Pictured are Owen Foley, Kevin Brew and Dermot Duffy, sixth-year students at Ashbourne Community School, Ashbourne, Co Meath, who won the 2000 Spin A Web schools Website competition. Their winning entry, Carbon is 4 Ever, was chosen by the judges because, while demonstrating key skills, it also showed outstanding originality and creativity in using information technology.

Dermot, the technical brain in the team, taught himself the programming languages HTML and Java. The three boys agreed that the "satisfaction of doing the project was the best part".

Ailish Mullen, the teacher who brought the team together, said the motivation behind it was the opportunity to use computers as a teaching tool. "Rather than looking at information, they wanted to create something that others could look at."

The 10 finalists were chosen from 50 groups from schools throughout Ireland.

More than £10,000 in prizes was awarded to this year's finalists who come from schools in Westmeath, Waterford, Derry, Dublin, Cork, Meath, Down and Roscommon. The overall winners received a data projector worth over £3,000, with other prizes including a CD-ROM writer, a scanner and digital cameras.

The awards ceremony was hosted by Ray D'Arcy from RTE and the winners were announced by Minister of State at the Department of Education and Science, Noel Treacy, TD. Judges included Dr Fred Martin of MIT and MediaLabEurope, Prof Niki Davis of Iowa State University and Anne Byrne of The Irish Times.

Now in its fifth year, Spin A Web is co-ordinated by Trinity College Dublin's computer science department and Eircom to encourage secondary-school students to create projects and publish them on the World Wide Web. The sites of the 10 finalists are reviewed below.