The Experience Nicaragua team is made up of four members, two students, Shigeki Seko and Darrin Nix, and two coaches, Jon Happel and Juan Pablo Salinas. The first thing we would like to say is that we owe an enormous thanks to our coaches for the many different things they did like getting us interviews and helping us get permission to use material. But most of all we would like to thank them for keeping us motivated and just being there when we were stuck.

Darrin Nix
I'm 17 and I've been living in Managua, Nicaragua for the last two years but I will be moving to the US in September to work for a year before I move on to college to study International Economics. I graduated as the '98 Salutatorian from the American Nicaraguan School, a school of about 400 students, in June. I suppose my favorite parts of school (if there are such things) were my Economics classes and getting to teach an introductory programming class to the Middle School. English is my first language but I've lived in South America for most of my life so I speak some Spanish as well. My favorite hobbies are languages and computer programming (Java). I was on the soccer team for a while, but I've decided to leave sports up to the people who were born with the bodies for it. I spend a lot of time on the Net reading online programming books and playing multiplayer games like Myth: The Fallen Lords. I am also the team leader of our project.

Shigeki Seko
I am 14 years old and I am in the Japanese equivalent of 9th grade in the English educational system. I have been living in Japan since February but before that I lived in Nicaragua. My father is Japanese and my mother is Honduran so I speak Spanish and Japanese fluently. I have received most of my education in Japanese and Spanish schools but I have studied in English schools for four years and can consequently speak some English as well. I really like computers and spend a lot of time working on them and chatting with my old friends back in Nicaragua. I was able to learn HTML one and a half years ago but I do not have any experience with it. Although I don't know any serious "programming" languages, I know Javascipt and I like working with it. Ok, my other hobby besides computer is the guitar and my dream is to become a professional guitar player! I had a band in Nicaragua and we were pretty good! I'm Japanese but I love Nicaragua a lot and I want to let more and more people know about Nicaragua using this opportunity.

Experience Nicaragua: The Creation
Although the Thinkquest competition didn't officialy begin until the end of February 1998, Experience Nicaragua began long before that. It all began in March of 1997 when a computer science teacher at the American Nicaraguan school used a winning Thinkquest project to help teach C++ programming at the school. Darrin Nix was in that class and decided to enter the competition in 1998 and set out to find suitable team members and an idea to develop.

Notepad, Internet Explorer, and Netscape, where the HTML was written and tested.

After meeting five or six potential members on the Net, he was introduced to Shigeki Seko by his future coach and the team was ready. We brainstormed for a while on what idea to use and finally decided on a topic that we both were interested in, that we both understood, and one that offered practically unlimited potential for creative development -- Nicaragua.

Creating Experience Nicaragua took more time and more effort than we ever anticipated. But now that it's over we agree that it's been one of the best things we've ever done and is well worth the sacrifices we made. We began the project by collecting all of the material about Nicaragua that we could lay our hands on. First we went to our libraries and pulled out everything there was about Nicaragua and photocopied all of the relevant material. Next we went on the Internet and surfed and surfed and surfed some more, trying to find useful material. Eventually we discovered every known piece of information which lurked in the dark corners of the world-wide-web and printed it out.

Then came the hard part -- summarizing the thousands of pages that we had compiled. This part of the project actually began in late March and ended in late June, taking up the biggest chunk

Adobe Photoshop 3.0, where all the graphics were born.

of the competition. The rest of the time, until the end of August, was spent creating the Enhanced, Light, and Japanese versions of the site. Throughout the entire project, from February to August, we collected images from wherever we were allowed and recorded interviews. Those last two months were spent encoding videos, writing applets and CGI scripts, and coding the HTML.

One major problem, of course, was that since Shigeki lived in Japan and Darrin lived in Nicaragua neither their daily schedules nor their school schedules coincided. Darrin's vacations came while Shigeki was in school and we often had to pause for long stretches because one of us had major exams. We managed to resolve the time-difference problem, however, at least for a while. For the last three months of the competition, Darrin began getting up at about 6:00 in the evening and going to bed at 10:00 in the morning so that he would be able to work live with Shigeki on ICQ and so that he wouldn't have to fight off his family to use the computer.

We've learned more than we ever imagined by doing this project and we've also experienced what it's like to work together smoothly as a team--something that took a while at first. We hope you will enjoy the Experience as much as we have.