Bitten By the Web Design Bug

I first started ThinkQuest last year, when my brother's friend asked me to join a team that was writing about the December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. I especially felt a connection to the topic because my family comes from Thailand and two of my relatives were boating in Malaysia at the time of the disaster.

This year, our topic was mosquito-borne diseases. Each of these diseases causes about a million deaths every year! We created the "Tiny But Dangerous" site to help raise awareness and educate children about these diseases.

Hours and Hours of Technology Tutorials
Last year when I worked on the tsunami site, I mostly wrote and did a few drawings. This year, my job was to do web design, animation, and drawing, and I had to learn lots of new skills. During the summer, I spent at least two hours each day doing tutorials for Flash and Dreamweaver. During the school year, I had almost no free time because it was all dedicated to my ThinkQuest website. When I got home every day, I would go straight to my computer and start working. I was learning new things, such as how to make a button, how to make games, and how to draw, animate, and edit pictures. Sometimes it was frustrating because I was figuring out how to do these things for the first time. I had to stay up late to revise, redo, and revise endlessly. I succeeded in making the malaria, filariasis, spinning globe, and splash page animations on our website.

Paranoia Strikes
A year ago, I would never have thought I would be able to understand different stages of parasites. You might not think that mosquitoes are deadly. You would think that they are pesky, but little and harmless. But when you really research mosquitoes, you realize they're not. Mosquitoes spread deadly diseases such as malaria, lymphatic filariasis, West Nile virus, and encephalitis. Once you have looked at a proboscis (a mosquito's mouth/needle) up close under a microscope, you shudder every time you get a mosquito bite, thinking of that thing piercing your skin. Over the summer, before I went outdoors, I put on ten times more mosquito repellant than years before! Also, we actually had two ThinkQuest teams in my house, and my brothers' team was researching Avian Flu. The more we learned about how virulent all of these diseases are, the more paranoid we became. Maybe it was just stress. I'm only scared a little bit now. Maybe I should be scared a lot!

ThinkQuest was not just about scary diseases though—working on our website was really fun too. We wrote jokes for the site and when I made animated games, we would all try them out (we especially liked the "mos pong" where you bounce a mosquito back and forth using swatters). And, when we went to each other's houses for team meetings, we also played some games while we were there. Through ThinkQuest, I've met lots of people who have turned into friends and role models. It takes teamwork to have a successful website. Every single member has to put their very best effort into the website to get the whole thing finished, and you learn more than you think you ever would. In fact, I can't wait to be a coach someday. Of course, I still have more things to learn as a student and I want to make the best of it before I become a coach.

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