NEWS

TEAM TQ Volume #1, Issue 2

ThinkQuest 99 Team Members and Coaches,

It's time already for the second edition of TEAM TQ. This week we have (1) two articles on on collaboration and communication. One from Pat Libutti, the ThinkQuest cybrarian, and one from Janine, a ThinkQuest 99 participant, (2) a tutorial from Paris on using Perl scripts to create CGIs and, (3) information on TQ chat resources from Sonia.

A quick note to coaches. If any of you are attending NECC in Atlantic City later this month be sure to stop by the ThinkQuest booth (#1058) in the exhibit hall and say hello.

1. Collaborating and Conversing Across Borders Patricia O'Brien Libutti, Cybrarian, ThinkQuest

ThinkQuest teams cross many borders in their sites. If you are in the same school as your teammates, you need to get to know each other's best qualities to work effectively as a team. The team that prepared Ahupua'a Adventure--From the Mountains to the Sea (TQJR http://tqjunior.advanced.org/3502/). kept a diary of their collaboration and work together, called: Reflections: Looking Back and Forward as we go.... [http://kalama.doe.hawaii.edu/~designz/brains/index.html].

You will find their concerns about ways to think about the students who will see their site, play their survival game and use the resources (people as well as the Net). Look at their Promotion of the site to see how each team member contributed. This feature can be used by either ThinkQuest or ThinkQuest Junior teams to let others know how you got your ideas.

Others came together through technology, meeting on-line through the ThinkQuest TeamMaker [http://www.thinkquest.org/tq/teammaker.html] or Hypernews [http://hypernews.thinkquest.org/] to find partners and exchange ideas. Working together with someone you have never "met" brings a whole new set of challenges to collaboration. It's not as easy to get motivated, brainstorm, or work out technical problems when you are not face to face, though the rewards can be great. Many ThinkQuest teams have succeeded at creating wonderful resources from across oceans. Three girls, from Norway, the United States and Germany collaborated on an International Newspaper. They show how their schools, legal systems, governments, homes, fun activities and families are different---and similar. See Global Gazette, [http://www.advanced.org/18802].

Whether on-line or face-to-face, collaboration is the key to your team's site being a unified, satisfying experience for you and a valuable resource for your audience. Take some tome to think beyond the many tasks" and "lists of things to do" and "checking the HTML" and get to know each other as people. You'll find the work moves much smoother as all of the team is involved with what they do best.

Communication and Collaboration

Janine, TQ team 25772

I'm participating in the TQ competition for the second time now, and I think it's pretty important to create deadlines (even if you know you can't have the work done by that time) to stimulate working on your site.

Further, the people you work with have to be people you like so it isn't difficult to collaborate. Your topic is also very important because that's the thing that has to keep you going. If you participate next year, I think it will be a very good idea to pick your perfect team member and subject (of course, it's too late for that for this year). And always keep in mind, if you want to have a great web-site you'll have to spend much time in making it! Good luck to all of you!

2. Using Perl's CGI.pm module

Paris Treantafeles

CGI.pm by Lincoln Stein is a Perl 5.x module that greatly helps with cgi programming. Using CGI.pm you can easily create fill out forms, parse queries, and more.

CGI.pm is loaded on all of the ThinkQuest servers and if you are developing off-line, you will find that it is available for the Windows and Mac ports of Perl too.

You can find the full documentation for CGI.pm at http://stein.cshl.org/WWW/software/CGI/

The documentation contains some great examples that you can easily modify to fit your own needs. Many of the examples are actually on-line and can be tested.

Below is a program that we wrote using CGI.pm that takes user input and writes it to the screen AND to a file so that you can use it later.

Although this is a simple program, it covers several aspects of web programming:

1) forms
2) displaying results back to a web page
3) writing the results to a file.

To test this out, you should:

1) copy the perl code below and save it e.g., cgi-test.cgi
2) upload it in ASCII format to your team's cgi-bin directory
3) either through your FTP client or through a telnet connection, make it executable - for example in the cgi-bin directory you could type:
chmod 755 cgi-test.cgi

To test it, go to http://dev99.advanced.org/TEAM_ID/cgi-bin/cgi-test.cgi note that it saves the data from the form to a file in your team's directory named data.txt

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI qw(:standard);

# this defines the file that you will write the results too.

$datafile="../data.txt";

# this line takes care of creating an HTTP header for you.

print header;

# note below the many HTML shortcuts provided for you

# you can probably figure out what most of the shortcuts do but

# see the CGI.pm documentation for details

print start_html('This is a Perl CGI.PM test'),

h1('A Simple Perl CGI.PM Test'),

start_form,

"Name: ", textfield('name'),

p,

"Please choose one:",

p,

radio_group(-name=>'colors',

-value=>['red','blue','yellow'],-default=>'red'),

p,

submit,

end_form,

hr;

# param() catches all of your form based variables

# so this statement checks to see if param () has data

# if so, it displays it on the page.

# note that the variables are stored using the same names as in your form

# so, since the textfield variable in the form has the name 'name',

# the user's data is in param('name')

if (param()) {

print

"You entered the following....",

p,

"Name: ", param('name'),

p,

"Color: ", param('colors'),

}

print end_html;

# here we assigned variable names to the param() results

# and then write the results to a data file.

# note that you use ">>filename" when you want the data

# to append to a file.

$name=param('name');

$color=param('colors');

open(OUTFILE,">>$datafile");

print OUTFILE "$name, $color\n";

close(OUTFILE);

###############

We hope that this example has helped to show how helpful CGI.pm is.

We encourage your team to try it out.

3. TQ Chat

Sonia McSweeney

Even though teams have been formed and everyone is working hard on their Entries, the Chat area of the ThinkQuest web site is still a great tool to use to meet others, learn and communicate with current team members. Open to everyone, the ThinkQuest Chat area is divided into three category chats: ThinkQuest, ThinkQuest Junior and ThinkQuest for Tomorrow's Teachers.

The Chat area is hosted regularly by the ThinkQuest Staff. Additionally, there are guest speakers that are experts in particular areas that speak on subjects of their expertise. For example, guest speakers in the past have spoken on topics such as "Careers in Computing" and "Advanced CGI".

Our next special guest speaker will be Sonia McSweeney who will discuss "Graphics and Web Design". This special chat session will take place on June 15, 1999 at 3 PM.

Don't forget that the Chat area is also a resource that you are free to use. For example, feel free to chat and ask questions of the staff and others in the chat area. Or, remember that you may also use the chat area to communicate in real time with current team members as an option to e-mail.

Lastly, if you are a past ThinkQuest contestant or when you do become a "past" contestant, you are welcomed to appear unscheduled to chat or to schedule a time when you can chat on a particular topic of expertise or just share your experiences.

To view our staff chat and special guest chat speakers, please visit the "Meeting Places" area of your particular contest menu of the web site, or go to:

http://chat.thinkquest.org/chatclient/chat.html

Sincerely,

The ThinkQuest Staff

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