A beautiful island located in the Eastern part of Asia, off the Western Pacific Ocean, Taiwan is a country with many inspirational cultures and arts. The history of Taiwan’s traditional arts can date back to about the mid-17th century when the General Crisis occured. However, with the advancement in technology and the fast-paced modern life, few Taiwanese people still possess the skills and knowledge needed to continue creating Taiwan’s traditional art. Without help from the younger generation, Taiwan’s traditions are slowly fading.

　　During the process of creation, the group had to write decent paragraphs for each section in the website. Writing the Chinese contents wasn’t as challenging since Chinese is our mother language. However, translating the Chinese contents into English was quite a challenge for us. The topic of our International Cyber Fair project was “Lacquer Thread Sculpture,” which is a form of Chinese traditional art. A lot of professional vocabularies that are related to lacquer thread and the techniques were in Chinese and do not have direct translation on the internet. To overcome this obstacle, students in our group searched up all the vocabularies that have similar meanings to the professional Chinese word and discussed together about which vocabulary had the closest meaning and which fits the best. Other than the translating obstacle, the group faced a bit of technical obstacles while creating the website, but eventually solved it by communicating and solving the issues with teachers. Discussions and communication indeed allowed the group to overcome all of the obstacles that appeared during the process of creating the website.

　　Through participating in this year’s International Cyberfair, every member of the team has improved their skills and increased their perspective of our culture by investing a significant amount of time researching, creating the website, and conducting the interviews. This project taught the team to work through the obstacles in order to achieve the best result and taught the school our country’s traditional culture that is fading away little by little.

　　Through the process of researching and conducting interviews for this project, we learned about Taiwanese history and its traditional arts. As IB and AP students, Taiwanese history isn’t available in our curriculum, thus this a special opportunity for us to learn about our own culture, even parts that are not present in conventional Taiwanese history courses. We also had a chance to try creating a simple lacquer thread pattern, an experience we won’t forget. Teamwork plays an essential role throughout the process. We learned about when to discuss as a group, when to divide and conquer for efficiency, assisting and learning from each other’s strengths simultaneously. We shared this website with our peers, and we hope our achievements in this competition can allow a wider range of audience to notice our work, for friends around to see the beauty of Taiwanese artwork. Finally, it is a blessing to be able to use the internet as a learning tool. The internet is an infinite world without borders, where we customize our own curriculum, determine our interests and dive deep into them. It’s an experience that traditional textbooks can’t deliver, and has benefited us for both this project and regular school work. The internet also enables us to reach out to lacquer thread sculpture. Their experience, stories, and answers to our questions are uncomparable to and much more valuable than the standardized content published online.