This website was created by Jennifer Claro (photo of me above, taken just after completing this website :) as a requirement for the graduate course Internet Resources and Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada. Following is an explanation for how I put it together.

A. Finding the Websites

I used Google and Vivismo to do my initial searches. in both cases I entered "children science websites". Google came up with 1,820,000 results, so I further refined the search by adding "K-6" which is my chosen age group. This narrowed it down to only 15,900, all of which I visited. Just kidding. In fact I only read and visited the top 20 because there were so many directories of children's websites which I found in my Google search and my Vivismo search (which turned up 163 results). By searching through the directories of children's websites I could find all the sites I was looking for. In fact, it was hard to sift through the multitude I found, and I wish I could have included more.

B. Finding the Images

In fact, for me it was much harder to find the images I was looking for. I wanted big photos with pixels of 600 x 800 or bigger. I didn't realize that Google Images offers views of small, medium, or large images, so I wasted some time before finding this tool. I used Google Image Search and initially entered search terms like"science kids" or "science children" which did bring up photos, but of real children, which I felt was inappropriate for my site since I did not have permission from those children to use their photo. So I changed my tactics and used search terms like "insect macro" to find the wasp photo and the simple term "science" to find the scientific photos and images. I do not have the authors' permission to use these photos. All images are, however, linked to the site where I found them. Just click on the image. In the future I will ask the authors for permission to use their photos if I decide to leave this website online. In the meantime, I will not put any META tags in my HTML so it will be difficult to find this website.

C. Writing the HTML

I used the book HTML Goodies (the book, not the website). It explained everything I needed to know for making this basic website. I had thought of trying to use CGI but ran out of time. As well, it really isn't needed on this website. Perhaps a future project?

I'd like to thank Dr. McLean for assigning us this project. I learned so much by doing it, and I have a website online as a result, something I had been hoping to do for some time now.

Last updated August 13, 2004.