ThinkQuest

» see thinkquest.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ThinkQuest started in 1996 as a contest. Allan H. Weis, who ran the nonprofit Advanced Network & Services after selling off its backbone business, put the money into asking schoolchildren to build educational websites and then judging them. Teams of students picked a subject and published a site about it. The good ones won scholarships, and under ANS the program handed out more than $1.5 million a year.

The Oracle Education Foundation acquired the website and the competition in 2002 and the thing became Oracle ThinkQuest. The scale under Oracle reached a lot further than the name suggests: participants in over 75 countries across six continents, and a project-building tool localized into eleven languages. Turkish was one of them.

By the time ThinkQuest spoke Turkish I was at university and well past the age it was built for. In 1996, when the contest started, I was twelve and still two years away from my first modem. The program also lived inside schools that had a web curriculum, which is a different internet from the one you found by yourself on a 33.6k line. ThinkQuest was something a teacher signed you up for.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the contest worked ~

Entries were team-built and subject-based, and the judging rewarded sites that taught something accurately over sites that looked expensive. Every qualified entry, winner or not, went into the ThinkQuest Library, which teachers and parents used as a reference long after the competition year it came from had closed.

April Wennerstrom ran the international training and evaluation side before Oracle arrived, working with educators and judges in other countries to find scholarship recipients. That is why the country count got as high as it did. Somebody had to go and build the judging network in each place.

~ the library ~

The Library was the part with a second life. A competition produces a winner once a year, but an archive of thousands of student-made educational pages kept getting linked by teachers who had never entered. For a stretch of the 2000s it held one of the better collections of plain, readable explanatory writing on the web, most of it written by people who were thirteen.

~ the email ~

There was no press release. In early 2013 teachers began posting on education forums that they had received a message from Oracle saying ThinkQuest would no longer be supported and that after June 2013 it would not be in use. One of them asked the obvious follow-up question, which was what free and student-friendly thing to move to instead. The answers came back Edmodo and Schoology.

The last competition ran in 2012. The initiative was discontinued as of 1 July 2013 and an archive of the Library was promised. thinkquest.org does not answer today.

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