about this publication This publication is made up of contributions from MYP Year 4 students at the Canadian International School of Hong Kong and is the result of an interdisciplinary project between Humanities and Technology. Students were asked to research primary source information on a person from 21st century who has had an influence with the domain of the arts, music or sports. They were then required to follow the MYP design cycle framework to design and create a contribution that employed principles and elements of design and using the Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Kuler and custom typeface using dafont.com.
the challenge How can print media communicate the cultural impact of a celebrated individual or group from the 20th Century? As Science students need laboratory equipment and Math students need calculators, History students need source books in order to understand and write historical narratives. This is a particular problem for the CDNIS Humanities Department as many of the source books published before the advent of the world wide web and mobile devices are still not readily accessible online and/or difficult to locate. When assigning historical research, the CDNIS Humanities Department have found that a large majority of students do not take advantage of human-complied source books archived in libraries. Instead, they often turn to Google to quickly locate ‘machine-compiled’ sources which can be problematic as the search results are mathematically ranked by ‘popularity’ and therefore the validity of the sources is questionable. The CDNIS Humanities Department recognize that with the wide-spread adoption of laptops and mobile devices, today’s students are ‘connected’ more than ever and simply find it more convenient to access historical information online “anywhere, anytime”. Students were presented with the challenge to create a well-researched, engaging and visually attractive electronic source book for the Humanities Department of the Canadian International School of Hong Kong to be distributed on the Issuu publishing platform and ultimately accessible via the web and mobile devices.