by Daniel L., Grade 5, Cyberstories editor
Putting together a ThinkQuest entry teaches you about teamwork, the Internet, and whatever subject area you happen to choose. Win or lose, preparing a ThinkQuest entry is a worthwhile experience. ThinkQuest is a contest, though, and contests mean competition, and hopefully winning! We wondered if the ThinkQuest Junior winners from this year had anything in common. Is there a formula for success? We asked each winning team five questions:
1. Why do you think your entry won?
2. How many hours did you spend working on your web site?
3. How did you come up with your idea for the web site?
4. What was the hardest part about developing the web site?
5. What software did you use to develop your web site?
Here's what we found out.
The judging
rubric used by ThinkQuest Junior judges is published right on
the ThinkQuest web site. So what makes a winning entry is not
really a mystery. However, each team had its own special way of
achieving those guidelines.
Certainly the educational value of the site was most often mentioned by winning teams as the reason for their victory. However, these winners went beyond producing sites just to meet educational objectives. These teams said that they really tried to think of the kids that would be using the sites. What matters to these site visitors? What makes a site easier for kids to use? For example, the award winner Surfing in Hawaii said they created their site from a learner's, not a teacher's viewpoint, and they made it fun to use.
The winning teams also put a lot of emphasis on creativity. They looked to see what else was out there on the Internet, and then came up with an idea that was new and original. For example, the award winner, Yo, It's Time for Braces, first considered an entry on helping parents quit smoking. After looking around on the Internet, though, they saw that there were already a lot of sites on that subject. They decided on a site about getting braces instead.
One thing we learned from the answers to this question, is that most of the winning teams do not think that fancy pages, Javascript, or other technically difficult features made their entry win. They felt that good, educationally valuable content was far more important.
We could tell from the answers we got to this question that winning is not easy. The teams we talked to spent anywhere from 60 to 150 hours. Some teams, like the one that prepared the award winner Words and Tolkien started out gradually with only one hour a week, and then progressed to two, then four, then eight, then sixteen! A Pioneer's Journey to the Frontier took from 10 - 15 hours a week, working from October to February. And if you're already planning an entry for next year, keep in mind that just getting the necessary permissions for using information from other sources can take a long time. For example, it took Yo, It's Time for Braces, one email every day from October to March for the permissions they needed. We also get the impression that most of this time is spent outside of the regular school day, especially weekends.
Also, the teams differed in how the time was spent. Some teams met together all the time. Some met together part of the time, but worked on their individual parts most of the time. Our Cyberstories team only met face-to-face a couple of times, then did most of the work at home, relying on email for sharing and collaboration.
As we mentioned earlier, many of the teams directed their entry toward a need they saw in their young audience. Brainstorming was the method of choice for coming up with ideas, but the idea that was finally chosen by each group came from many different sources. For example, the Words and Tolkien entry had its origin with one team member, who then recruited others to work on it. The Surfing in Hawaii team wanted an idea that was uniquely Hawaiian. The Creatures of the Night and You team wanted to build a site about a subject they really liked. The Children's Creative Theater team's idea grew from one of their team member's experiences with the Rose Theater. The A Pioneer's Journey to the Frontier team got their idea from their classroom studies and recognizing that there was not much available on that subject on the Internet.
There were a lot of different answers to this question. The Words and Tolkien team felt that coming up with the content was the hardest part. The Yo, It's Time for Braces team said that dealing with a mixture of Windows and Mac computers caused them many problems. The Surfing in Hawaii team thought it was difficult to keep working on a big project that lasts a long time. Endangered New Jersey also thought that getting permissions to use images was difficult.
We at Cyberstories thought the toughest part was getting forms and scripts to work. We started out with FrontPage web bots, but we couldn't get them to work, even though ThinkQuest Junior supports FrontPage extensions. So we had to redo all the interactive pages with CGI scripts. We also spent a lot of time trying to get the right look for the navigation bar and opening page.
Other teams reported other difficulties. Creatures of the Night and You team said their greatest challenge was recording live coyote packs at night in January. They said it was hard to get quality sound and it was also very cold! The Children's Creative Theater team said that finding enough time presented the greatest difficulty for them. They also said they did not have the technical knowledge to get the CGI scripts provided by ThinkQuest working on their own and were very grateful to TQ-Help for getting things working smoothly.
The A Pioneer's Journey to the Frontier team had a variety of difficulties because each team member has different areas of inexperience. Three of the team members had never even typed on a computer before the contest! Journey To New Worlds- Exploration of Space and Hawaiian Voyaging team thought that HTML coding was the hardest part.
The coach for Great Inventions and Inventors and Seeing Disabilities from a Different Perspective had a special problem. He was the coach of two winning teams, and had to deal with dividing his time between the two teams fairly.
Since the coach of our Cyberstories team was given a copy of FrontPage 97 last year for ThinkQuest Junior, we would have guessed that most ThinkQuest teams were using FrontPage. Not so. Lots of different software was used.
Software Title |
Number of teams using software |
| Adobe Imagestyler | 1 |
| Adobe Photodeluxe | 1 |
| Adobe Photoshop | 3 |
| Appleworks | 1 |
| Asymetrix DVP Video Capture | 1 |
| Avid Cinema | 2 |
| Claris Home Page Maker | 4 |
| Edit Plus | 1 |
| Microsoft FrontPage | 3 |
| Netscape Composer | 3 |
| Netscape Navigator | 1 |
| Photomagic | 1 |
| Print Master | 1 |
| QTVR Authoring Studio | 1 |
| Sierra Print Artist | 1 |
| Web Painter | 1 |
| Word Pad for HTML | 1 |
Of course, part of this software is for putting together web pages and part is strictly for graphics. Our team, as well as most of the other teams, used at least two software packages to prepare an entry.
We want to thank those winning ThinkQuest Junior teams that responded to our survey. There's just one more question we wish we had added to our survey though: What are you going to do with your prize money?! We're guessing that there are as many different answers to that question as there are team members.
If you've never done ThinkQuest before, we hope the information here will give you ideas on how to get started and complete your entry. Good luck and we'll see you in ThinkQuest Junior in 2000!
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