Goddard senior named U.S. PowerPoint champion

Andrew Parker remembers his first PowerPoint creation. Sort of.

In fourth grade, he was assigned to research and give a presentation on a historical figure. He doesn’t remember whom he chose.

What he does remember is standing in front of the class and realizing, at the last minute, that the version of PowerPoint he had used to build his presentation on his aunt’s computer was different than the one on the classroom’s computer. Some of the slides looked wonky. Some of the pictures were missing. He remembers panicking a bit.

“I hadn’t saved it right or something, so some of the things I’d done weren’t actually visible,” Parker recalls. “That wasn’t fun.”

He knows PowerPoint better now. A lot better.

Parker, 17, a senior at Eisenhower High School in Goddard, recently was named U.S. national champion in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013, beating out more than 430,000 students who entered the competition.

“I was pretty surprised,” he said. “When they said my name, my mom said I just kind of froze in shock for half a minute or so before I even got up to go onstage.”

Parker earned the honor at a competition in Orlando, Fla., in June. He qualified by logging one of the highest scores in Kansas on a Microsoft Office Specialist exam that measures students’ proficiency on the popular slide-show presentation program.

At the national competition, Parker and 85 other finalists were given a printed copy of a presentation – something about a fictional winery, he said – to re-create in PowerPoint. The timed tests were scored according to the accuracy of the re-creation compared to the original.

“It’s not really something you can practice. … It’s mostly just knowing the various skills and any shortcuts you can use,” Parker said. “When you take the test, you either know it or you don’t, and you just kind of try to figure it out as you go.”

Parker was one of nine students to earn a PowerPoint certification at Eisenhower High this spring.

Kristin Salazar, who teaches computer applications and sponsors the school’s Business Professionals of America club, signed up for Microsoft’s IT Academy program last spring and encouraged students to try for specialist certifications in Microsoft Word, Access, Excel and PowerPoint.

“I thought, ‘Let’s try it. These tests are free for us right now, so let’s see what we know,’ ” Salazar said. “They were kind of like guinea pigs. I just threw them into it just to see what happened.”

Then Salazar learned about competitions sponsored by Certiport, a company that provides certification exams and other services.

“At that point, it was just a matter of seeing how the kids scored and whether they qualified,” she said. “It got to be quite a little competition in our classes, among the students. It was a big deal.”

Parker’s performance was the biggest deal, by far: On his qualifying PowerPoint exam, he scored 985 out of a possible 1,000 points.

“He knows his stuff,” Salazar said.

As the U.S. champion, Parker won a Microsoft Surface 2, a medal, a trophy and an all-expenses-paid trip to Dallas in August. There, he will test his PowerPoint skills against finalists from more than 30 countries in the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championships.

Julie Cannizzo, assistant superintendent of academic affairs for Goddard schools, said certification programs like the one Parker and his classmates completed are part of schools’ efforts to teach life skills and better prepare students for the job market.

“It gives those kids a leg up when they get out of school, to get into those tech programs, colleges, the workforce,” she said. “It’s just a great opportunity we’re providing kids.”

This story was originally published July 4, 2015 at 5:54 PM with the headline "Goddard senior named U.S. PowerPoint champion."