Wednesday, August 16, 2017

"Three Days at the Microsoft Office World Championship"

TV:
This marked the first night of the 16th Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) World Championship, in which teens and young 20-somethings compete for the title of World Champion in their chosen professional application. It's an event put on annually by Certiport, a Utah-based subsidiary of standardized testing giant Pearson VUE

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Ayman Ben Souira (16, competing in Word), from a small town outside of Marrakech, Morocco, had never left his country before but spoke English and some anime Japanese like an Angeleno. "The first time people came to our school to give out fliers about the competition," Ayman said, "I thought it was really just a scam. We're gonna go to LA? It felt so farfetched, this is the craziest first place to go."

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Before Excel, Kyriakos had relied on Zumba as a source of joy. "I have participated in many zumbathons," he said

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At the world competition — and the nationals of more developed testing nations like the US and the UK — instead of following a test step by step, the students are given a bunch of assets (like datasets or images), a sheet of basic instructions, and a finished document, which they then have to exactly re-create