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Our Meeting in Geneva!

After over a year of communicating by email, all of the team members were quite eager to meet in person at last. Sergei, Vitaly, Nadejda, and Vlad all arrived in Geneva on Thursday, and Kate and Joseph joined them on Friday, 16 March, a day before the event officially opened. The team's first real meeting took place Friday night, when all six students and coaches got together to prepare for the judging on Sunday. Well, we did get some preparation in - but we also spent almost two hours exchanging information about our lives and routines in our respective countries. Despite some linguistic difficulties - English is a rather difficult language, and the two Americans' knowledge of Russian goes no further than "nyet" - we were able to communicate successfully and informatively. We went to bed that night tired from travel and excitement, but also eager to learn more about the new worlds we had discovered.

Over the next few days, we met many more times, both at official ThinkQuest events and at team-organized preparation sessions. (Yes, we were quite compulsive about preparing for the judging!) We all learned a great deal about the specific problems the other team members encountered during the development of the project. However, most fascinating were the many details of life and livelihood we discovered in the course of our conversations. We continued to share tidbits of information and our respective memes even after the judging had been completed. We were certainly sad that our too-short vacation was over!

The Long-Awaited Judging Session

When we arrived in Geneva, we had two overlapping thoughts occupying our minds: meeting our teammates and getting judged. Before we left, we had all done some rather extensive individual preparation, brainstorming questions we thought we would face and collecting relevant data such as website statistics, permissions letters, and educational usage information. Once we actually met, we pooled our thoughts and perspectives to coordinate a cohesive presentation of our website and the work that went into its development.

Despite our rather compulsive worries, the judging session turned out to be a very pleasant experience. Our three judges were all extremely kind to us and worked hard to make us feel more comfortable. While we obviously can't describe the judging process in extensive detail, we can report that the experience is actually quite enjoyable! It was certainly rewarding to present the fruits of our long, hard labor to a team of people specifically chosen to understand our website and the technology used to create it. Thanks to all the wonderful people who gave their time to become ThinkQuest judges!

We spent most of Monday touring CERN, preparing for the Awards Ceremony, and once again worrying nervously about the awards revelations scheduled for that night. After spending about an hour waiting nervously in a lavishly decorated meeting room at CERN, the awards event finally began with a flourish. Naturally, ours was almost the last award to be announced - only the Best of Contest came later! We are delighted to announce that Replicators: Evolutionary Powerhouses was the proud recipient of the Platinum Award for the Interdisciplinary category of ThinkQuest 2000. We would like to thank all the members of the ThinkQuest staff, as well as the many sponsors of the ThinkQuest competition, for all of their hard work in coordinating this event. We would also like to congratulate all the other ThinkQuest finalists for their hard work and dedication. The other award winners can be viewed here. Great job, everyone!

View Our Picture Tour!

We all took tons of pictures while in Geneva, and now we'd like to share them with you. Just click the button below to view our picture tour! Please give the images some time to load.

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