Jeff is 12 and in grade 6. Jeff lives in New Hampshire. He likes to launch model rockets. He plays baseball, basketball, and soccer.

Stephen is 12 and in grade 6. He lives in New Hampshire. Stephen likes to learn about outer space. He is pretty good with computers. He runs track, plays basketball, soccer, chess and computer games.

Ben is 12 and in grade 6. He lives in New Hampshire. Ben likes to play soccer, computer games, and likes to watch movies.

Coach: Mr. Dworak - Sixth Grade teacher in New Hampshire.

From left to right Jeff, Stephen, and Ben

 

"Astronomy for Kids" - How We Did It!

"Astronomy for Kids" was created by Stephen, Ben and Jeff. If you are wondering how we created a 35 page site, read on.

First we came up with all the ideas for what we wanted on the site. On the first day, we spent 8 hours learning how to use PageMill and Adobe Photoshop from Stephen's older sister, who is in high school. We created the index page (Astronomy For Kids logo), created our scroll bar, and designed our "welcome page". Then we worked on putting our research into pages and downloading copyright free photos from various sources on the web. Stephen created the "Virtual Telescope" and made his constellations. The team kept working together to create all the other pages on our site. Then Stephen created the animations from photos of the moon by James Funkhouser.

It became a routine to go over to Stephen's house for several hours and work. We had to work hard and stay focused. Sometimes we stayed up till 10:00pm working, all trying to achieve perfection. We had to stay focused all the way to the end in order to complete the site. We would talk to our coach, Mr. Dworak, about our site and see if he had found any mistakes or problems. We have had some guidance from computer experts who taught us how to set up our forum, how to create animated gifs for our site.

During the final weekend, our team worked on finishing the pages and making the links. It was a tough job in that it seemed we were making very little progress after spending a lot of time. Finally, on Monday, the day before the deadline, we worked on proofing our work, checking links, and uploading our site. On Tuesday, March 31, we added our forum, proofed everything one last time and began testing our site.