What is the ThinkQuest Narrative Competition?
The ThinkQuest Narrative Competition invites teams of students, ages 9-19, to publish their ideas on issues of global importance. Teams must use
ThinkQuest Projects as their online publishing tool, and may supplement their narrative with any multimedia components that ThinkQuest Projects supports. Each team must be coached by a teacher, who enrolls the team and guides the students.
Completed entries are published in the
ThinkQuest Library, the world's largest online repository of student-developed learning projects. Winning teams receive exciting prizes.
Why Compete?
Whether you teach writing, civics, history, science, geography, art, or something else, the ThinkQuest Narrative Competition can help you engage students to create multimedia-rich classroom projects and develop 21st century skills.
The following are a few examples of ways you can use the competition to develop students' 21st century skills (
read definitions of these skills):
- Critical thinking: Help students choose a topic that enables them to investigate and propose solutions for a real world issue.
- Creativity: Encourage students to include multimedia components in their entry.
- Teamwork: The ThinkQuest Narrative Competition requires students to compete in teams, working cooperatively to meet a shared goal.
- Cross-cultural understanding: Encourage students to research a topic of global relevance and to use sources that provide diverse viewpoints.
- Communication: Remind students that information in their entries must be clearly presented and logically organized in order to serve a global audience of web learners.
- Technology: The ThinkQuest Narrative Competition requires students to use the online publishing tools in ThinkQuest Projects.
- Self-direction: Make students responsible for managing their time effectively in order to meet the competition deadline.
In addition to developing important 21st century skills, students become published web-authors with a global audience when their completed entries are published in the
ThinkQuest Library.
How Can I Integrate the Competition into My Curriculum?
Below are some examples of how competition
topics can spark fun classroom projects across a variety of core subjects. This list is by no means exhaustive. Rather, it is designed to quickly illustrate how easy it is to integrate the competition into your daily curriculum.
- Literature and Writing teachers: Students can create online book reports that address the topic: "What lessons have you learned from a favorite book or film?"
- History teachers: Students can bring history alive by addressing the topic "What lessons have you learned from history?" or "What leader do you most admire, and why?"
- Science teachers: Students can raise awareness of environmental issues by creating entries to address the topic "How can we take better care of our world and its resources?" or "How can humans and animals live together harmoniously?"
- Geography or Social Studies teachers: Students can share interesting aspects of their cultures through the topic "What is life like for people in your local community?" or "How would you introduce a tourist to your home town (or country)?"
- Health teachers: As students learn about nutrition, exercise, and other health issues, they can share tips through entries that address the topic "What can you do to lead a healthy life?"
Entries can include essays, articles, narratives, photos, charts, graphs, presentation files, videos, and much more.