The ProjectGreen Team

Aditya - Team Leader and Flash

Aditya, our inspired team leader, is an outspoken crusader for the environment and does everything he can to protect mother earth. Aditya regularly visits national parks and reserves, and believes there is a lot more we can do to protect the environment. He is an extremely serious basketball player and pianist. As a team leader, he spared no expense in seeing that the work was done with flair. He played an instrumental role in bringing us together, and most of our web design and flash is attributed to him. He also wrote articles for a few of the sections, and made the intro movie. Without him, our team would never have been a cohesive unit.

Aditya says, "This is my second contribution to the ever-growing ThinkQuest library, and I must say, my experience this time has been even better than the first! This year's competition has required me to work with people of different strengths, abilities and working styles, and hurdle demanding communication and collaboration challenges that has been an important factor in enhancing my leadership and teamwork skills. ThinkQuest allows one to realize that any finished product, such as a website, is like an orchestra; without any one element, the whole thing seems incomplete. I was able to appreciate the importance of balancing the information, interface and interactivity, at the same time, I have learnt a lot about our topic of focus, and I feel that it has made me a more conscious and active individual. This year has also been a test of my time management skills - it was a tough challenge at first, but I soon learnt how to balance the attention demanded by the upcoming IGCSE examintations, and of course, our website. Yet, I would be glad to participate in ThinkQuest competitions in the future, and meet the new challenges out there that await me"

Sireesh - Research and Flash

Sireesh has added much to the “Interactive” section – the quizzes and crosswords were all done by him. He worked with efficiency and delivered the work for deadlines. Sireesh takes drama as a subject in the IGCSE and actively believes in conservation. He is convinced that electrical inefficiency is killing the environment, that if our clean energy were more efficient, our dirty energy usage would plummet. His hobbies include reading and playing basketball. Sireesh contributed significantly to our research sections as well, and also edited the site’s content, making sure that there were no language errors. He has been with the team from the very start, and has stuck to it the entire time.

Sireesh says "For me, ThinkQuest was one of the defining themes of the year. As I was a boarder, it was exceedingly difficult to communicate with the rest of the team, using only email. Though I saw Aditya every day, it was not usually possible to talk to him about the website. Working together on this project truly raised my standard of collaborative working, and for that, I am grateful. Despite some frictional instability in the team, we were able to pull through and create something that will always hold a special place in my heart."

Janhavi - Research

Despite being a later addition to our team, Janhavi has proved nonetheless that she is a hardworking soul dedicated to the environment. A lot of the excellent ideas and features exhibited by this website are a result of her brainpower. She has contributed to the website with her passionate writing and her keen observational skills, considering her additions to the "Scrapbook" section of the site. She has written most of the important essays of the website, found in "The Project" section, namely the "Amalgamation", "Diversity" and "Collaboration" essays. Her writing skills deserve an applause - they are one of the greatest assets of the ProjectGreen team.

Janhavi says "Web Design was something very new to be altogether – when I first joined the team, I was afraid that I would not have the necessary skills to design a website, but I soon realized that there are many other skills involved in producing a finished website, not just programming and using software tools, but also research, writing skills and photography, and I am happy to have been able to contribute to the project in the latter. This project meant a lot to me this year because the topic is something that I am very passionate about – I think it was worth confronting obstacles such as communication, boarding pressures and internet usage restrictions, and of course, balancing the attention demanded by my IGCSE Art coursework, in this crucial year, and writing for ProjectGreen, because it has helped nurture me into a harder worker and better team player, something that I feel will benefit with me for the rest of my life."

Aditya - Research

One Aditya wasn't enough to satisfy our diverse pallates; that's why, ProjectGreen also has a team member at our antipode, who was primarily responsible for contributing a different viewpoint, in the form of his articles, interviews and surveys, and additionally provided us with an added challenge in the form of communication and collaboration. He has also spent a lot of time proofreading the entire site to make sure that there were no mistakes in the site concerning  content, grammar and also the technical front.

Aditya say "At first, after joining the group, I was skeptical about the ease, clarity and efficiency of communication only over the internet. I thought it would be very difficult adequately getting ideas across through nothing but email. Working through email is nothing like meeting and talking face to face. As we continued to work, my ability to express thoughts and suggestions over the internet became better, but it still took time to get each party to completely understand something I wanted to say. As we emerged into the latter stages of the project, our skill at online communication was much better, and it was much easier to understand what exactly the other person was talking about. Another major difficulty was the time zone difference. The U.S. and India are separated by 9-10 hours, so it was hard to get each other 'online' at the same time. I was at school when they were free in the evening, and they were asleep when i was free in the evening. Because of this, everything had a delay of at least a day, which became a problem when the deadline came closer. I had to compensate for this by always trying to work ahead.

Through ThinkQuest I learned a lot as well. My time management became far better, because of the added prospect of working on a timeline, compounded by the different time zones. I also became better at making a point clearly through articles. My ability to work with a team also improved a lot, as did my communication skills. ThinkQuest, at least, was a huge learning experience for me because of the difficulties the team faced and the skills I improved."

Ms. Bina - Coach

Ms. Graciela - Assistant Coach

Coaches are an important part of any team. In fact, we might not have gotten so much better at what we do, had it not been for our coaches.

The focused on every aspect of our development, while letting us explore, and present in our own way. They always told us our strong points and weak points, trying to make us better at everything we did. No matter what our site turns out to do for the world, their focused help has made us all, not just better workers, but also better people.

Ms. Bina is an extremely supportive helping hand to all the students in our school. Getting help from her store of knowledge was extremely useful. She taught each of us new things that we will never forget. Not only that, she helped to bring the multiple ideas running around in each of our heads, out on to the screen. We cannot thank her enough, for helping us bring our visualizations to life.

Mrs. Elia was a great bridge between the team members in India and the U.S. She gave us a lot of feedback about content and spotted some crucial bugs. She was always excited about the website and helped as often as she could. Although she joined late, her suggestions and succor have been invaluable to the finished product of Project Green.

All in all, we could have never endeavored on this project, without the guiding encouragement of our enthusiastic mentors.