Try your best to finish deadlines--My journey of CTB

What is CTB

China Thinks Big, with the initial CTB, is a contest which encourages students in Grade 10-12 to think independently or even innovate in the daily life. Each candidate needs to find 3-9 partners to be a team. The team has to choose two to three specific subjects and study in this field. It is worth mentioning that the team needs to submit essays and/or videos to be judged by experts every week.

Brief introduction of my team and me in CTB

What I did in my team

Our group had 7 members, all members except me were girls. CTB official guide asked us to choose a role in our team. We had 2 writers, 2 people to analyze, 2 researchers and a team leader. I was a researcher, that means I mainly needed to find bibliographies and reference on the Internet or in the libraries.

Why I chose this role

I seldom used my computer to study efficiently before CTB. I wanted to strengthen my abilities to search information by CTB.

Which topic did our team choose to do

Our team chose social science as the main subject, our topic was “The phenomenon that more youngsters have insomnia, why it happens and how to avoid it “

Why I chose our team

First, the majority of my members were my responsible classmates. We could have convenient communications and efficient teamwork to do the task.

Besides, I was a teenager, and our topic was to solve the problem of insomnia in teenagers. In my opinion, insomnia is a serious problem among the youngsters today, it will make us too tired to finish our work thus decreasing the productivity. I wanted to solve it.

Special events

Handing out questionnaires

In order to find precise data about the percentage of Chinese senior high students have insomnia, our team decided to make a questionnaire. We thought twice and finally made one with 10-30 multiple choices (students with insomnia needed to answer extra questions so it is a range of number of questions) since no one would like to answer statement questions.

Then we handed out it in our school, which had 3000 students, we got nearly 2300 effective questionnaires.

A funny story during questionnaire process

Our team leader printed sentences on the Internet to encourage insomnia people on the insomnia, each questionnaire has its own sentence.

I realized that we could reach interest innovation just in our daily life!

Video

As we performed well in online contest (I will mention it after this section) we reached the final national contest.
Before entering it, each team had to send a video to the official, it would be judged by experts and professors.
I made a brief presentation in the video as I read many references about insomnia, that means I could say some academic terms to show we are capable enough to do research.

Hard challenges from CTB– frequent deadlines

If you ask me what impressed me a lot during the CTB online course, i must reply you about the frequent deadlines. We submitted essays every week since deadline was once per week. You would be disqualified if you miss any deadline. One group of my classmates were even be disqualified by that!

What I have learned from it

I should obey all rules once they are told to me. I once think I could miss some deadlines until my classmates were disqualified.

In addition, we should finish our duty on time.

Achievement

This certificate shows we were excellent during online CTB contest and we had the chance to do the presentation in the national contest.

A quite big challenge to us–national contest

Backgrounds

All competitive groups which finished all deadlines could
access in the national contest.

That means unlike other contests, all teams here have responsible and adequate members, we have much more competitors compared with other contests.

What we did there

Each team needed to submit a video about their topic and feelings of taking part into CTB.

Besides, each team ought to choose 3-4 members to prepare for an online presentation. It would be judged by experts and professors.
But i needed to prepare for IELTS, that means I didn’t have enough spare time to do the presentation.

Final score

Actually, we didn’t get award in the national CTB contest. Absolutely we felt sad
for a while at that time, but then we remembered the interesting and meaningful experience during our CTB journey. We all felt happy at last.

###What I have learned from CTB

First, I knew how to communicate with others efficiently. We preferred face-to-face communication since we could identify whether or not others listen to others by eye contact. Previously, I tended to chat with others by social media, but I didn’t think if my communication was efficient at all!

Second, I knew how to manage my time wisely. CTB official gave us tasks every week during online contest, which took place between September and December, 2020. At that time, we had to deal with different school subjects. I developed the habit to make a to-do list at that time.

Third, I met different friends and widen my horizons there. Two girls were not my classmates, they were my classmates’ friends. They were good at different tasks, one was keen on analyzing, and the other did well in searching information. We undertook different tasks by efficient communication. In other words, we developed the ability to do the teamwork.

Finally, as the researcher, I read different books about insomnia, the most impressive one was The Sleep Revolution, with the author Arianna Huffington. During this process, I develop my skills of reading and extracting information. Besides, l acquired knowledges of avoiding insomnia. I used to be insomnia since the peer pressure was hectic, but I was much better now. My studying efficiency also increased and I got much higher scores at school than before.