quantum computing

EVOLUTION LIES AHEAD

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Journal

20 January 2008

Teams were finalised at the beginning of the 1st school term.

21 Jan - 31 Jan 2008

During this period the team set about brainstorming intent on finding a topic that was original, relevant, exciting and above all: a topic the each on every one of us had a passion for and a desire to learn more about. Unanimously quantum computing was agreed on, and we are very confident that we have found just what we had in mind.

1 Feb - 10 Feb 2008

Now that we had finalised the topic, it was important to set goals and ascertain specific prerequisites. We took note of our target audience being students as well as adults, considering our topic was very complex and technical. The most gifted physicists and scientist today are intrigued as well as baffled by the eeriness and weirdness of the quantum world, and new startling discoveries were being made every day in the field. Bearing this in mind we identified that our most difficult challenge would be to actually understand quantum computing, before we could explain it on our own to others on our website.

10 Feb - 15 Feb 2008

After much browsing we realised that most of the wealth of information out there was extremely complicated and intended for scientists or highly qualified experts in the field, and we understood very little. Most web pages relevant to our topic were filled with bombastic language and mammoth formulae which we didn’t need. We did not want to regurgitate a mass of confusing content on our website than nobody else would understand or even bother to read. Therefore what we did was trawl the mass of content on the web thoroughly, and once we found more suitable sources, we read through it, understood it from back to front, and then finally condensed it in our own words, with the intention of writing it so that students like us would also understand it.

15 Feb - 13 March 2008 (4 weeks)

At this point everyone had been allocated specific sections, from a content page that we had drawn up. We initially set a goal to finish content in two weeks (by the 29th of Feb), but everyone was not even close to finishing their tasks by this time. We then set a new goal for two weeks later as we had underestimated how much thinking, and hard work would be needed to cover our topic thoroughly. This was also due to the fact  that, during our discussion at the initial meeting on 29th of Feb, we had just reviewed the content we had come up with and we all agreed  that our content should not only be understandable (which it was), but also written dynamically so as to sustain the readers attention. We also decided that by using multimedia like images, diagrams and videos; we could break up the content and more easily explain certain phenomenon. The next two weeks were spent sprucing up our content and moreso creating original diagrams and images using Adobe Photoshop CS2, making videos using Nero Vision 7 and organising our final content in various Microsoft Word documents.

14 March - 31 March 2008

In hindsight, we were pressed for time after taking a whole month for content but we didn’t feel under pressure because we all helped out and chipped in wherever we could. That month of gruelling hard work really paid of though, because our content proved to be really inspiring. We knew that ‘content is king’ and it seemed we had the king of kings in the content we had come up with in quantum computing. We also knew, from experience, that no other website on the World Wide Web existed that explained Quantum Computing in layman’s terms yet accurate and in dept at the same time as ours did. For next few weeks we focussed on the interface or design aspect on the website. Unlike with content, we found that certain members were better at web design than others some of us did more work in this area. Using Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, we created a very aesthetically pleasing design that was good enough to present our content. Once we made a general template, all that was left to do was bring everything together which we did successfully.

Last few days

Over the last few days we basically made a few tweaks and added some bells & whistles, checked browser compatibility, as well as verified that all hyperlinks and multimedia was working. Lastly, we created a sitemap and uploaded the relevant files onto the ThinkQuest server.