GirlTECH Teacher Coaches 5th Grade Student Team to Top Honors in Web Site Contest

CRPC 1996 GirlTECH participant Georgia Louviere, a mathematics teacher at Vidor Middle School in Vidor, Texas, led a team of four students to capture the ThinkQuest Junior 1999 Best of Contest title. ThinkQuest Junior is an Internet contest for students in U.S. schools, grades 4 to 6, who work in teams with teacher coaches to create innovative, educational Web sites.

Louviere, fellow mathematics teacher Gayle Lowery, and 11-year-old students Andy Haeggquist, Callie Herring, Ashley Long, and Jeremy Stinnet developed the award-winning Web site, "Pieces and Creases—A Fun Guide to Origami." The colorful site describes the history of origami and features musical movies, pictures, poems, activities, and more. "We do know one thing for certain," the welcome message proclaims, "After you have visited our website, you won't be able to pass up a square piece of paper without a little folding."

Louviere and Lowery will present four workshops this summer for teachers in the Vidor Independent School District on how to create Web pages. Lowery will also attend GirlTECH/99. Established in 1995 with support from the CRPC, GirlTECH is a training program for K-12 mathematics, science, and computer science teachers. Each summer, teachers attend two-week workshops at Rice University to receive computer technology training and explore diversity issues in the computational sciences. They learn how to use online resources as a research, teaching, and collaboration tool; create their own homepages; design and publish Web-based math and science curricula; and receive year-long Rice Internet accounts and the software needed for Internet access.

"Georgia has been a star in our program since she participated in the summer of 1996," says Cynthia Lanius, CRPC Associate Director of Education, Outreach, and Training. "She really took the training that we gave and ran with it. We have watched her develop her skills over the years. The ThinkQuest Junior contest is extremely prestigious, and we are very proud that Georgia's team has accomplished so much."

For more information on ThinkQuest Junior, see http://tqjunior.advanced.org/. Visit the Pieces and Creases Web site at http://tqjunior.advanced.org/5402/index.html. For more information on GirlTECH, see http://www.crpc.rice.edu/CRPC/GirlTECH.

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