Teenage problems were the focus of this project undertaken by Grade 8 students at Hilton College, an independent high school for boys. The College has an enrolment of 540 boys and is a well-resourced boarding school, situated in a picturesque rural setting. This isolation and the boys-only environment meant that the students were at risk of remaining naive about social issues that affected them. De Lisle set out to accomplish several goals. He wanted to expose his students to the research process with the hope that they would discover that information can be found as well as generated. He knew that they would not only acquire technical knowledge (the attraction for boys), but that they would also improve language, research, and communication skills by participating in a project that integrated technology effectively.

The students selected a range of research issues including drugs, alcohol, smoking, HIV/AIDS, sex, and drugs in sport. They used electronic encyclopaedias, the Internet, and print literature to find useful information, including statistics and research results. De Lisle introduced them to mind-mapping software where they organised the results of their research graphically. The assessment for this first part of the research process placed emphasis on how useful the information was in assisting the students to proceed to developing a questionnaire for field research.

"I advise the students to use the spreadsheet as the most appropriate tool to create the questionnaire," said de Lisle, an experienced and innovative coordinator of technology integration activities. "I showed them how spreadsheets could be used interactively in calculating results as they entered them. I also insisted that they use different types of questions. We discussed the difference between open and closed questions, five-point attitudinal scales as opposed to yes/no questions, and attitudinal versus factual questions.

"Pivotal tables and charts were the next new tool that I helped the students to use in order to experiment with the concept of independent versus dependent variables, and to divide up a data set accordingly. They entered rows for subjects interviewed and columns for variables and then used pivot tables to analyse the data and produce pivot charts. The more interesting charts were pasted into documents along with the students' own conclusions drawn from the data. One such graph indicated that 13-year-old boys were at high risk of starting smoking. Interestingly this was especially true if they came from Johannesburg, a major city in the main industrial region of the country."

The next step in the project involved the issue of advertising. The students analysed current advertisements that were aimed at warning teenagers about the dangers of smoking and alcohol abuse. De Lisle asked the students to identify basic principles common throughout this type of advertising. They were to design their own advertising campaign that would "talk" to those at risk who were identified in the research. For this part of the process the students used computer graphics software to produce posters. They then used animation software to create a 30-second movie advertisement.

This project involved a wide range of skill acquisition amongst the eighth-grade boys. Not only did they learn about advertising, surveys, and how to use a range of software, they also exercised their thinking skills by devising thought-provoking questions. De Lisle noticed that the different skills of various members of the groups came to the fore during different steps of the project. In this way, different learning styles and individual strengths were exploited to the full.

De Lisle explained that although this project was predominantly an information technology project, he was able to integrate the technical, mathematical, artistic, and expressive skills of the group members and that these are skills which are critical for success in all other learning areas in the school. At the same time, 13-year-old boys had engaged meaningfully with social issues that affected their daily lives.