Student's Persistence Leads to Victory

I competed in my first ThinkQuest competition when I was in fifth grade. In retrospect, the entry was a good start, though it left much to be desired. Our website lacked uniform navigation, had a crazy multi-colored background, and incorporated many features that seemed like a good idea at the time, but now seem ridiculous—such as an animated trail of letters that followed the mouse cursor as it moved around the screen (my mom said it made her "dizzy").

Since then, I have participated in three more competitions, and each website has turned out better than the one before, eventually bringing me to ThinkQuest Live as part of the winning "A Dollar A Day" team. While every ThinkQuest website is unique, all teams inevitably encounter challenges along the way. For us, one of the first challenges we faced was our topic—solutions to poverty—which encompassed an enormous amount of information. We knew our site's content had to be of reasonable length so that readers would stay focused, but due to the huge amount of data available, it was hard not to cram in everything we could. In addition, much of the information we needed was buried in long, difficult-to-read reports. Sifting through it all to find memorable facts was difficult. We found that some sources had only a few relevant sentences, while others were long and contained too much technical language. Creating "middle ground" between these two extremes made for an immensely challenging writing task.

A Call from Bill Clinton's Office
Time and again throughout our research, we learned the importance of persistence. Getting the information you want, even if you know exactly what you want, isn't always easy. For example, pursuing interviews with topic experts was an endless progression of ups and downs. Often, it took repeated emails and phone calls just to get to a scheduler for each potential interviewee. We'd get a response to an email, and then try and schedule an interview by phone without success…over and over again. Once, in response to our emailed request, I even got a phone call from President Bill Clinton's scheduling office. I wasn't home at the time and was forced to call back later. To make a long story short, the interview fell through. We started the project with a pool of about 25 interview candidates and in the end, we interviewed only seven. But, it was a good learning experience and a challenge I had never encountered before.

Another huge task—for me, my primary one—was actually putting all the writing, photos, and interviews we had generated into a website. Over winter break, when my friends were on vacation, skiing and visiting relatives, I was struggling with the website, trying to add web-based elements of interactivity to the writing of my teammates. And then there were the inevitable "bugs" that had to be rooted out before the final deadline. I probably spent the last month of the competition correcting spelling errors and broken links and images that we had found while testing the site. I was in a perpetual state of fear that something I did would permanently break the main navigational links of the site and cause our team to be disqualified. Thankfully, that never happened.

Relief After the Final Deadline
When the final deadline arrived, I was relieved, maybe even joyful, to be finally finished with the site. After all that hard work, I was ready for a break. Looking back though, the months spent working on the site were some of the most rewarding ever. I accomplished much more—in terms of research, writing, and web design—than at any other time. Other projects I've done for school pale in comparison to ThinkQuest, in terms of depth, work, and sheer enjoyment. The creative freedom and long work period we were afforded in ThinkQuest enabled us to try new ideas (for example, this was the first time I worked with Flash in-depth), making the work more interesting and engaging. I hope that future teams will experience the same feeling of accomplishment after working on their sites that we did when we completed ours.

Tell Us Your Story

Is ThinkQuest making a difference at your school? Click here and tell us about your experiences.