Biography - David
Name : David
Nationality: British
Age: 19
Role: Web Designer
My name is David and I live in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England. I studied my A Levels last year in Business, Psychology and Computing, and am now living in Manchester, working towards a BSc in Management. I’ve been developing and designing websites for around 9 years, and have run a hosting company, a stock photography business and worked on a number of websites for different clients while in school. This background came in very useful for my role on this team.
I found out about ThinkQuest through a link at a website I used to frequent – Joshua Ink It inspired me to investigate further, and when I met Kishore and heard what he had to say about the competition, I was really compelled to take part. The prospect of working with others in an international competition was something I jumped at, as it was completely different from anything I had ever done before. I met my other team members at our first weekly online chat, but had been introduced to Jim and Tina via email beforehand. They were welcoming and friendly, and I was pleased to discover that Tina is a fellow Mac user!
My role on the team was primarily design and content addition. I came up with the basic structure and layout for the website, helped to work on the logo and graphics as well as integrating the actual articles and content into the design. I think I may even have picked up a little Greek from all the articles I dealt with! It was thrilling to see all the work we had done on the design come together with the written articles, and the feeling of accomplishment when we mixed the two together was something I’ll never forget. Working with Ruohan was inspiring as he is such a talented programmer and computer science student, and Kishore’s dedication to the site design was second to none.
One of the trickiest things to get right at first was choosing the time we would have our online conference chat each week. I can’t believe how busy everyone’s schedules are, and it was a real challenge to find times when everyone was free to talk for two hours at a time. We settled on a time of around 11 AM on Saturday for me here in England, but not before I’d stayed up till 2 AM some nights! It was all great fun though, and I’d certainly do it all again if I had the chance.
I feel truly proud of the website and project that we have created, and hope that it helps to educate and entertain people all around the world. Time is a fascinating subject, and I can’t believe how much I’ve learned as we’ve gone along. Not just about time and science but also about communication, interacting with others and compromising to come to a conclusion that everyone is happy with. It’s a real shame I won’t be able to take part next year as I’ll have crossed the age boundary, but I’ll be following the competition eagerly, and it will be exciting to see how it progresses and changes in the future.
Long live ThinkQuest!