UPDATE - Today’s competition was the regional one and below I have marked how they did.
They were competing at the 7th - 8th grade level.
Hint - Every website won!!

Of my kids. No. Not my real kids. Although I am very proud of all five of them because they are, without exception, AWESOME KIDS.

But in this case I am talking about the kids I have been working with at the local middle school wherein I have been volunteering to teach web design for the last few years.

Tomorrow they will be going to their regional technology competition, where the will be competing in web design, robotics, programming, and General Applications. Here are some links. One of the requirements I made for the kids is that the look, feel and formatting for their sites use something called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Thats a lot harder than the older kind of web pages. All of them met my requirement. Plus they wrote the content and used other applications and tools such as The GIMP, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Flash.

Today I did a final review of their work and all I have to say is . . .
WOW!! Check out the links below and tell me they won’t win.

HONORABLE MENTION — FOOD - This is a team site using almost all AJAX. In other words, very sophisticated using the cutting edge technology used by Google, Yahoo and other big web companies to make fast and interactive web pages for building web-based applications. It has a random fact generator (Did You Know?) As well as an quizlet tool. The hard-core technical stuff here was all done by a 14 year old.

HONORABLE MENTION — ALTERNATIVE ENERGY - This is a team site that makes extensive use of another technology called Flash. Its only the most commonly used 3rd party add-on for websites to make them interactive and, well, “flashy”. For example, every time you watch a video on YouTube, you are using Flash. This site also has great content and is Standards Compliant. Impressive!

FIRST PLACE — HUMAN TRAFFICKING - This is a team site. Standards Compliant (Click on the two W3C images at the bottom of the home page).Great use of Flash (The Header. Plus see what happens when you click on the “Where is it Link”). Random Fact box. Great Content. WOW!

FIRST PLACE — DANCE - This is an individual site on Dance. Simple but very nicely done. With good use of CSS.

THIRD PLACE — ANCIENT EGYPT - This is an individual site that makes good use of CSS. and has a nice layout.

I will update this post when we have the results of their competetion.

Scott