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ThinkQuest to Honor Young Web Designers and Teachers from All Over the World at its 4th Annual Awards Weekend

This Year's Celebrity Presenters Include Boy Meet's World's Rider Strong, Olympic Gold Medallist, Kerri Strug, LaVar Burton of Star Trek fame, Academy Award Winner, Marlee Matlin, Comedian, Pauly Shore and Bill Nye, the Science Guy

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan Will Also be on Hand to Meet the Finalists

ARMONK, N.Y., November 10, 1999 - ThinkQuest®, a philanthropic and educational initiative, today announced that its 4th annual awards event to honor the winners of the ThinkQuest Internet Challenge and ThinkQuest for Tomorrow's Teachers contests will take place November 19-22 in Los Angeles. The event will bring together students and teachers from all corners of the world, for a weekend-long final competition to win almost $2 million in scholarships and cash awards.

As part of the ThinkQuest Internet Challenge, teams of students world-wide, ages 12 to 19,work together to create interactive, compelling and well-researched Web sites on educational topics of interest to them. These collaborative efforts foster friendships and life-long skills. ThinkQuest Internet Challenge teams work for more than eight months to gather data, conduct research, and learn about the Internet as a collaborative medium as they build educationally rich sites. This year's more than 150 ThinkQuest Internet Challenge finalists have been selected from a pool of more than 10,000 applicants and are from cities as far away as Essex Junction, Vermont and Auckland, New Zealand. Upon completion, the entries become a permanent part of the ThinkQuest Library, available to teachers, students, and Internet users across the globe.

"As the Internet has evolves, so do the entries in the ThinkQuest competitions," said Allan H. Weis, founder of ThinkQuest. "This year, we are seeing the deployment of exciting technologies for the creation of incredibly informative, highly interactive, and fun to use sites. The world is in transition, and the ThinkQuest programs help children harness the skills they will need to be successful in the new millennium including information literacy and the ability to use technology as an extension of themselves. This global project featuring international teams fosters collaboration among students and teachers with varying degrees of technical experiences and different backgrounds."

"When you take a look at these web sites, you would never guess that they were created by everyday kids, said Rider Strong of television's Boy Meets World. "I look forward to meeting this year's finalists and getting a few pointers for my own Web site."

The ThinkQuest for Tomorrow's Teachers competition challenges teams of K-12 teachers, prospective teachers and college and university faculty to build content-rich and easy-to-implement Web-based educational materials for K-12 classrooms and teacher-education programs. By working in teams, teachers, university faculty and prospective educators draw upon their individual strengths and share their diverse knowledge and talents with the rest of their team as they create their contest entry. Composed of four-to-seven members, the teams create quality Internet-based educational material that encourages teachers to use technology as an everyday tool for learning.

The weekend culminates on November 22 with the awards ceremony where leaders in the fields of education, science, technology, and government, along with several notable education luminaries from around the world, will announce the winners of both contests. Adding to the excitement, this year's ceremony will feature celebrities, including Olympic gold medallist Kerri Strug, Academy Award Winner Marlee Matlin, Comedian Pauly Shore, LeVar Burton of Star Trek fame, Kim Kerberger, author of "Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul," and the Science Guy himself, Bill Nye. Nye has dedicated his career to letting kids know that science is not only cool, it's powerful. The ThinkQuest competition furthers Nye's commitment to making science relevant to youth. Los Angeles Mayor, Richard Riordan will also attend the event to meet the finalists.

The judging for both competitions is conducted by the Internet Society. This panel of experts looks for compelling and accurate educational content, technical excellence, interactivity, and imaginative use of graphics. Teams are also assessed on how well team members collaborate on their entries by sharing their individual knowledge, skills, efforts, and contributions with other team members.

ThinkQuest program participants learn invaluable skills, whether they are in grade school, college-bound or heading for a vocational career. A number of ThinkQuest's students start their own Web design businesses while still in high school and use a combination of the moneys earned from their efforts along with their contest winnings to help pay for college tuition. ThinkQuest programs are sponsored by Dell, Global SchoolHouse at Lightspan, Goldman Sachs, Nortel Networks, and Spencer Trask.

About ThinkQuest
Since its inception in 1996, 50,000 young Web designers from 100 countries have participated in the not-for-profit ThinkQuest programs, competing yearly for nearly $2 million in scholarships, cash awards and technology products for themselves and their schools. The challenge encourages collaboration, leadership, and critical thinking and helps raise students' self-esteem, along with their technological skills. Collectively these students, many of whom are new to technology, have created nearly 3,000 Web sites on topics ranging from Shakespeare to space exploration to holistic health practices. These Web sites are found in the ThinkQuest Library at www.thinkquest.org, the most heavily trafficked educational destination on the Internet with an estimated 20 million hits per week.