The latest SkillsUSA Championships, a national Web design competition, honoured with a gold medal two senior students from North Allegheny whose team was complemented by the North Hills graduate William Fox. The last month's national championships that took place in Kansas City, Mo., evaluated over 4,000 students competing in 77 skill areas. The web design participants had to complete the task of creating a functioning web site for a nonprofit organization.
The event incorporated local, regional, state and national competitions in which students demonstrated their occupational and leadership skills. The SkillsUSA programs provided a work station, a storyboard and an electrical outlet. All the participating teams had to bring with them personal supplies such as laptop computers with Ethernet connections, related software, and design and development tools needed to build a complete Web site.
The entries were judged by a panel of four experts on the basis of certain criteria developed by the World Organization of Webmasters. A 20-point written exam was carried out; each entry could get up to 15 points for overall visual appeal, mechanical aspects, look and feel, navigation, compatibility and code structure and design; up to 10 points were intended for professionalism; and up to five points - for scaffolding process and richness of process.
The gold-medal team is comprised of Francesco DeSensi, Christopher Brack and William Fox who first got the trio together. Before taking part in the SkillsUSA competition, Brack, DeSensi and Fox took fourth place in an international data modeling competition sponsored by Oracle, behind schools from Virginia, Romania and the United Kingdom. They also won the local and regional competitions held at Beattie in late 2003. The state competition was at Beattie in April.
The students of Beattie's Oracle Internet Academy program stood out of the highly-competitive multitude of 30 other teams. Along with their gold recognitions, they were rewarded with $3,000 worth of software and memberships to the webmasters' organization. In the opinion of Beattie's information technology coordinator, the trio is so talented that at least one of these guys will be a Bill Gates.
What are the truly talented guys figuring out to do from now on? Currently, Fox is looking to attend Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Information Technology where he wants to study information technology, information systems management, database administration, and network administration.
Brack and DeSensi, in turn, have already embarked on their successful web design career. The pair, along with North Allegheny junior Aaron Marks, operate their own Web design business, ultimadesigns.com. They are dealing with designing home pages and publishing businesses' catalogs online and are currently working on a system that is possible to be accepted by BMW for customer retention application.
