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In the summer of 2000, I worked on a three person team to develop the educational website called Dinosaur Treks. Our team was comprised of Megan Shimota, Laura Eckstein, and myself. We were coached by Mr. T.J. Fletcher and Mr. Josh Barnd. In October 2000, our team was named a finalist in the ThinkQuest 2000 Internet Challenge, a non-profit program that matches teens with peers from around the world to design educational websites. Our team was selected from an international pool of more than 6,800 students from 85 countries; only 70 students were chosen as finalists in 2000's Internet Challenge.
The annual ThinkQuest Internet Challenge invites teams of students ages 12 to 19 to work together to create an interactive, well-researched website on an educational topic of interest to them. Most teammates, who have never met in-person, use the Internet to complete their entries by coordinating their workloads to accommodate the members' diverse schedules, language differences, and divergent time zones. The teams work for more than eight months to gather data, conduct research, and learn about the Internet as an educational medium as they build educationally rich sites. Upon completion, the student-created entries become a permanent part of the ThinkQuest Library, which is made freely available to teachers, students, and Internet users across the globe. These Web sites are found in the ThinkQuest Library at http://www.thinkquest.org, the most heavily trafficked educational destination on the Internet with an estimated 120 million hits, and 2.5 million unique users, per month. A panel of experts from the Internet Society conducts judging for the ThinkQuest Website entries, looking for compelling and accurate educational content, technical excellence, interactivity, and imaginative use of graphics. In addition, teams are assessed on how well members collaborate by sharing their individual knowledge, skills, and efforts. Students participating in the ThinkQuest programs learn invaluable skills, whether they are in grade school, college-bound, or heading for a vocational career. Acquiring skills such as time and project management, and technical expertise, some ThinkQuest participants start their own businesses while still in high school, and contest winners use awards to pay for college tuition. The challenge encourages collaboration, leadership, and critical thinking and helps raise students' self-esteem, along with their technological skills. President Clinton cited ThinkQuest as a good example of a non-profit program helping to bridge the digital divide. AND
THE WINNER IS...
Dinosaur Treks has won the top prize in the Science and Mathematics category for the 2000 ThinkQuest Internet Challenge! On March 19th, during the Awards Ceremony at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, they announced that our site was the Platinum Award Winner. Click Here to Read the Article that Appeared in the Daily Iowan on March 23, 2001. Please
go visit our award-winning site, Dinosaur
Treks, and |
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