One day in September last year we walked into our computer class as 9th graders. Mrs. Thomas, our computer teacher, had something ready for us. We finished our unit on HTML last year and she wanted us to participate in ThinkQuest. The five of us have been together the longest in class and we know each other well and can work together better. First we all brainstormed on what we wanted to do. Since all the secondary students in the school had been on a trip to the Aral Sea, we looked at the areas we could do and saw that "World Economy" might suit us. We felt the topic of cotton and the Aral Sea would be fit for the 9th grade project.

Then we divided up our selection into different parts, each student was responsible for researching their area and then coming back together to see what information we could use. Each student took an area that interested them. Now for a theme for our web page - we wanted it to be with an Uzbekistan flavor, thus the tower and the little people. We thought that this would be a good representation of our country. Trying to do this in HTML was very challenging and we had to have help from Mr. Andrew, our Computer Aide. He helped us along the way. Each week we had a meeting to see where we were. There were different criteria that we all enjoyed working on because our goal as a team was to produce the best we could. We all come from different parts of the world and that makes our project better because our culture and our talents make us different from others. We all did a fine job communicating with each other. We met twice a week in our computer lab, but also worked on it every day at home. We spent as much time as we could to make it the best. We all had a great time doing this project, some of us enjoyed researching, some enjoyed writing in HTML. We will always be interested in doing projects like ThinkQuest because that makes us get more knowledge. Some of us got to know even more about Uzbekistan. We hope that our hard work pays off and that we can achieve our final dream.

Teacher about ...

If, cajoling, pleading, and bribing is evidence of the role of the teacher(s), the web site is proof of a lot of the above. Although our five students are only in computer class one day a week, they were highly motivated to do the ThinkQuest projects. We had been on a field trip last year to the Aral Sea and, while looking for a project to tell the rest of the world about our ecological disaster, this seemed to fit perfectly. Weeks went by and progress was being made, but the question "Are you done yet" was asked many times. Always "I will be, tomorrow, next Monday", was the answer. But it was done piece by piece. The last two weeks were hectic. We coordinated our web site together, had it proofread by our English teacher Mrs. Timke and Mrs. Thomas saying "got to be done, got to be done". Just in the nick of time, it was done. It was a team effort and whatever happens all of us really enjoyed the process and hope the world will realize the plight of the Aral Sea.