1.catagory of competition：local specialty and quality

2.Description of "Our community":

　Yangmingshan belongs to the Datoon volcano region, which is located north of our school.

The Yangmingshan National Park enjoys a fine reputation that is internationally recognized, with her beautiful forests, breathtaking flowers, and of course, her one-of-a-kind "hotsprings."
　Shih Lin residents often claim jokingly that :we don't need to buy summer or winter houses. Just take the bus, and 10 minutes later, we're at our "secret back-garden."
In addition to the flowers and the forests, the hotsprings provide the elderly in our community a daily routine and ritual to dip in the hotsprings every morning.

The buses 15 and 16 have already become synonyms for relaxation, fun, information exchange among old friends, and more importantly, the revitalizing and beautifying hotspring trip.

3.research project outline:

• why is hotspring dipping so popular?
• what are the characteristics of the Datoon hotspring?
• Besides relaxation of the mind, are hotspring really theraputic? Is there a medical basis for that?
• what is the influence to the neighborhood?
• what type of economic impact have hotspring made?

　The above mentioned provide the teachers and students of Shih Lin Elementary School much to discover. However, there isn't much in the textbooks.

　Thus, we've decided to take the students into the real sites of these hotspring, and offer them hands-on experience and combine the information gathered with the latest website design technology, and help the students learn through doing. In addition, the finished project could be used both for the education purposes for the school itself,and also to enter national and international competitions to learn from other schools.

4.Our internet facilities:

　Our school has ADSL networking using virtual IP with two NT servers and one NT workstation; the workstation is responsible for being the "firewall" and the servers are mail servers and run things like proxy, www,and DNS.

 

5.Problems we had to overcome:

（1）After we decided to name our project "Taipei virtual hotspring " the end of September,we suddenly realized that this August and September were filled with typhoons and thunderstorms and thus the mountain areas might be extremely dangerous. Thus we postponed the actual field trips and started with data research first. Not surprisingly, when we started the field research around November and December, much of the geological information has changed from the ones in the books and websites.

（2）When taking water samples in a public tub, we were often escorted out by naked men,until we gave them a full explanation of our intentions were we able to proceed with the project.

（3）The correct way to dip hotspring is to be naked, and no photographing.But in order to make our research project more complete, the nice owner of "beauty hotspring " kindly let us use the public tub within a special time.

（4）As we were trying to photograph vendors we were constant being stopped until we guaranteed to them over and over that we were simply teachers and students doing research, not journalists or policemen
　　From the above experience we realized that the only way to really learn something is to communicate and manage information, and to think creatively.

6.lessons learned:

　discovering and solving problems is the only way to accumulate knowledge and enhance personal growth