This site was primarily created for our own educational benefit and the benefit of others. In this spirit, we have entered this site into the ThinkQuest International web design competition, sponsored by Oracle. This competition brings together students from all over the world, spanning schools, universities, nations, and continents. For us, ThinkQuest International was always the goal. After settling on our topic and beginning to research, we often consulted the ThinkQuest Library to see how others from past years had structured their sites. It is our hope that one day our website will also be featured in this library, so that future students can learn from our research, web design, and experiences. We know for certain that the work published on ThinkQuest is first-rate. To this end, we view our site as part of a greater whole, one dedicated to global education. For example, rather than place search boxes on our site that search only our content, we have facilitated searching of the entire ThinkQuest Library, as we know other entries have insights that are deserving.

ThinkQuest is an entirely free competition because of the many individuals who give up their time to support us and because of the generous support provided by companies like Oracle. We are grateful to all those who make this possible and we acknowledge, win or lose, that we are lucky to have been given the opportunity to participate. We are all better for it.

If you are an educator or student, we encourage you to get involved in ThinkQuest, either internationally or locally. For us, it was tremendously motivating to aspire to field a worthy entry into the ThinkQuest competition. Though we are just a few students from a small school in America and none of us had ever done any web project of this scale before, we have found ourselves eager to join the global conversation that is ThinkQuest. It is our hope that we have submitted a worthy entry that others will find educational and accessible. It is our sincere belief that we, like many, owe much to ThinkQuest for its commitment to education and to global cooperation. The crux of our site is interactivity online; we encourage you to safely interact, collaborate, and cooperate, especially through ThinkQuest, but elsewhere as well. In the end, we will all be better for it.