"The Parent Trap" leads to on-line ‘zine Ourturf.com is the on-line magazine created by Amyel Oliveros, Joel Cajipe, Miguel Cajipe, Joshua Matic (yep, that’s Kool Kid Eco!), Victor Oliveros, Ana Pascual, Lizelle Ejercito and Carl Cabrera. These kids, who are from 11 to 16 years old, were brought together by what you might call "the parent trap."

Josh and Victor’s moms met while both kids were attending the Junior Summit--an international conference on the environment that brought together kids who had been connected via e-mail--in the USA last year.

Says Victor, "They were inspired by the Summit to create a group made up of their friends’ kids . . . that’s us." It was the grown-ups who decided that their kids should work together in creating their very own website.

At first, the gang wasn’t all that thrilled. For starters, they didn’t really know each other and Carl recalls thinking, "We can make any website at Geocities anyway, why do we need to join a group?"

After just going yadda-yadda for a couple of meetings, the group of eight suddenly realized they were all excited about the same thing-on-line chats.

"We started developing the idea of a storytelling chat for our website and that’s what made us come together," beams Ana who is Ourturf’s CEO, a.k.a. elected Big Boss. "In the end we all had the same vision, the same goal."

Working their "butts off" or The Making of Ourturf.com

They began by taking computer programming lessons over the summer. Then it was plan, plan, plan for all the neat things they were going to put in their site. What they finally came up with were sections for homework-friendly news, the hippest in fashion, top music hits, insider gaming info and action-packed sports features plus an arts and literature section for those who want to take their imagination for a ride, space-age style.

Their main attraction, though, is the Ourturf storytelling chat. Kids around the world can add their own special twist to a basic story and make the ending as far-off and far-out as they want it to be. Later on, the Ourturf gang are going to learn more programming techniques so they can turn the chats into on-line animated storybooks. Visitors to the site can then make their own characters to interact with others.

All in all, Ourturf took eight months of 7-hour Friday meetings which sometimes lasted until the wee hours of Saturday morning. Says Lizelle with a mock-exasperated grin, "This is our social life." And Amyel, the youngest member of the group wails, "Even with this site, we STILL need to beg high grades, so we really worked our butts off!"

"At first our name was Urool," says Miguel and we’re pretty sure we hear him say "drool."

Drool?!?

"You see, that’s why we didn’t like that name," Ana points out with a grimace.

So who finally came up with "Ourturf"?

"The computer!" they chorus. Explains Joel, "We decided on the word ‘realm’ and then we used the thesaurus (in the computer) to find the next coolest word."