Kishore

Nationality: Indian

Age: 18

Role: Website implementer, Team Leader.

Hello, I am Kishore, an 18 year old from India.

I am the leader of this wonderful international team. It has been a great experience working with such an energetic and creative group of students from all over the world, regardless of the time, cultural and geographical barriers that separate us.

My role on this team was to oversee the work of both our content writers and our animators and to meld their combined efforts into a top quality website. I tried using the latest web methodologies, such as semantic XHTML markup and CSS to create a website that was friendly, speedy and aesthetically pleasing enough to add value to the site’s content. I also helped to keep things fluid and well organized by setting up and moderating our team’s forum and am pleased to say that the forum turned out to be one of our most productive collaborative tools. I assigned duties and deadlines to each team member based on their individual strengths and was constantly there helping and motivating them to give their best.

It was a new and challenging experience for me and I picked up many important people management and collaboration skills along the way. However, I must say that my role as team leader was made much easier because of the presence of two excellent coaches and a group of exceptionally co-operative and hard working team members. I wish to acknowledge and thank them for their hard work and support.

Perhaps the greatest personal challenge I faced as the team leader was to ensure that we, as a team, kept in regular contact with each other and kept the lines of communication open even though we were individually scattered all over the world. Despite the wonders of Internet telephony, electronic mail and text chats, communication proved to continually be a challenge. For example, although there were eight people on our team (including the coaches), none of the Internet telephony software we knew of was able to host a conference of that many people at one time.

This is my third outing with ThinkQuest, and I am still amazed at how enriching this experience can be. I am so grateful for having been part of this international collaboration again. The concept of ThinkQuest is really an ingenious one as it is a great way in which students can learn and at the same time contribute to the community. ThinkQuest’s library of web sites, serves as a well known educational resource for many, and I am happy to have had this opportunity to contribute to it.

This unparalleled experience has been an eye opener for me in many ways. Firstly, I learned much about the life styles of people in other countries, through my interactions with my team members. Building this site has also been the impetus for me to learn and reinforce my web development skills. In the process, I uncovered a passion for web development and this experience has given me the confidence to pursue freelance web development in my free time.

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