People told us that the World War I was devastating. However, they
never explained how the war came to be. We were in need for topic because
certain circumstances forced us to drop the ones we chose before. Looking over the list of sample topics collected by one of the 7th
grade teachers, Mrs. Gee, the unique word "Zimmermann" caught our attentions.
Further researching the topic, we found out that the Zimmermann Telegram was the catalyst for America joining the war.
Amazed and very interested at how a simple message could have had such a drastic effect, we immediately chose this as our project.
The next question was what we were going to do for the
project. Being a newer generation, the website appealed to us more than any other
media. Also, we did not think a website would have to be presented
until we found out otherwise after we already started on our project.
Nevertheless, none of us were experts in web building. After experimenting with some programs, we decided that Microsoft
FrontPage would be the easiest to use.
For us, group meetings were quite difficult to obtain.
Our schedules conflicted with each other and most of the time; only two of the three
members were able to meet. We solved this problem by ingeniously splitting the research into three sections.
Laurie was assigned to find ten reference sources, Sara was given the work to find
ten books, and Sylvia searched the Internet to find ten useful websites for notes.
This way, everyone would get an equal amount (the web being quicker), and none of our sources would be similar.
An obstacle we faced as a group was to locate a server for our
website. Many required a large amount of money, and it was only by viewing Tiffany Hsu's last year's NHD webpage that we were finally
able to find a server for a cheap price. Freewebs only had a fee of $6 for six months and was very user friendly.
Now, we were all set to make the website itself.
The Zimmerman Telegram was the perfect choice considering the theme we
had this year: "Communication in History: The Key to Understanding."
This simple telegram managed to convince the peaceful America into joining the war and changing the course of history.
Communication was vital to the outcome of the war and this managed to be an excellent
proof to that theory.