Phillip Dhingra, a junior at Rancho Bernardo High School in San Diego, was part of
a three-student international team that won the 1998 ThinkQuest Internet Challenge in
graphic design. ThinkQuest is an international program for students ages 12 through 19
that encourages them to use the Internet to create web-based educational materials. The
three young men, each of whom had an adult adviser, won $20,000 scholarships to the
colleges of their choice.
When I was 13, I came up with a computer gaming site called Exscape. One of the main
things I like about the web is that I can put something up there that anyone can see. You
know, when you're a little kid, the only way of communicating with the wider world is by
having a lemonade stand or something. But if you put your project on the web, it's there
24 hours a day, seven days a week, worldwide. I basically treated the site like a
magazine, where I would get volunteers from across the Internet who wanted to write
reviews on games, and then we put them online for other people to see.
When ThinkQuest first started sponsoring the Internet Challenge in 1996, I read about
it in the newspaper but didn't enter. The next year I heard that the person who won the
grand prize in 1996 had been contacted by Stanford University and asked to apply. Well, I
really want to go to Stanford, so I'm like, 'If I win this contest, that's my ticket.'
My two teammates, Garrett Hamann from Texas and Tobias Kohler from Germany, were both
finalists in 1997, and so was I. We met at the awards ceremony that year. Part of the
judging criteria is the international diversity of your teammates. The larger the
challenge you take on, the larger the boundaries that separate you from your teammates,
the more points you score. So it's an incentive to work with students from around the
world, from different time zones, different cultural backgrounds.
The three of us scheduled weekly meetings through online chat rooms. We'd also
communicate via e-mails. We divided up the site into three different tasks: programming,
graphics, and content development. I did the graphics and the design. Then one person,
which was me, took all the pieces and put them together. The only time we all met together
was at the awards ceremony when we won.
The idea for our multimedia web site, which we called EgyptWorld, came from Garrett. He
wanted to create a site based on an ancient civilization because he wanted to make a game
where someone could be the Pharaoh or king and run an empire. And Tobias wanted to do
Egypt because he knew a little bit of the hieroglyphic language.
I think I learned far more about Egypt working on this computer design project than I
ever would have studying it in a class. I just went to see the movie "The
Mummy," and I kept seeing all these inaccuracies.
The project required that I work really hard and also work well with my teammates. When
you say things online, emotion doesn't exist, so you have to communicate in a way that
properly conveys your meaning. It was really hard at first with my teammates because I
couldn't tell whether they were being sarcastic, humorous, sad, happy, angry, or whatever.
Right after winning, I got a couple of job offers from some local Internet start-ups.
I'm currently employed at a company called Go2 Systems. Plus I have my own web design
company that I started with my coach from EgyptWorld. And I'm not even out of high school
yet!
