How We Got Our Idea

At the beginning of our second quarter of the school year, our coach, Mrs. Forsyth, told us we had to do a competition. She gave us many options, but the thought of making a website popped out at many of her students. Our original team was three members, which grew to four, and then finally five. The first idea was to a site on global importance, since we had to research about the oil crisis already. It fell through very quickly, and we re-grouped with censorships. It was much too broad though, so here’s when we got our fourth member. Crystal is the one who got us onto censorship in schools. It slowly progressed from there on out, and is why we are here today!

The Makings of Our Website

Four of our team members go to the same public school and the fifth goes to a local private school. We communicated through e-mails, phone calls, and meeting for lunch dates outside of school. Each did his or her own research, but when it came to websites the original four were dumbstruck. Then another ThinkQuest got too many team members and we were fortunate enough to adopt Ian. He had already been studying website design, and with the help of the Nick Natalie’s graduation project, we got DreamWeaver. We worked with just about every Adobe’s software we could get our paws on, and created the site here.

Team!

Ally is a strong willed independent individual who loves a variety of things. Among her favorites are: the computer, TV, video games, hanging out with friends, eating, and sleeping. She plays soccer and tennis and has a knack as a leader. She is very proud that she had been confirmed into her church, and loves knowing her friends support her. A hobby is writing and drawing. She excels in school and aspires to be a scientist. Her dreams are to create a comic book, and become famous for something. She would like to learn Crew. Ally contributed by making the site uniform, and doing research of her own. She was the one who drove the team to finish by the deadline.

Cordelia is an aspiring artist, and loves to doodle and draw in her spare time (when she has it). She especially enjoys drawing cartoon figures and delighted at the opportunity to contribute comics to her Thinkquest team's website. Her prime concern for college is creating an outstanding portfolio in order to be accepted into a prestigious college of the arts. She doubts she'll be able to design anything more than mediocre but might as well try. Her hobbies include but are not limited to, writing stories, reading good books, walking for pleasure, eating, drawing when inspired, talking in third person, and procrastinating.

Mickey is the self expression expertise in our little group. He's a proclaimed genius and is a member of the artistic community in our town. He enjoys acting and singing in the art world along with architecture. He is a bio “wiz”, because he hasn’t done chemistry yet, and enjoys all forms of mathematics. He reads almost anything he can get his hands on and loves the idea of being a unique individual. He's the guy who you either love or want to be kept away from.

He is a Third Former at the Hill School. That just means that he's a 9th grader. The reason he was put on self expression is because he has to wear full suits with the tie and everything. Even though he has strict dress code rules he still wears illegal hats and goes as “the Hill School Goth.” I’m not a goth yet I like the idea of annoying the perfect picture that is the Hill School.

Ian enjoys working with computers and any electronic things. He especially enjoys working with video games. He's good at engineering and tries to be good at designing things, such as a websites. He wants to pursue some sort of job in the field of engineering or architectural work or computer sciences.

Crystal is a passionate person, and a writer at heart, and always feels strange not using creativity. She uses it all the time when she's bored – she day dreams in her head and on paper. But she has a serious, controversial side that explores philosophy, religion, politics and psychology, also. It’s the controversial side that had her working on this project.

Teens don’t have the rights they think they do and it’s our job to inform them. A democracy is all about education, right? So she worked on the self-protection part of this site because it looked to be full of controversy. Teens with weapons to defend themselves, say what!? However, she felt it necessary to touch upon it. Moreover, she comes from a family who kills for dinner. She is learning how to shoot a gun, too, for self-protection purposes.