Students Take Educated Tastes to the Web – February 14, 2008
Lexington Minuteman
For those who cannot make it to the Lexington Education Foundation’s (LEF) 19th annual Educated Tastes event or want to start their bidding early, most of the silent auction items can be previewed at www.educatedtastes.org , a Web site built by Lexington High School students.

The teachers who oversaw the design and construction of the Web site received Education Foundation grants several years ago to develop courses that focus on Web design for community and non-profit organizations and computer animation.

Jeffrey Harris, a computer science and Web design teacher in the Lexington High School math department, said the cornerstone of the Web development class is creating a project for a community client. “The students learn by creating a real product for a real client,” Harris said. “We were thrilled to be able to do this for LEF since an LEF grant started this program in the first place.”

“Creating the auction Web site was a challenge for the students — they had to make something visually interesting that was also easy to navigate and understand,” said Sean Hagan, a visual arts teacher who co-taught the class.

Building the Web site involved creating the framework and populating it with dozens of pictures of the various auction items. To organize the offerings, buttons were created for “Art,” “Entertainment,” “Food Glorious Food,” “Getaways,” “Health and Sports,” “Kids’ Stuff,” “Looking Good,” and “You and Your Home.” Auction items run the gamut, from tickets to sporting events and the arts, to restaurant gift certificates, to regional getaways and rental homes.

The students have even been able to create a mechanism to allow bidding by e-mail beginning Sunday, Feb. 24 and ending Friday, Feb. 29, at noon. Although bids can be placed by e-mail on silent auction items, only those attending Educated Tastes will be able to bid on live auction items. Educated Tastes will be held on Sunday, March 2, at the Boston Marriott at Burlington. The event will feature silent and live auctions, with the goal of raising funds to support Lexington’s public school system.