The bronze medal winners:

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On monday march 8th we brought a visit to Vale, where we were given a presentation. Yeah I know, this post is a little bit old, but very interesting to read.

Vale is the second largest mining company in the word and also a sponsor of SENAI. For those of you that don’t know, SENAI is like a educational institute for vocational skills in Brazil.

Why did they give this presentation? Of course.. Vale people are smart. At the AmericaSkills competition, they will be looking out for persons who are willing to work for them. One thing you must know, every person in that building HAS a talent or professional knowledge of a vocational skill. So the AmericaSkills competition is one of the best places to look for work.

Those who are recruited by Vale are given a full 9 months training before starting on the job. Just like Spang Makandra.

Very interesting it was.

Afer our visit to Vale it was time for… the opening of the largest competition of vocational skills in the American continent! In te Maracana stadium! Yes.. the largest in Brasil.. where I waved the Suriname flag with pride

I did it again, finnished every task of today. I hope I score well with what I have done today. It was Mainly flash, planned for 5 hours. 1 banner animation, 1 sonsor animation and one movie player. All done in about 2 hours. The 3 other hours I spent in PHP. I wasn’t the only one who was done earlier. Just so you know, the competition is still strong!

As I said, I hope I score well, because there is an objective part and a subjective one. The objective one is just graded on the things you’re suppose to do. But the subjective one is dependent of the evaluator’s vision on things.

Tommorow it’s PHP all the way! I have to finnished the test project according to the marking scheme. Just imagin it, 4 pages of functionality and 5 hours of work. I  think hell will break lose here in Rio Centro. Atlease Christ is here on the mountain.

I think i’ll go take a break now. Walk a round in Rio Centro a bit, because I have to wait on the bus, that will arrive at 7.

Pfeew… what a exhausting day it was. Not the competition only, but the transport and all. We have to get up at 5 in the morning, get ready, eat breakfast and leave. It is a one hour ride from the hotel to the Rio Centro building where the competition is held. And if you might want to know, we never start on time. I get tired from waiting all the time. I also don’t like the food here.

As I was saying to day was day 2. The HTM, CSS and Javascript part. I think it went well. I just have to wait untill the last day and see what the results are. Tommorow I’ll be doing the flash part. I have to make 2 animations and one movie player. I hope to finnish fast enough so I can start on the php part.

Well wish me luck. I’m so tired I almost dont wanna blog.

Today was the first out of 4 competition days on Web Design for WorldSkills America. Each competitor has his own expert (jurymember). The experts evaluate the work of the competitors each day in the evening. The four days are devided in 4 modules; day1; planning, concept, design, etc day2; front-end development day3; animation and video day4; back-end development The competitors have 20 hours total to complete all the tasks included in the project. The project is a website about the forthcoming olympic games in Rio at 2016. Simon is in the running with 6 other countries to win gold, silver or bronze at the closing ceremony on sunday! I’am not allowed to tell about his prestations, so you’ll have to read about it on monday!

Today was installation day. Preparing the Web Design computers with the right software in the right languages. We’ve experienced difficulties in translating our needs to portugees and spanish. Their were common mistakes made on things like the right service packs in the right languages to cooperate with adobe cs4. This could have been arranged on forehand, but still needed to be done. Let’s hope tomorrow when the competition starts everything will work out fine!

Finally I arrived in Rio de Janeiro. Together with Marciano and mister Pinas, I was brought to the Windsor hotel. It was a sight I’ve never experienced before. Roads, buildings, houses…. totally different than in Suriname.

The hotel here is much better than in Belem. We arrived at about 5 o clock. I went to my room, packed out my stuff and watched some tv. After that I took a bad and went to eat my dinner. And guess who was there… It was Wouter, together with Natasha and Lennard. I finnaly got to meet them. I also spoke with the teamleader of USA and asked him about the schedule of tomorrow. Even he was confused. So we went together to the woman of the organization to get things straight. Glad to see that there are some proactive people around, just like my fellow Surinamese colleges at Spang Makandra.

Ow, and I received a bag from the organization including a shirt. I’ll show it to u some time.

As for now I’m tired and will be going to bed soon. It’s pretty boring here, without you Surinamese people. For now, I’m trying to have a talk with every participant I see in the hotel. I’ve talked to 3 Colombians, 1 Dominican, 2 USA people, 2 dutch people, 2 people from the organization. I’m doing this to get familiar with them. Maybe talk about some more detailed stuff about the competition later on.

I’ll keep you updated soon.

regards,
Simon..live from Rio!

ps. The hotel people think they’re smart. Internet is slow so you have to stay longer and pay more. Sorry I can’t put pictures.