Community Outreach Merit Program

Today sees our last day in Dingxi for this project. We have succeeded in doing what we set out to do, even though there are some details that we will definitely have to come back and take care of this summer. But overall, I think that we managed to do what we had planned, and we have all learned a great deal during this project and feel that all the hard work was worthwhile.

Hopefully, sharing our experiences during this trip via blog will encourage more people to participate in these projects in the future. It is a very rewarding experience, and sometimes, I think that we benefit a lot more than the people whom we set out to serve.

I will close my post with two pictures from what I consider to be one of the most successful portions of our project: the video-conferencing session. As Lozen told us in his blog post a few days ago, we set up a video-conferencing session between the kids at JCPS and some Hong Kong schoolchildren. For all of the JCPS kids, it was the first time that they had interacted with somebody in such a manner, and I believe that it was the first time that many of the teachers had seen something like this in action, too. They chatted and sang songs with each other, and finally also drew a picture together, using collaborative software. The photo on the right below shows that picture in the process of being produced. The bottommost image is the completed picture. Can you guess which side did what?