Making the Site: 2 High-Tech

Actually it's kind of ironic how the team was formed. All three team members came from the same high school, but that's not how the team came together. The team was formed in the Urban Scholars program, which is located in the University of Massachusetts in Boston. All three members were interested in the development of a web site for the ThinkQuest Internet Challenge.

In the beginning, the team met once a week and discussed possible topics for our site with our coach, Gail. After about four meetings we decided to produce a site that focused upon the future of technology because that topic interested us the most. After choosing our topic, we wrote our proposal. Originally the site was called "Beyond the Internet: A Closer Look into the Future" but we later changed it to "2 High-Tech".

After that we had to get our content together. At first we composed a questionnaire that we emailed to over 200 technology experts asking them what they thought would be the major technological development in the next 10 years. (Yes, we decided to use Internet technology to conduct most of our research.) We were disappointed that only 10 people wrote back to us - but we got some very interesting responses. We heard from the head of MIT's Media Lab, Neil Gershenfeld, the Director of Communications for Internet 2, Greg Wood, and Jean Krause, a MIT grad student of electrical engineering, and more. All of the questionnaire responses gave us great "insights" about the future.

We continued researching future technology and began writing articles about technological developments. We wrote about developments that we thought would interest our web visitors. Some of these topics took us longer to research because they were totally new to us and we had to learn terminology and concepts. Although most of our research was done on the Internet, we also used technology and news magazines, as well as newspapers, to give us ideas about new technology. (Keep in mind that some of these technologies are often times very new and couldn't be found in most books in the library.) Basically our research educated us in future technologies and we hope that our site will educate others the same way.

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