While educators bemoan the lack of quality educational materials online, a contest called ThinkQuest is quietly coaxing kids to create them instead. The nonprofit project aims to teach students by having them teach others online - and maybe win money for college in the process. Thirty-five teams were announced as finalists Thursday for the second annual contest, and to the ThinkQuest founders, all the participants are winning much more than just prize money.
"It's helping students around the world learn by building things for other students," explains ThinkQuest founder Al Weis. "We want kids to build good educational tools that are exciting and have their mindset, instead of some 60-year-old person who wrote a book's mindset."
The ThinkQuest competition was founded in 1995 using the proceeds of the sale of the backbone provider Advanced Network and Services (which, as the principal architect of the National Science Foundation, essentially built the Internet) to AOL for US$35 million. ThinkQuest is also sponsored by Microsoft, Adobe, and other technology companies, and cash prizes top $1 million. So far, over 10,000 students and educators have participated in the project.
To compete, students must assemble teams of two or three people with dissimilar backgrounds and knowledge; to help them form teams, a "matchmaker" service on the site lets students search for others based on their technical and creative skills and the subject category in which they're interested. Projects must be educational in nature - for example, a photography tutorial, or a history of women in Alaska - and teachers from students' schools generally serve as coaches. The idea is that by bringing strangers with wide-ranging skills together, students will be forced to learn from each other.
"In spite of our specific roles in the project, we shared each other's workload and in the process increased our own knowledge," says finalist Debangsu Sengupta, the content guru for the project Himalayas - Where the Earth Meets the Sky. During the course of their project, his team migrated from India to Africa, and from the US to Taiwan. "We found that in spite of all these developments, the one constant was indeed the Internet.... We have learned to accept the limitations of the Internet and yet push it to its limits while collaborating over different continents."
This kind of collaborative (or what MIT's Seymour Papert calls "constructivist") learning is so integral to the project that a major judging criteria is just how dissimilar the talents and backgrounds of the project members are. Other criteria are the projects' educational value, innovation, Net-savvy, and popularity with users.
But although most educators are thrilled about ThinkQuest and the ideas behind it, there are those who point out its flaws: namely, that kids interested in doing highly competitive technology-based contests will generally be the already successful, often privileged students. Or as Daniel Granja, technology director of Arizona's Parker Unified School District puts it, "What it achieves is that students that are already on the road to making $100,000 a year in the computer industry get a reward for their interest."
"It's the science fair mentality - it made science very geeky, very elitist.... If ThinkQuest is simply a carry-on of that, then it's subject to the same criticisms," says University of Michigan professor of education and engineering Elliot Soloway. "It's not the exclusive model for using technology to engage kids in learning.... Education has to be authentic: meaningful to kids. But if they feel that competitions and going outside school is something that motivates them, then go with God.""
In the meantime, the 35 finalists are about to wend their way to Washington, DC, in the hopes that their HTML skills, CGI-scripting, and creative abilities will win them the coveted $50,000 in grand prizes. The winners will be announced in an awards ceremony in November, where celebrities like Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and James Brooks, a creative mind behind The Simpsons, will be on hand to award prizes to students.
And regardless of whether they win, numerous students are already gearing up for next year's competition, which is open to entries until February. As one student puts it, it's less about winning than it is about the Internet and the way they are contributing to its growth as an educational tool.
"Kids know more about computers than adults. [The amount] is growing everyday," gushes Nima Dejbod, whose international team pooled its skills to create Reaching for the Planets. "By involving all kinds of people, we can all make the WWW a better place to be in."
