Introduction

Our project presents the history of the California Grape Boycott led by Cesar Chavez in the 1960ís in the context of the Chicano/a, Latino/a Civil Rights movement. The Web pages contain a Grape Boycott simulation applet and the historical background of the boycott. This includes links to related web sites that serve as a small virtual library on the subject.

A first prototype of the simulation and the web page was built for a Protest and Reform history class we took at New Vista High School. In this class, we had an opportunity to study protest movements throughout U.S. history (e.g. the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement), and to learn about theories of protest and social change. In order to make our simulation accurate, we needed to find out about the history of the boycott and of the United Farm Workers movement. To achieve that, we did some research in the library and on the Web to learn the historical facts, and found relevant Web pages, which we referenced on our own Web page. The simulation Java applet we created, using the AgentSheets simulation environment, shows both the process of how a boycott works and the historical events that occurred around this particular boycott. Users can run the applet and observe the boycott happen as we have it set up, but can also interact with it and change things in the boycott world and see the effects.

Figure: Susana (left) and Claire (right) at New Vista.

This project was created by Claire Peterson and Susana Diaz, with the help of Maya Vigil, the guidance of John Zola, a social studies teacher at New Vista High School, and the support of Dr. Alex Repenning and Andri Ioannidou from the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design at the Computer Science Department of theUniversity of Colorado at Boulder and AgentSheets Inc..