Final Spurt at Home for the Switch – Junior Web Award
Yesterday we had a final spurt time at home: Our youngest son (14) had been finalizing the website he had created together with some classmates for the Junior Web Award, a Swiss national class competition for realising websites which closed this night at midnight. The contest was organised by Switch, the Swiss Education and Research Network, which is responsible for all Swiss domain registrations.
With the project they wanted to offer “teaching staff the possibility of integrating the topics of internet, domain names and websites in their school lessons. By having students gain insight into the structure of a website and letting them learn something about usability, for instance, they have been able to improve on their own personal information capability and enhance their media competence. At the same time, the competition has also allowed them to acquire other competences of central importance in the present-day world of work, such as teamwork and project management. It is precisely these aspects that have made the competition so valuable for vocational school classes too: planning and implementing a project (e.g. a website) jointly in a team and within a limited timeframe is a skill that is absolutely essential for professional life today.” More than 100 classes – or more than 2000 students – have created in excess of 100 websites in the categories of Design/Fun and Topic/Contents.
Our youngster however, didn’t have much of his web-knowledge and experience from school, but from his enthusiasm about creating websites. Since he was 12 he had started doing sites and studying web programming (he switched from reading Mickey Mouse to reading books on html- and php-programming…) and has done already some projects.
The site for the competition he called Freizeit und Sport (Leasure Time and Sport, for the contest section Design/Fun), of course housted on his own domain… He got some friends together to portray scenes from sport and hobbies, and one of his friends does really good photos. Another friend dropped off from the project 2 days ago, so that they had to realise with another one the missing section, and it worked out well.
Besides a school soccer cup of our community, where his class yesterday made the first rang, and a school band concert from his ex-school there was quite some stress around till the site was finalized, but it really turned out well, also in comparison with many other sites of the competition.
So in case you want to vote for this site in the contest, you can do it here (write Freizeit und Sport into the box) from June 18 – July 15.
