ThinkQuest NYC Judging is Complete
Well, my part of the judging for TQNYC has been done for some time and I’ve been meaning to do a write up. For those that do not know, TQNYC is a website competition for children in K-12 schools that is initially judged by industry “experts”. The students are required to design and build an educational site about a topic of their choosing. The primary guideline is that the site must inform the reader of something.
Other than procrastinating until the last minute to do my judge-ly duties, the event was a complete success. Luckily, there were a few categories that needed additional judging after the event had officially completed, so I was able to cram a few more into my schedule. See 2006 TQNYC Internet Challenge Finalists to see which entries were judged to be the best.
First of all, the project is a great project, integrating language, technology, research and teamwork. These are all skills will serve the students far more greatly than remembering how the War of 1812 ended (I’ll save you the trouble, it was a stalemate). In addition to the sheer coolness of the project, I had some selfish reasons for wanting to be involved. As a web design hack from way back, I must admit, I was curious about how today’s students see web design. I had questions that needed answered and they could only be answered by the first generation to grow up (for the most part) with the Internet at their fingertips.
Do they still use the blink tag (like so many did on our their first webpage)? Are animated .gif files still cool? How does a 10 year old choose a color scheme? Do they know about standards yet? Does Information Architecture even exist before most students get to college?
What did I see?
Readers, rest assured. Animated .gif files are just as cool as they were in 1994-1995!
The best way to describe what I saw would be to say that I saw the internet as it was in my early days of using the Internet. Static HTML pages, maybe 5-7 pages in the entire site, all of the files in the same directory. As you would expect, animated .gif files, cursive fonts, richly colored background images and illegible text were the norm.
What truly shocked me was not how much the fact that they had spent more of their lives on the Internet affected their designs, but how little. It was truly like stepping into a time machine and going back to the days of GeoCities, Tripod, or other like sites from the mid 90’s. I saw ornate buttons that could have been modern art masterpieces, but were completely illegible. Before beginning the judging process, I didn’t know what to expect, but after I logged in, I was right back at home, complete with a guestbook and other retro pluggable interactive content.
What did I learn?
Good Design + Good Content is hard to find. It doesn’t matter how old you are.
It certainly seemed like the students had many of the same problems modern web designers and software developers have. How often do you find a great piece of software with terrible UI or a beautiful piece of software that doesn’t do anything useful? As we would expect, the students were not immune to these problems. Many of the groups were able to pull off either good design or good content, but a site that reflected both was rare.
Why is this so rare? Is it a symptom of how the children (and eventually adults) have been socialized? In reality, I would expect that we find that this is due to the students preferring those who have like skills. Those with a high technical aptitude are already segregated from those with people skills as early as grade-school without any assistance from corporate America.
This reminded how vital it is that site design is performed as a collective effort between those with differing skillsets. In my experience, a site is best cultivated by at least three types of pesonalities. Firstly, the team will need a technical person (”nerd”). This person will insure that the site meets technical requirements, such as standards compliance, browser compatibility, and performance concerns. Secondly, the team will need a designer (”artist”). This person will insure that the site looks beautiful and that it is easy to use. Thirdly, the team will need a language expert (”editor”). The editor will insure that the textual content of the site is grammatically correct and that the site language is written at a level that lends itself to consumption by web users.
How did I do?
My scores were probably inconsistent with many of the other judges, partially because I value simple design. A simple, elegant design with 2-3 colors and easily readable fonts would score highly in my evaluation, while one cluttered with graphics would not. It may not be a suprise that none of the sites I judged are finalists, of course it may just be luck of the draw. Toward the end of the judging cycle, it sounded like judges were ditching broken sites in order to judge sites they could say nice things about (either that or they procrastinated too).
One of the criteria on the rubrick I was glad to see was the expectation that the sites cite content “borrowed” from another site. However, since so much of the content was regurgitated from Wikipedia, one of the difficulties I had was attempting to determine how much of the content was actually written by the students. Certainly, it was easy to tell where there were borrowed animated .gifs (and suprisingly the students remembered to at least list the site from which they lifted the images). This is probably due to the fact that my background is in technology, rather than education. Although, I wonder how educators make the determination when grading papers, especially if the student is clever enought to skim the paper and make sure it is not “too” good.
Overall, the process was a pleasure and I tried to provide adequate feedback to each site for each section of the rubrick. Sometimes that was impossible as the site was incomplete or so completely broken that it could not be navigated. One of my most common comments was, “check your links!”. I found many dead links, but a lot of them were due to designers who used a Microsoft Windows workstation and uploaded the files to a UNIX server and did not check the links after the upload.
In Reflection
I’m sure that one day some of the students who were involved with the contest will read this and feel that they have been judged harshly. It’s easy to see this analysis as criticism. It isn’t. I have tried to look at trends that I saw during the contest and to draw parallels to modern web design, sometimes in a humorous way. My first website was no better than any of those I judged. The fact that the students were able to build a site with educational content and put it on the web to be judged is commendable and all of the students should feel good about their entries. My only regret will be that I did not get to go to the awards ceremony and meet some of the groups that submitted entries.