I have been thinking about this final project from the beginning of the semester and hope that the results will be a great project that I can be proud of and that it will be useful for me in one way or another in the future. There is a variety of topics that I can choose from in North Carolina history. What I would like to do is look at animals in this area in relation to history. I would like to look at different species and see if there is any history of them interacting with people here in Western North Carolina. There could be small species or big species, from spiders to bears. I would have to go through old news papers from this area to find out if there is any history about this topic in this area. I believe that there must be some events that have occurred throughout the history that concern dangerous animals and people. This part of my project I would like to develop as a timeline, where the year 1889 would be clickable to some stories on animals and people in the newspapers and then another date/year would be clickable to another story.
Another thing that I would like to look into from the newspapers are information on animals. What kind of information did people have on animals? Did they discover some "new" things back then, that are old information to us? This might be interesting and I am sure there would be some newspaper articles on that topic. This kind of information would give the computer user an idea of how life was back then, what people thought about animals and how they used animals to live a better life. I would also put this information on a timeline like I mention here above. I would have a clickable date that would lead the computer user to a certain story from the newspapers in Western North Carolina.
I am also very interested in stories or tales. Animals have been a part of nature since creation and there must be some tales on animals that have been written, either in the newspapers or in other resources. I would like to look into this and develop interactive tales on my web page. I would like to have the tales written down exactly like they appear in the newspapers/books and make them interactive. For example if a bear growls in a story I would like to have the sound of a bear growling on the web page. Another suggestion would be to have a movie of a real animal, the movement of it, sound, etc. This might be very interesting to my audiences, who are both 4th and 8th graders, studying the history of North Carolina.
If there will be time I would like to develop an information web page on the most common animals in Western North Carolina. This web page would have pictures of the animals, information on what the animals eat, how they hunt, how they mate, show their movements, etc. A student that has already read my other web pages might want to know more about those animals, and it would be great if my home page could also have a link to a page that included information on those animals.
