ThinkQuest has always been my labour of love. It’s not even a labour. It’s been always love. It was love at first sight. Late 2000, I stumbled upon a participant’s entry while searching for information. I hooked up, looked for ways I could find more information before I finally decided to participate. I was so engaged with the concept: a dynamic and challenging way to do something that I loved to do that time (making a website), a fun medium to find friends, and the excitement of feeling involved in an ongoing project of global scale discussing global issues, with people I never met.

The excitement factor was the most that kept me going. Communicating, sharing text and pictures to strangers that were closer to the heart than they seemed to be. Instant gratification of sharing ideas with no preceding judgments. It feels fairly different than doing this with the friends, or teachers, or any adults you’ve dealt or known with before. We are not normally eluded by someone’s backgrounds. We focus, rather than what should be done, or who will make that done, in what could be done. We don’t see the people, we don’t judge the people. Alright, we might see (and must) see the people first, but we skip that fast to see beyond. It’s best done with newly made friends who got recommended by another newly made friends who got recommended by, well, a fairly newly made friend from last year, or a couple of months ago. The more diverse it is, the much more fun.
Then there is the phase where we finalise the team and starts to build relationship and communication through variety of methods. I’ve had forums that lasted throughout and filled with hundreds or even thousands of posts. Then I’ve also had mailing lists which serve as a sole form of interaction, or just one that acted as file sharing device. We also exchanged instant messaging accounts, and in special cases, phone numbers. We got into action right away. Set things up. Then begins the next fun step: defining the topic. Firsthand email or message got broadcasted, asking everyone to enlist topic choices as far as they can go. Democratic process pretty much ensued. Shortlisting, voting, everything. We challenge each other’s ideas, sharpens topic choices as they get coned down to a top three. Everyone of us starts fiddling around with ideas and possibilities. We might make an awesomely insane interactive map showing historic data. Try having a Flash game defended as something that will be a turn-based strategy game letting users decide on an epidemic disease. We’ll likely use an exotic language never been before used in the 75,000+ richness of ThinkQuest Library. Yes, this will be something. We’ll make a legacy!
Planning, planning, more planning before executing. Something that not all will like doing since it involves routines. Setting up deadlines, milestones, meeting points, task divisions. We’ll define each person’s skills and assign that someone with the appropriate tasks. You do the research and writing. The other will do the programming and design, and the rest stays with language translation, art-making or photography. Sometimes one person could traverse another realms, if they like doing so. No problem. When will we consult the coaches? When we have problems—or we have something delicate to do that needs advices. Can we use this specific image from Time magazine? How can we visit the forest reserve that seems to have a difficult bureaucracy? All the difficult questions.
When A starts writing, B would start making site visits. Then C stays in front of his screen tweaking his templates, before uploading to the forum to show his creations to the team and coaches. D assists A in writing, and will continue translating written materials into Spanish. E, the youngest, likes to draw and makes good art. She also wants to help C with some Flash animation. While B does his job observing on-site, he takes notes on his laptop, sends over original pictures and text to A and D. Coaches will take the back seat, observing the forum, attending to IM chats and probably phone calls, to make reviews and recommendations. Oh, did I mention that A and B lives on the same country, but different city; while C is fairly isolated hundreds of kilometres away. D lives in a place in a timezone that is about 8 hours difference. E lives in a different country than D, even, although in the same timezone. Can you even imagine they speak 3 different languages? Or that some of them have never built any website? Or, to complete this, someone must walk 9 kilometres away to find the nearest Internet cafe? Some of this was a real condition that I experienced in ThinkQuest as a student.
What’s next? Personally, I would not be surprised to find myself always wanting to go home after school just to immerse myself in the forum. After finding some surprising facts and done some work, I would really look forward to the weekend for a monthly team meeting. Getting up at 5am for the meeting seems to be a delightful breakfast. I keep daydreaming about what I’d do next, in any condition: during school breaks, or even during study hours! It is so engaging that, to quote one participant’s words in a ThinkQuest promotional video, “we actually made time for it because of enjoyment.” How amazingly, yet pleasantly, true.
Milestones reached, a masterpiece is being crafted. A masterpiece of everyone’s hard labour and pride. Obstacles exist, in a way that is sometimes also harsh. We argued. We missed some milestones set. Idealism vs. reality. We have to dump some dreams in order to realistically make this happen and finish. Not a problem, after all, even though you don’t reach the sky, you’ve aimed for it. Then you fall for the immediate checkpoint: the cloud.
Last minute rush and sleepless nights often concluded things, in a fun, exciting, and sometimes in an emotionally feel-good way. You’ll finish the seven or eight months hardwork by paying tributes to friends and families, letting them to know and visit your freshly-brewed website. You and your teammates savour it to bits, perhaps should also regret something that hasn’t been included because of time or other constraints. But it’s fine, you’ve finally finished a huge project. If you don’t even finish it, you surely had learned something: perhaps there are something that didn’t work. Let’s make it better next time.
This personal outlook that I’ve had is what I believe will be eventually missing from today’s ThinkQuest. I daresay, ThinkQuest competitions have lost the charm of a personal learning experience. It no longer supports the kind of excitement that builds in gradually, and finishes off so memorably. In the competition (now should be with “-s”), every time I see the winners list each passing year, the quality keeps degrading. Moreover, they feel pretty generic. People have focused more on winning. People have also focused more on technical matters than the quality of the topics and information. Same faces keep churning out year after year. Attention to details has vanished somewhere. So many to complain about.
It feels like manufacturing. A robotic process. Year after year.
The latest models of the competition lacks dynamism, the nostalgia of challenge, the excitements. Excitements are limited to winning the awards and going to ThinkQuest awarding ceremony.
The true gem of ThinkQuest is that it starts with serendipity with some predictability. It starts with a question. It never, and will never ever start with predefined curriculums. It should be contained in a model that sparks curiosity, opens the widest doors of participation, and a process throughout that is very dynamic, providing continual challenges of the mind and soul.
What should the next ThinkQuest be like? Whether it is a competition, or a competition with an embedded project learning environment (or vice-versa), it should induce questioning, provide a platform that is less intimidating and more accommodating. Make it less complicated, less cluttered for students (and teachers) to participate. Perhaps, a simpler platform, with less complicated attributes, would be able to spark more participation. Or, the same attributes, the same platform, but with a more personal or community approach. So much about the intangible aspects that will propel this in the future, not rules, nor curriculum demands.
After a while, it’s been my thought that what brought me this far with ThinkQuest is all that I’ve said - not rules, not curriculum demands, not teachers. And yet, my teams and I still did project-based learning. Maybe anyone would care to conclude if I’ve even developed 21st Century Learning skills?
ThinkQuest as a competition is already a star on its own. Don’t kill it just for the sake of any format. Are we killing creativity? Are we killing imagination? With all the tools we have, do we have what it takes to bring it alive? ThinkQuest isn’t owned by any party or institution. It belongs to us all, it has always ever been so.