NEWS

ThinkQuest Newsletter
December, 1998

Contents:

• Feature: The 1998 ThinkQuest Awards Event
• Announcements
• ThinkQuest Teams in the News
• Technical Tips & Hints Special: Designing Multi-Lingual Sites

• The 1998 ThinkQuest Awards Event

On November 21 - 23, 1998, ThinkQuest was proud to host it's third annual Awards Weekend and Ceremony to honor the 1998 ThinkQuest finalist teams.
Over 95 students and 80 coaches from 24 countries made up the 35 finalist teams who attended this all expenses paid weekend of fun, friendship, learning and celebration. ThinkQuest national partners from 19 countries also took part in the Awards weekend and summit conference, as well as many guests.

The event was held at the Universal City Hilton in Los Angeles, California.
Weekend activities included an international food festival, dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe, a trip to the Getty Museum, and of course, tours of Universal Studios and shopping at City Walk. The ThinkQuest Generator Room, a spectacularly designed cyber cafe, media room, and family room, all rolled into one space, was a focal point for much of the weekend activity.

In conjunction with the Awards Weekend, ThinkQuest sponsored "Kids,
Technology and the New Millennium," an educational technology conference.

At this 'summit' educational and advanced technology leaders from the US and around the world presented insights and discussed in small group sessions the challenges faced in preparing our youth for the next millennium, and the ways these challenges are and will be met. Hands on lab sessions provided valuable in depth technology training for participants.
Perhaps more than anything else, this conference is set apart by the ability of participants to meet, share, and learn from the ThinkQuest students and coaches who are helping to create the future of education.

Of course, the highlight of the weekend was the gala Awards Ceremony, where $1,300,000 in scholarships and cash awards were presented to winning students, coaches and their schools. The event was co-hosted by Leonard Nimoy and Titanic producer John Landau. Featured presenters included notables from the television and film industry like writer, director, producer James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, As Good as it Gets), John Ratzenberger (better known as Cliff Clavin from Cheers), as well as distinguished scientists, Jaron Lanier, Dr. James Bower and Dr. Hisham El Sherif, and technology industry leaders, including Thomas M. Fitzgerald, Director of Education Sales at Dell Computer, Dr. Charles Geschke, President of Adobe Systems, and James Kinsella, Vice President and General Manager of MSNBC.

Congratulations to all of the finalist teams that participated in ThinkQuest 1998. Despite stiff international competition, student team members Alex Kulesza, David Green, Granite Christopher, and coaches Diane Bundy and Donald Hyatt won the Best of Contest Award for their entry, "The Soundry". Check out the site at: http://www.thinkquest.org/library/19537.html

You can see how each team placed in all of the Awards, including the GEM Award, the Collaboration Award, the Design Award Sponsored by Adobe Systems and the Java Award Sponsored by Microsoft at: http://www.thinkquest.org/library/98winners.html

A special thanks to Dell Computer Corp. for providing the computers for all of the Awards weekend activities and the ThinkQuest conference. Thanks also to Ambrosia Productions for a spectacular Awards Ceremony and assistance with the conference, and to Highwood Productions for the Generator at ThinkQuest.

• Announcements:

The 1998 COACH OF THE YEAR - LYNNE SUEOKA

To understand what makes a great coach we asked the students. Read the tributes written by student team members to their coaches, including the story of Coach of the Year Lynne Sueoka at: http://www.thinkquest.org/teach/coachoyear.html

THE DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS HAS BEEN EXTENDED!

The deadline for the applications for ThinkQuest and the Tomorrow's Teachers programs has been extended to March 31, 1999.

IMPORTANT CHANGES TO 1999 TOMORROW'S TEACHERS RULES!

Several changes in the Tomorrow's Teacher program rules have been made.
Those changes include the addition of an optional "Technology Mentor" and changes in the eligibility of K-12 teachers to include any certified professional staff member at a qualifying K-12 school, which includes teachers, technology coordinators, library media specialists and administrators. For more detail, please visit the following page: http://www.thinkquest.org/tqtt/rulesnew.html

APPLICATIONS ARE NOW ONLINE

For 1999, our online applications are new and improved. For all contests, access applications from: http://www.thinkquest.org/apponline.html

• Team in the News:

1998 Best of Contest winning team, The Soundry, was featured in the December 2, 1998 issue of the New York Times. The article, written by Pamela Mendels, can be found by searching the New York Times archives at: http://www.nytimes.com/

• Technical Tips and Hints Special Feature
  By Aaron Schlesinger

Designing a web site to be multilingual? Want to impress your foreign audiences by making them think your site was designed mainly for "their" language? This month's tip focuses on making the web server display the default language selection of whoever views your web page!
Step 1) Create your sites with the different languages. For this example we'll use Italian and English as our 2 choices.
Step 2) Name the index page for English index.html.en and index.html.it for Italian.
Step 3) create a file in your directory called index.var and set it up like this: (Note: items with a # are comments to help better explain what you are reading)

URI: index; vary="language"
# The URI is a filename without the .extension
URI: index.html.en
Content-type: text/html
Content-language: en

URI: index.html.it
Content-type: text/html
Content-language: it

That's it! Now your web page will display the English version for English browsers and Italian for Italian browsers! (Note: make sure that there is no file named index.html as that will take priority over the language negotiation) Here's a short list of some languages and their extensions:

English        en         Korean          ko
Italian        it         Russian         ru
French         fr         Spanish         es
Dutch          nl         Chinese         zh
German         de         Finnish         fi
Japanese       ja         Czech           cs

The ThinkQuest Newsletter is edited by Sonia McSweeney

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