, the task of website production was assigned to them.

Our Project Sound Bite

Through the referral by Mr. Chun-yen Huang, we had the opportunity to visit CCCO, enjoyed live and wonderful traditional music. The proficient conducting skills of the Conductor Mr. Yi-hung Chang and the excellent performances, the seamless cooperation, and constant practice of the members are pivotal to the success of a concert. It was an unforgettable experience to interview Chian-fu Chiu, the Mayor of Changhua and General Director of CCCO. He was nice and humorous and knew a lot about traditional music. He also shared his tips of governance from which we benefited much.　

Our team was motivated by the support and encouragement of our teachers and parents. We also experienced the milk of human kindness from the enthusiastic responses of CCCO members and the feedback provided by the Chinese orchestra clubs of Zhong-Shan Elementary School, Din Fan Elementary school, Haibu Elementary School, Jin Shou Elementary School, and Yongjing Elementary School.

We obtained many valuable experiences different from school curriculum through the opportunity to participate in this CyberFair. We felt mixed emotions and grew up much. Working together to complete a work was our best reward.