Time and again as the Internet Science and Technology Fair's staff viewed the evaluations from throughout the year, it became apparent that the foundation for a winning ISTF Project was great teamwork. Students, teachers and technical advisors alike remarked on the need for all of the team members to communicate often, share ideas, delegate the workloads and in the end, learn to compromise in order to achieve a final product the team could be proud to submit.

For students, learning to work together was an adventure sometimes exhilarating and sometimes exasperating. Most students who participated in the ISTF had numerous other commitments including extracurricular activities, heavy course loads and often part-time jobs. It is amazing how well all the students did, considering that for most, this was their first year of participation in the ISTF.

Teachers also found that it was not always easy to arrange for team meetings because of their own commitments to other school activities. But many commented on how proud they were of their teams for taking control and arranging to meet together, sometimes even in chat rooms from their own home computers. Other teams "met" by forwarding URLs and valuable information to each other via e-mail in order to keep their projects on track. Almost all of the teams felt that they learned valuable lessons about how to manage their time wisely, how to communicate effectively, and how to work toward the common goal of creating an attractive and informative website.

Over half of the student teams had dedicated technical advisors and communicated with them via e-mail on a regular basis. Improving communication between the students and technical advisors continues to be the ISTF Program's greatest challenge. These professional men and women took on the responsibility of helping teams to find key information about the National Critical Technologies (NCTs) and develop technical applications the teams were working on. As professionals, they asked questions to keep teams focused and they provided valuable insights based on their fields of expertise. Since the technical advisors too had major time commitments, it was interesting to learn that many felt they could and would have provided more help if the teams had asked for it.

The ISTF projects you will find on this website under Winners represent a small fraction of the hours of study and work done by student teams. Of the teams that complete the competition, about one-third usually advance to the final round of judging and between 5% to 15% receive awards. The winning websites represent the very best of the program. However, all of the teams that competed worked very hard on their ISTF projects.  The University of Central Florida's College of Engineering and Computer Science (UCF-CECS) recognizes all students, teachers and technical advisors who participated and completed the ISTF Challenge.