Time machine ticks while students
click
By Joy Wallace Dickinson
SENTINEL
STAFF WRITER
Posted
Actually, the machine is
ticking -- or glub-glubbing, or doing whatever time machines do -- all over the
world right this minute, if you go to a computer and log on to this Web site:
fp.lhps.org/orlando/.
High school students in
Scarbeau's Internet Applications class developed and launched the site as a
project for the term that's coming to an end this month at the campus near
downtown
The result is one of the few
spots on the Internet where you can dip into
.
And it's the only Web site
designed to introduce middle-school students to the city's heritage through
activities and games.
By clicking on 25-year time
periods beginning with the city's rough-riding roots in the 1850s, young Web
surfers can read about pioneers such as Dr. Phillips (Philip Phillips), the
1920s citrus baron, or Joseph Bumby, the energetic Englishman who landed in
what was a small cattle town in 1873 and grasped the promise of the future.
When the class began the
project, "there was really nothing much out on the Internet that had to do
with
The ability to share
information about something everyone can relate to -- the heritage of the place
they live -- made history an especially good subject, Scarbeau said.
"One of the things I wanted
these kids to understand in their generation of using and now creating Internet
sites is the sharing aspect of it -- that the information is to be used that
way."
In other words, as most
researchers on any topic know well, the treasure hunt for information is one
thing -- and making discoveries available and enjoyable to others is quite
another.
The technical challenges
the students faced included making sure their site could be used by both
Internet Explorer and Netscape, the leading Web browsers, said Adam Rabinowitz,
a senior who tackled the problem and also researched the years 1926 to 2000.
Getting the site to work
with the browsers required lots of attention to detail. "We had to keep
changing things," Adam said.
The students' historical
research included a trip to the
"They got a big kick
out of the weatherman in plaid pants," he said.
A visit to the class by
longtime Orlandoan Joseph S. Guernsey, a founder and trustee of Lake Highland,
was also a high point on the trail to the past.
Guernsey, born in 1918, can
offer eyewitness descriptions of life in Orlando from his 1920s boyhood to the
present.
"That was the cherry
on top of the sundae -- talking with someone who had been through the booms and
the busts the city has seen," Scarbeau said.
But in the end, the
Web-site creators' most effective collaborators were seventh-grade students at
Lake Highland who tested the site and answered a questionnaire put together by
10th-grader Peter Gebhard, one of Scarbeau's students. "We had to make
sure younger audiences would be able to understand what we were talking about
and be interested in it," Peter said. "We had to get their attention
with the activities and games."
The seventh-graders proved
to be great reviewers and were "very honest" about what worked and
what didn't, Scarbeau said.
To satisfy their younger
critics, the high-school students worked smoothly as a team, with senior
Kristina Foster as project manager. Then, "We e-mailed middle schools in
Orange County" to let social-studies teachers know the site was available,
Scarbeau said.
The project is just a first
step in time travel, Scarbeau said. The class was able to mention only snippets
from Orlando's past and get the site launched by the end of the term. But it's
a start other students can follow.
"We've gotten good
responses," Scarbeau said. "I'm very pleased with what the kids
accomplished."
Photo credit: Joe
Burbank/Orlando Sentinel
Joy Wallace Dickinson
can be reached at