A very professional website, designed by students from Chamberlayne Park School in Southampton, won the first prize in the South West Hampshire Website Challenge. The competition, now in its third year, attracted teams representing schools within the Winchester, Eastleigh, New Forest, and Southampton areas.
The competition was launched by co-sponsors Solent Skill Quest and Aimhigher in March 2008 at the University of Southampton. Representatives from the Nuffield Theatre and The Point, Eastleigh, invited students from each school to develop a 10-page website for either of the organisations and gave them all a brief on expected outcomes.
IT specialists are in urgent demand for the ever increasing World Wide Web environment and the Website Challenge provided the students with an excellent opportunity to develop their skills and consider further and higher IT educational courses. Many of those taking part will have been encouraged to consider IT related careers.
Having developed the websites within their respective schools, five teams of students were then selected to progress to the final. This was held in June in the Nightingale Theatre, within the University of Southampton campus. At the final, each team delivered a 20-minute presentation, which provided an opportunity to demonstrate their planning and creative skills. The panel of judges included Renaud Clark of Atelier Studios, Keith Taylor of British Computer Society, and Matthew Fox of Microsoft.
Matt gave an exhiliarating presentation on new developments at Microsoft. He said
"Technology and the internet are having an impact on people's lives on a daily basis - influencing both their lifestyle, and their work style, the way in which people learn, and the way in which people teach. The exponential change is set to continue - hardware costs continue to fall, the range of personal devices that people own is predicted to increase, and the internet will play a huge part in how individuals (and groups) access services, applications and content."
The presentation provided the audience with food for thought about the impact they are having on education, as they discussed web-based methods of storing content, collaborating and connecting people and institions.
Chamberlayne Park School students collected the prestigious glass trophy, as well as an invitation to a show at The Nuffield Theatre. Students from Regents Park Girls School collected the runner-up award.
