The idea of entering ThinkQuest came about when a fellow student in our Advanced Placement European History class mentioned a scholarship contest for designing web pages. Jason and Jeremy looked into it, and despite our early astonishment at the works of previous ThinkQuest winners, we decided to give it a shot. At first we had no idea what topic we should focus our site on. After some discussion, we realized that there were a multitude of chemistry web sites on the Internet, but it was nearly impossible to find an organized, up-to-date site designed for student's use. Henceforth, we set out on our journey.

A large part of our web site, the Periodic Table of Elements, was kindly enhanced with the addition of a fellow student: Ben Dekarske. When he reviewed the site, he wrote a 1,000 line Java Script to create a great table.

Then came the work we despised most. After searching all over the Internet, we gathered around 80,000 chemistry-related sites, and the process of sorting them was an enjoyable one. On a monitor we posted a sign that said, "Do it for the sake of knowledge!" Though cutting, pasting, and writing HTML tags in Notepad wasn't exciting, we decided that we must finish what we started. We currently only have a couple hundred links up, and will continue to add more as they spring up.

We were featured in our school's publication, the Lincoln Log, in which we wrote an article entitled "Computers and the Internet", and in the local Wisconsin Rapids newspaper, the Daily Tribune, in a great article covering The Development of the CRC.

Our team is quite different regarding our access to technology and our knowledge of it. For example, Jason had never taken a computer class at high school, and Jeremy had never owned a computer, but our high school helped us out quite a bit. We have translated our site into other languages, since Jason speaks fluent German and has lived there for over a year as an exchange student, and Jeremy took four years of Spanish and has traveled there with a group from school.

We hope that other students will enjoy using our entry. We have supplied a variety of ways for students to contact us: submitting sites to be considered for indexing, leaving comments or suggestions, and also having our personnel email addresses on the site.

The team feels that helping students find chemistry research is a very important objective. We realize how hard it can be to find accurate, well organized, and focused information. While developing the Chemistry Research Center, a main priority was to try to have as many sites as possible indexed, while still sorting them so that a student can actually find what he or she is looking for.

We have been glad to hear that many students from all over have used the site. We have heard from students everywhere from New Mexico to New York, and have tried to adapt our site to provide information for everyone. Our hit counter cleared 1,800 only a few months after its release, and most of those were not ours!

The site is very easy to use and is consistent throughout. In fact, our main goal while organizing the site was to make it so uncomplicated that someone with little or no Internet experience can feel confident using it. We also check out the validity of all sites submitted, so that we don't put useless sites up for students. Even sites that are ranked low on our star scale still could have some educational value for a student out there.

Though we cleared the preliminary judging, the CRC did not place in the 1998 ThinkQuest contest. Despite these unfortunate results, we are still working on the site. It was prepared for entry into the 1999 Wisconsin Web Fair, and was named a Distinguished Entry. This was yet another way in which we hope students were be able to find and then use the site we have created. Our Narrative Page for that contest shows a little more of what we have learned throughout the development of the CRC.

The time put into constructing the Chemistry Research Center has definitely been immense, but we are still not done. Despite our busy college schedules, the site must go on! There will be more conferences with coaches, days sorting URLs, and hours in front of monitors, but through it all we hope that you recognize that the time put into developing the Chemistry Research Center has been put in "for the sake of knowledge!"