These Awards have been set up to celebrate excellence in web publishing supporting education for all. They encourage creativity, originality, new content and new participants in the world of web site communication. The quality of the content, design, functionality, audience awareness and interactivity were deciding factors in making the 2002 Awards. The Awards aim to showcase the best of educational web publishing, and encourage organisations and institutions to contribute to the National Grid for Learning.

For further information see http://www.becta.org.uk/websiteawards/

What the judges thought:

Lots of very engaging material

• Head2Head is a brilliant concept offering interviews with Henry VIII and Adolf Hitler, who will each answer natural language questions about their lives.
• Interaction is provided to help get these characters answering the questions correctly - you can submit any question to the moderator to which you did not get the right answer, and an answer will be loaded onto the system.
• The audience is clearly for pupils, but there are lesson plans and worksheets for teachers too.
• The content is brilliant and very usable in other contexts.

NOTE: Whilst Hitler is a controversial subject area, the panel considers it to have been responsibly handled - every answer is prefixed with 'In my view' or similar. It is clearly moderated as a site, and Becta has verified that the mechanism for the questions and replies ensures that the facility is secure and not open to possible abuse by sympathisers of this political viewpoint. Becta is encouraging the winner to add to the Head2Head range to detract from the current emphasis on Hitler. In the meantime, Russel Tarr, the creator of this concept, is clear about his reasoning for choosing this figure and has been asked to make this reasoning clear on the site. Hitler was chosen simply because he is a controversial topic which should prompt active questioning and feedback by users of the site. This subject matter relates to a period of history which pupils are required to study under the National Curriculum.