Local high school students win web contest, trip to England

As part of the annual Global Awareness Project and competition, Early College High School freshmen McKenna Gordon and Brittany Stump won a trip to England today for building a website that explores the topic of Human Migration. The announcement came during a lunchtime ceremony on the Costa Mesa campus.

 Early College High School (ECHS)—a joint-effort between Coastline Community College and the Newport Mesa Unified School District—hosts the Global Awareness Project competition each year with a focus on worldwide issues. Students compete in teams of four, with two students hailing from the local ECHS and two students hailing from a similar high school in England. The students collaborate on the project for months (connecting via e-mail and social networking sites) with an end-goal of creating an attractive and informative website on the assigned topic.

This year’s topic, Human Migration, was something that instructor and project-coordinator Lisa Rodriguez was passionate about. Rodriguez teaches Anthropology to ECHS students and felt the topic of Human Migration was both important and timely.

“It’s rare that students have exposure to this topic at such a young age,” she said. “I was impressed by their level of interest and by the amount of things they learned from this.”

In addition to winners McKenna Gordon and Brittany Stump, Rodriguez noted that there were nine other local ECHS students involved in this year’s competition, including Javon McGriff, Ana Martinovic, Neal Lawton, Mary Simich, Nathaniel Zucker, Carlos Guerra, Max Mendez, Juan Grajales, and Nolan Daigle.

Upon hearing their names announced as winners, both students immediately dialed their parents to tell them the news. “I just called my mom,” said McKenna Gordon. “She announced it to her whole office and everyone was screaming!” McKenna’s mom is Kymberly Gordon who works at Woodland Elementary in Costa Mesa.

Judging of the sites was based on the quality of the information communicated, suggestions made to improve the situation/problem, resources cited, artwork, extra research done to better explain the topic, spelling and grammar, user-friendliness of the design, and the visual appeal. Serving as judges were John McDermott, a Professor of Anthropology from Fullerton College; Barbara Erickson, a Professor of Anthropology from Cal State Fullerton; and Kenneth Schaffer, a special agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

 “All of the sites were good, but the winning site had great visuals and was easy to use,” said Kenneth Schaffer. “All of the kids did a great job considering the weight of the topic,” he continued.

Links to the sites created by the students can be found at www.coastline.edu/echs.

McKenna and Brittany will travel to England for a week this summer to meet their U.K. teammates face-to-face for the first time. Their teammates in the U.K. will later travel here, to Orange County, to visit with McKenna and Brittany on their home-turf.