Part D: 2009 ThinkQuest TRIO Rules
An Internet Challenge for TRIO Students 12-19 Years Old

(Rules comply with the Oracle Education Foundation’s Rules for the 2009 ThinkQuest Competition)

1. Schedule and Deadlines
Registration for ThinkQuest TRIO 2009 is available January 5, 2009.

Entries for ThinkQuest TRIO 2009 must be completed and submitted no later than the entry deadline of 5:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time, Friday, August 7, 2009.

Online judging of the entries begins immediately after the entry deadline. Judges decisions will be announced in the fall.

For registration and submission process, please go to the Step-by-Step guide for each activity.

2. Student Eligibility and Team Makeup
In order to participate in ThinkQuest TRIO, a student must be an active participant in an Upward Bound, Upward Bound Math/Science, Talent Search, or EOC program, or under special conditions, another federally funded project serving TRIO type students. An EOC student who meets the age criteria may also participate.  A team consists of three to six students and one to two coaches (a Primary coach and an Assistant Coach). Student members do not have to be the same age, be enrolled at the same school, or be from the same TRIO Program. In fact, students are encouraged to form teams and collaborate (via the Internet) with students from other programs. 

Each student team member must make significant contributions to the success of the team and be a full participant in the development of its entry. Coaches, in support of students' efforts, may help with team formation, provide guidance and encouragement, help students locate human, technical and information resources, help students with final uploads as well as help to manage the creation of student sites. Only student team members may work directly on the entry. All coaches and team members must have an active e-mail address that can be used for communication with the TRIO ThinkQuest staff. If any submitted information about a team member is found to be intentionally misrepresented, the team will be disqualified.

A student is eligible if he or she is:

• 12 to 19 years of age on April 1, 2009,
• not registered solely as a full-time student in an institution of higher learning (concurrent enrollment in secondary school and postsecondary is permitted),
• on active status in a currently funded Upward Bound, Upward Bound Math/Science, EOC or Talent Search Program, or under special conditions, another federally funded project serving TRIO type students, and enrolled at the elementary through secondary school level (or equivalent).

Restrictions:

• a student cannot be a member of more than one ThinkQuest TRIO team during one year,
• a team may have no more than one student who has been a member of a ThinkQuest TRIO Best of Contest Team or Oracle ThinkQuest Finalist Team.

A primary coach is eligible if he or she is:

• an employee of a TRIO Program
• is over the age of 21 on the TRIO ThinkQuest application deadline date.

An assistant coach is eligible if he or she is:

• an employee of a TRIO Program
• is over the age of 18 on April 1, 2009.

3. Qualities of the Entry

• The site must be an appropriate educational site for viewing by 12 – 19 year olds. Programs must monitor the selection of topics by teams and review the written content and media to assure that the diverse values and cultures represented in TRIO are respected.
  
  

• The site must clearly indicate the educational objectives or purpose of the site and indicate the intended audience.
  
  

• For the security of the students, personal information, including students’ last names and student email addresses or personal contact information must not appear on the site.
  
  

• The site must be intellectually honest.  (See Program Responsibility in Part F)
  
  

• The total size of the site may not exceed 100 mb.  Students may temporarily upload media files to the servers but need to remove unedited material within a week.  Students need to save their original media folders on servers other than the one provided for this activity.  Final edited versions of media should be the only files that remain on this server.
  
  
• All website content must be uploaded through the ThinkQuest TRIO portal of the Oracle Education Foundation; i.e., no portion of content (including multimedia, game files, guest books, blogs, and other hosting services) can be hosted on an external server (e.g., You Tube, Quia, etc). Students may provide outside links as resources, but judges will not judge outside links as content.
  
  

• Websites may not contain any commercial content that promotes the sale of a product or service either directly via the Website or via hyperlinks to external sites.  Commercial content includes but it not limited to logos, brand names, slogans, text, images, videos, or any type of multimedia file(s).
  
  

• Websites must be built to run within a browser based on the following guidelines:

• browser-based technologies such as Flash, Java script, dhtml, style sheets, and applets are supported;
• and server-based technologies such as PHP, Perl, SSI, Java, CGI and FrontPage extensions are NOT supported.
  
  

• The site must be able to be viewed on different browsers (including IE version 7, Firefox version 2, and Safari 3.1) and platforms (including Mac and PC) and at different connection speeds.  Teams are encouraged to test their Websites on a variety of machines and browsers.