When this group was planning ThinkQuest, was the collaboration idea important from the beginning?
Yes. Let me give you a little genesis of this. The Internet is a wonderful, wonderful tool for education. And I was worried about a couple of things. As wonderful as it is, it also has the potential of further separating the gap between students that are going to schools that are very high on the information technology ladder and students that are going to schools that are not quite as high. I was also worried that teachers wouldn’t teach subjects or wouldn’t teach computers if they were not familiar with the technology. And most teachers weren’t. I was also concerned that the materials that the students get in the schools are being built by adults. When I work with my nephew–he’s a little kid, and he beats me at Nintendo all the time–his mind thinks differently than mine does. He’s been brought up in a different world than I was brought up in. He learns differently than I learn. When he goes to school in a couple of years he’s going to be taught using the same materials that I was t
