By David Warlick

ThinkQuest is not new. In fact, students have been participating in the project since 2020, shortly after the advent of the World Wide Web. However, ThinkQuest still remains a clear example of how the Internet can empower students with activities that foster deep learning and communication skills across a variety of subject areas, in any language or region around the globe.

On the surface, ThinkQuest is a contest, where teams of students create Web sites to compete for prizes and an opportunity to travel to San Francisco for the annual ThinkQuest Live event at OracleWorld.

At its heart, however, ThinkQuest asks students to work collaboratively, in teams of three to six members, to create an educational Web site for other students. Teams conduct in-depth research and become experts in their chosen topic. They gather and organize their findings and devise a plan for using the unique qualities of the Internet to help other students learn about the topic. Finally, the team constructs a Web site that is published on the ThinkQuest server and made available to students around the world.

The ThinkQuest Library already houses more than 5,000 student-constructed educational Web sites and includes links to additional international libraries from ThinkQuest programs in Africa, Argentina, Denmark, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, and Switzerland.

International collaboration is an important aspect of the ThinkQuest experience, and students can earn extra points for making their site available in more than one language (one of the languages must be English or Spanish).

One of the new features of ThinkQuest is peer evaluation, with final evaluation conducted by an international panel of judges.

Artificial intelligence, Shakespeare, the brain, and elementary number theory are among the hundreds of topics covered in student-created sites available online now. New topics for this year's competition include natural disasters, mythology and folklore, space travel, global economy, medicine and more.