A team of 9th grade students created a website on teen tech use for an international competition called ThinkQuest, which is sponsored by the Oracle Corporation, and placed second in the 16-year-old-and-younger category!
Lead by their coach, California math teacher Karen Salerno, the team goes long distance with one team member in Cincinnati who attends Indian Hill High School as a sophomore, Ivana Mowry-Mora. Ivana was joined by a former classmate of hers in Los Angeles who attends the Harvard-Westlake School, Nadia Rahman, as well as her classmates and friends Aaron Shih, Erina Szeto, and Nathan Szeto.
Their site, “From Laptops to LOLcats,” invites teens, parents, teachers, and others to “explore the pros and cons of teen tech use with them and to “Learn, think, discuss.” You can visit the site at: http://teentechuse.wordpress.com/.
As second-place winners in the digital media category for their age group, the team will travel to San Francisco in October to attend ThinkQuest Live, a four-day conference hosted by Oracle for first and second place winners from countries around the world, including India, China, Malaysia, Romania, Puerto Rico…the list goes on.
Every page in the site encourages visitors to post their opinions on the discussion topic. As they learned during the year-long process of creating their site, tech use is a topic that will continue to evolve over time and require critical thinking among teens.
You can learn more about the ThinkQuest competition at: http://www.thinkquest.org/en/
