Quest ends in achievement

The website: searchpune.com/maitrayieehtml Developed by: Maitrayiee Palwe, a slender 11-year-old Class VI student of St. Helena's School....

The website: searchpune.com/maitrayieehtml Developed by: Maitrayiee Palwe, a slender 11-year-old Class VI student of St. Helena8217;s School. Reason for developing the website: Read on.It was on November 14, 1998, that the Pune edition of The Indian Express launched a quiz series entitled Quest Milestones in Science8217;. The series, targeted at Pune8217;s English medium schools, focussed on 200 scientists, both of Indian and foreign origin, whose thumbnail sketches were prepared by the scientists of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre BARC, Mumbai. The students taking part in the quiz were expected to add more information, other than that offered in the clippings, and put all of it in a scrapbook. When Maitrayiee first heard about this quiz series in her school, it aroused her curiosity enough for her to participate in the quiz.

And right from the month of November itself the enthusiastic youngster started gathering the requisite information in right earnest. Says Maitrayiee, 8220;I was very curious about the scientists and my curiosity was further aroused as the paper published about more and more scientists in the series. As I probed for more information on them, I came across an amazing wealth of information regarding the contributions which they had made in the field of science and how they had gone about doing it. There was also information on what travails they had had to go through while making these contributions.8221;

This gathering of information went on for quite a long time, and by the end of March 8217;99, her room was full of papers and nothing but papers; all devoted to the information on scientists and their achievements.

The second stage was to put the information in the scrapbook. At this juncture, Maitrayiee faced a practical problem. The loads of information that the youngster had so painstakingly accumulated and was still collecting proved to be too much for the scrapbook because, as Maitrayiee herself says, 8220;The information accumulated on each and every scientist till that point of time was really too much and the scrap book did not have that many pages to accommodate all the information. At the most, I could just give two to three pages to each scientist and I felt that this would not do justice to the work that I had taken up.8221;

Faced with this practical problem, Maitrayiee realised that an alternative had to be found. And it came sooner than she thought possible. As a daughter of a website developer and one who also runs a computer academy, Maitrayiee was aware of the immense capacity of the computers and the ultimate ocean of information called the Internet. This lover of basketball sport hit upon the idea of putting all the information on the Net by creating a website of her own. With full support from her father, Manoj Palwe, Maitrayiee took upon this new activity with infinite zest. As she says, 8220;The idea was to give more in-depth information about the scientists and their discoveries. The Internet seemed a very feasible idea to do just that without worrying about how much space it would consume.8221; And as she adds with an impish grin and a twinkle in her eyes, 8220;It was a good strategy to collect infinite information on the scientists and put it in this infinite load of information as one of the selection parameters of the quizwas how much information the participant would give on each scientist.8221;

From April onwards, without disclosing her strategy, this upcoming pianist started devoting about two to three hours after her studies everyday in developing the website. The whole effort took about ten to fifteen days. Apart from continuing to collect information from libraries, Maitrayiee started to download information from the Net too. Going through the search engines on each and every scientist was a mind-boggling task and at times information was procured but the person sought was different.

So what Maitrayiee did was to make the search8217; sharper by setting out specific parameters. But even in this there cropped up another problem. There was a mine of information on the scientists of foreign origin but next to nothing information on the scientists of Indian origin, for example, B.C. Shankara and Muscati Jayakar. She had to depend on libraries for this and it proved to be her Achilles heel as she could not gather adequate information on them and had to finally contend with a consolation prize.

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As the quiz drew to a close, Maitrayiee had not only completed her scrapbook but website as well. The website contains first an introduction to Maitrayiee and then the information on the 200 scientists and their discoveries. And to let the judges know about her extra effort, Maitrayiee put in the information about the website and how the judges could go to that website in her scrapbook.

It was only after the quiz results were declared that Maitrayiee8217;s secret became public knowledge. In fact, Maitrayiee says that creating the website was a good idea because now anyone wanting to know about the scientists can just login to that website and get the information. She says, 8220;Although the quiz may be over, whenever I get time I will update the website. It is not only to increase my horizon of all this scientific knowledge but to let others also imbibe the additional information.8221;

What strategy will she adopt to tackle the next Quest series on Badge of Honour8217;? The youngster who desires to be a pilot replies, 8220;Wait one year. You will know when I will win the first prize.8221;