As a student of the Mission Heights Junior College, I was proud to be a part of the team that won the top honour in the Junior Science and Technology Category at the Future Problem Solving Programme held at the University of Wisconsin, US in June.
I am equally proud of the performance of the students of the Mission Height School for their distinguished, award-winning performance at the Competition.
We, a group of 12 students, saw a challenge and opportunity as we met during the First Term in 2009 to discuss topics of interest for Community Problem Solving Project under the ‘Discovery, Essentials, Extensions and Passions’ (DEEP) Programme. We identified a number of subjects of possible interest, including Water Safety, Cyber Safety, Cars running over Toddlers, Sun Safety and the Bush next to our College.
I was keen to develop Cyber Safety as the theme since ‘Cyber Bullying’ had become a major menace and decided to form two groups.
We contacted a number of organisations for advice and support, following which officials from Netsafe and Gen-i visited our School to talk on Cyber Citizenship, with flyers, posters and videos. We learnt the efforts being concerted by them to address the issue.
Thereafter, we began to construct a paper-based kit, which included an information booklet, a dummy phone for demonstration and flyers from Netsafe and Gen-i.
Hector’s World, a Netsafe subsidiary, offering free, online learning resource, invited us for a meeting with Liz Butterfield and Nancy Groh, its executives.
We found their website and the available resources interesting.
We decided to base our topic on Cyber Citizenship instead of Cyber Bullying.
Further discussions and study encouraged us to teach students of our Primary School the positive aspects of Cyber Citizenship. The resources that we employed were educative, informative, and fun.
Our Coach modelled a lesson teaching a small group of Year 3 students. We watched a number of episodes and tried to memorise the lesson plans. When we were ready, we started weekly classes.
We had outstanding response from parents after the annual E- Learning Evenings we held to inform them of technology we use, online resources and the mentoring programme.
We introduced Hector’s World website to them and informed them of the ways of keeping their children Cyber Safe handling situations.
We organised a Digital Citizenship Week, which included a host of activities and competitions for the students.
We also conducted a special assembly to celebrate the success of the mentoring programme, during which Ms Butterfield and Groh gave each of us an Award for our successful role as Mentors.
Our School also received an Award presented to the “Schools who have established a Successful Mentoring Programme.’
In order to sustain our efforts and progress our programme, we have started training a junior CCC Team with a few Year 5 students. We hope that the mentoring programme will continue to progress.
Anusha Ahluwalia, a Mission Heights Junior College (Auckland) student, was the sole Indian in the Creative Cyber Citizens Group (CCG) that won the top prize at the Future Problem Solving Programme held at the University of Wisconsin, recently. She was our Talent of the Fortnight (July 15, 2010).
