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There is a lot to be learned from our patients. If you have an office Website or are about to get one, you can find out what patients want to know. Let Svetlana, Valentin and Madeline tell you how their award winning site came about and then visit: The 1999 first place prize in Thinkquest's Health and Sports category. We encourage orthodontists to link this article from their office web sites so that their patients can view this article and visit this great site for kids in braces. http://www.oc-j.com/oct99/kidsweb.htm |
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In September of 1998 our fifth grade teacher, Ms. Alperstein, suggested that Svetlana, Valentin and I, Madeline, enter the national educational website competition for 4th to 6th grade students called Thinkquest Junior. We go to Public School 56 in Queens, New York City. We had no idea that this project would take seven months and is still continuing. We didn't know anything about the Internet or creating websites. One teammate didn't have a computer at home and the computer we worked on didn't have Windows 95. In addition, the school computers were old Apple computers. When kids get braces it is something that just happens one day. Kids don't know much about them and they have to live with them for a long time. We thought kids would be interested in knowing what to expect about the whole experience, so they wouldn't be afraid. I was supposed to get braces in January but my insurance forms kept getting lost. We didn't know how the kids in school would act when I got braces, but when I finally got them they just seemed curious. We started looking for information in bookstores and on Amazon.com, but there wasn't anything for kids. We found very good sites by orthodontists, but most of them were for adults. We divided the project into three sections. They are:
Since Val and Svetlana speak Russian, we thought it would be cool to translate some of the site into Russian and show how the Internet is international. We started drawing pictures for the website in school. We used them throughout the website and made a cartoon called "Sandy Gets Braces." The American Association of Orthodontists sent us statistics that we made into a bar graph. The NIDCR (National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research) gave us permission to use pictures from the Smithsonian's exhibit on dental history. We e-mailed many orthodontists in the United States and Canada to find out if we could use some of their information and pictures. It was incredible how many orthodontists responded to us and said they would help. I guess orthodontists like kids. Patients never get to find out what it's like to be an orthodontist so we wrote a long survey asking about their childhood, education and work. Eight orthodontists responded to the survey. The more people who responded to our e-mails, the more we wanted to do a website that would make them Happy they took a chance on a kid's project. Our teachers' son was about to have major surgery on his jaw. His Oral surgeon gave us a fantastic interview about computer imaging and how oral surgeons couldn't make the progress they have until they worked with orthodontists as partners. Companies like Teledyne and Sonicare also inspired us with their encouragement. As we learned to use the Netscape Composer software, downloaded from their website, our site grew. We had so much to learn! We made the pictures in school and our teacher converted the format of the pictures for a Windows™ site. We had to make sure that the site looked good in both Netscape™ and Explorer™. We had so much information that a lot of our time went to asking for permission to use it. Our acknowledgement page turned out to be 26 pages long. We almost lost that page on the last day of the competition. We worked up to midnight on the night of the deadline. We knew we had a good subject because kids from all over the United States started to write to our guestbook. When the kids part of Yahoo called "Yahooligans" featured it as a "Cool Site", we started to get guestbook entries from all over the world. In June 1999, our site won the first place prize in Thinkquest's Health and Sports category. It was unbelievable! At Thinkquest they said that the subject of the site expanded the idea of what educational sites could be. A representative from Thinkquest, and one of their German partners, came to visit our class. Our team and our teacher were invited to present our website at the National Education and Computers Convention in Atlantic City! President Clinton's advisor on computers and education, Ms. Linda Roberts, presented the award. It was so great. Many kids have written that the website has really helped them. We never thought we could make something so helpful for kids like us. We hope that orthodontist's tell their patients about Yo, It's Time for Braces at http://tqjunior.advanced.org/5029. We would love to read about their experiences with braces. |