In April of 1996, Miss Sheryl Hinman approached two Galesburg High School students, sophomore Tim and senior Mike, about working on a web-page building project together. The project was in correlation with ThinkQuest , an Internet contest offering scholarships as prizes.
After a meeting it was decided that Teen Court would be the subject of the webpage. The team chose to wait until the school year ended before working on the site. Meanwhile, the team was gathering teen court documents and statistics for use on the site. The third member of the team was Heather, from Syracuse, New York. Her coach, Bill Ralbovsky, suggested that she handle the statistics part of the page.
After the school year ended, the teens got to work on the project, attending a teen court session where they took pictures and videotaped the proceedings. Mike and Tim met at the Educational Technology Center often to work together on the project. Mike was responsible for graphic design and the multimedia aspects of the page, including the RealAudio. Tim scanned in pictures and documents and converted them into HTML. He also wrote different parts of the pages. The team had the help of Troy Walker of the ETC for the complex programming, including the cgi scripts and RealAudio portions of the page.
The team had a main page up by early July and most of the "gathering" done. A major obstacle came when the local access provider went out of business, leaving Mike and Tim without Internet access at home. The ETC became the central workplace for the rest of the summer. In late July through early August, the team cleaned up the site and finished the sections. The site was proof-read and cleared by Teen Court Coordinator Lolita Junk and local attorney Steve Watts. The site was finally ready for submission in late August. Mike and Tim each worked over 600 hours on the site. Due to various circumstances, the Teen Court site did not receive any suitable information from Heather or her coach Bill Ralbovsky. The site was closed for two months until judging could take place.
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This was the first design Michael and I worked on. It turned out to be pretty good because it was very easy to navigate throughout the whole site. The only element the site lacked was quality graphics and HTML expertise. |
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This second design worked really well. It was recognized by more people and it clearly showed by the amount of site awards it received(13). This layout was nice but proved to be very buggy when tested with Netscape 4.0.1.
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On October 6, two weeks before the contest winners were announced, a movie director from California came to Galesburg to film the Teen Court pages and interview Miss Hinman, Mike, Tim, Troy, Mrs. Junk and Shruti Mehta, who drew a graphic for the site. The video was used at ThinkQuest seminars worldwide on how to build a good website. That day, the Galesburg IL Register-Mail newspaper featured the website in an article.
Teen Court was not one of the winners announced in October to fly to Washington D.C. for the awards ceremony. The team regrouped and decided to continue work on the site. The site was featured in the American Bar Association Newsletter and at the American Legion National Conference in Washington D.C. The site has received numerous Internet awards from places such as USA TODAY and Microsoft. Mike and Tim presented with the Youth Extra Effort Award by their city council. News 4 of the Quad Cities did a feature on the website in February. The website has also helped set up many courts around the nation, including seven courts in Pennsylvania alone, by providing the documents and examples.
The Teen Court site underwent a massive overhaul by Mike and was updated and improved. New features include a message board, a chat room, search and post cards. Tim revised the procedure manual in late July.
Mike and Tim closed down the site after re-submitting it to Thinkquest for the GEM Award on July 30. In early October, the Teen Court website was the subject of a documentary by Gabriel films. The film is to be shown at the Thinkquest Awards ceremony. In the week of October 20, the team was nominated for the GEM award, along with two other teams. On November 21, the team traveled to Washington, D.C. to be judged and evaluated on their site. The GEM award was announced on November 24. Teen Court received the GEM award. Mike and Tim each received a $12,000 scholarship, the Teen Court, Galesburg High School, Mrs. Junk and Miss Hinman also each received $2,000 cash to spend at their discretion. The Teen Court website developers also were presenters at the American Bar Association National Law-Related Education convention in St. Louis in January 1998. CNN and local news have done features on the Teen Court and its website.
