School: Vartan Gregorian Fox Point Elementary School
Teacher: Claudia Pietros
Audience: Grades 3-5 Art
Project: Mrs. Pietros would like a program that surveys the
historical and cultural uses of Masks across various world cultures, such
as Native America, Africa, the Far East, and Europe. This might be a
program students would use independently as well as in a teacher-directed
whole group setting. The program would be rich in visual imagery, and
would allow for various kinds of creative manipulation, in order for
students to compare/contrast design principles and uses of masks
across cultures. Possible tools include Hyperstudio, Director and
Authorware.
Comments: The students who worked with Mrs. Pietros in
1999 found it an inspiring experience, and they produced a
wonderful program called
"Building Blast!". A new challenge to this
project will be to find creative ways to assess students' understanding
of the material in addition to presenting it in engaging ways.
School: Vartan Gregorian Fox Point Elementary School
Teacher: Cheryl Anne McElroy
Audience: K-5 Science Students
Project: Ms. McElroy would like a program to introduce her
students to the fundamental concepts involved in the classification and
study of rocks and minerals. The program would give students a sense of
the wide variety of ways in which rocks are used and how they help
people learn about the history of the world. Knowledge of how rocks
are classified (e.g. sedimentary, igneous, etc.) would be integrated
into a presentation that stresses the way rocks are used, and
might take the form of a game. The program might include
simulations difficult to present in class or on paper, and would be
used both in small groups and by individual students to reinforce
their understanding. Possible tools include Hyperstudio, Director,
Authorware and Java.
Comments: This is challenging project both because of
the variety of grade levels that need to be able to use the program
successfully, and because the program must be an engaging
source of understanding as well as
a practical tool for reinforcement of
students' knowledge of rocks. The subjet matter and materials are
great and could be greatly enhanced by interesting multimedia design.
School: Vartan Gregorian Fox Point Elementary School
Teacher: Pam Stegner, Mari-Ellen Boisclair and Susanne Gordon
Audience: Grades 4-5 Media Smart! After School Club
Project: The Media Smart! program aims to engage students
in activities that develop "media literacy," a critical approach to
cultural and digital information that makes students more aware of
issues like point-of-view and interpretation. Students would use the
program to understand, interpret, analyze and produce messages in
a variety of forms, and might be enaged to do this by a game format
or a character-assisted exploration. Five Questions of Media Literacy
are at the core of this program and will be reinforced by the
exercises. Possible tools include Director and Authorware.
Comments: This is a project with a well-formed curriculum
and a nicely focused audience, and the challenge will be to make
something that helps students understand and develop media literacy
in a way that builds on the classroom activities in the after school
program and takes advantage of the computer's multimedia environment.
School: Providence Children's Museum
Teacher: Robin Meisner
Audience: Ages 6-10
Project: The Museum's upcoming exhibt, Planet
Police, is targeted at 6 to 10-year olds, and their adult
caregivers, and aims to build an awareness and understanding that,
basically, it takes stuff to make stuff, and as there is really no
such thing as "away", people should always be thinking about
making stuff from old stuff! As part of the exhibit they
would like a type of recycling game that would combine the
style of "Where in the World is Carmine Santiago?" with
the subjec to trash. The idea is for the children to have an
interactive adventure that shows how the
choices they make (both good and bad) influence
what ends up in the landfill and what goes on to lead another life. For
example, in buying food for a lunch box you could buy lots of little
juice boxes or a big bottle of juice and a reusable container - what are
the consequences if you buy the juice boxes? They're looking for a
detective game/choose-your-own-adventure that explores the world of
reducing, reusing and recycling.
Possible tools include Director and Authorware.
Comments: We built the
Rima the Rat program years ago
for the Museum's City Streets exhibit, and it was a good experience
for the 92 students and the Museum. This is a project that
offers a more focused audience and message, but nonetheless a
formidable challenge to create a program that will engage and
educate children in the (challenging) setting of a busy museum
environment. An added bonus here is the chance to develop the
program as the exhibit itself is taking shape.
School: Save The Bay
Teacher: Betsy Dickenson and Dave Prescott
Audience: Grades 5-9
Project: The educators at Save the Bay would like an
interactive program for their web site that would introduce the
concept of a watershed, and give students an idea of how their
home watershed connects to Narragansett Bay. The program would also
be used by Save the Bay in their classroom education programs.
They would like students to understand the basic concepts of how
water drains off the lands surrounding Narragansett Bay into the
Bay itself. Because it is an abstract and experiential/visual
concept, watersheds are often confusing for young students, and
yet the multimedia interactive environment of the computer might
be used to convey the concept(s) with ease. The program would
teach students the geography of their own watershed, how it
is connected to their everyday lives, and how to assess the
state of a watershed. Curricular materials include maps that
could be turned into interactive exercises and simulations.
Possible tools include Director, Authorware and HTML/Java.
Comments: A well-focused project with some very good
material. Obviously the challenge will be to get the language
and level of presentation(s) right, to make engaging explorations
for different age groups, that teach and reinforce what are
difficult scientific and social-scientific concepts.
School: Nathan Bishop Middle School
Teacher: Tom Hoffman
Audience: 7th grade Computer Science
Project: Mr. Hoffman has 8 workstations, mostly Pentium 133s,
running Linux in his classroom, and he would like a
"kid-friendly" configuration tool for the open source Window Manager,
IceWM (see www.icewm.org). The
current tool, called IcePref (written in Python, using GTK+), is
too difficult for his students to use, and he is looking for something
that will not only allow his students to create their own computing
environment but learn about what is going on in the computer when
they make decisions about backgrounds, icons, etc. The proposed
program
would allow a seventh grader to easily customize his or her IceWM desktop,
which includes previewing and selecting background picture and/or
animations, the theme of the buttons and windowframes, and possibly
what extra buttons are available on the toolbar. Possible languages
include C++ and Python
Comments: Not exactly instructional software, but the
goal is to create a open source configuration tool that facilitates
customization by, and teaches something about how the computer works
to, 7th graders. For hackers and/or those with commitments to Linus
and/or Open Source, this will be a challenging project indeed.
School: Nathan Bishop Middle School
Teacher: Janet Rankin, Brian W. Sheldon, and Nancy Nowak
Audience: Middle School Materials Science
Project: This project is a collaboration between two
Brown Engineering professors and a teacher at Nathan Bishop. The
goal is to produce computer software that can be used to help middle-school
students begin to understand the relationship between the atomic structure of
certain "real life" materials, and their observable (mechanical) properties
and behavior. They envision interactive software that will allow students
to change the materials properties of certain simple machines and components,
and will then allow them to observe the impact of the changes on the behavior
of these systems. Ideally, they would like students be able to participate
in computer-based design contests: optimizing their virtual systems subject
to design and performance criteria specified by their teachers. The
general idea is to develop virtual "machines" that are instructional and
entertaining. One example would be an environment that would allow
explorations based on what can be done with/to a diving board. The
behavior of the board depends
on its dimensions and materials properties (i.e., density,
stiffness, and fracture limitations), but also the weight of the diver.
Choosing the wrong materials can result in a board with no "bounce" or
a board that breaks, and users of this program might be able to
"click" on the microstructure of a particular material chosen for the
board, both before and after a jump by a particular diver. Possible
tools include Director, Authorware and HTML/Java.
Comments: This is a challenging project from both
programming and pedagogical perspectives. The curriculum is
solid and the teachers are very cool and dedicated, and this is
a unique kind of collaboration between faculty in K-12 and
higher education that should result in excellent instructional
software.
School: The Moses Brown School
Teacher: Flossie Battle
Audience: 7th grade history students
Project: The Middle School at Moses Brown has begun
an initiative to address and help their students deal with issues
of body type and body image in the culture and in the media. As
part of Ms. Battle's history classes, which incorporate the
Facing History philosophy (see facinghistory.org), students learn about how ideas of physical perfection
have been used to justify oppressive regimes and racist principles,
and how measurements of physical features has played a role in
some of the most terrible movements of the 20th century. She would
like a program that presents a context for thinking about the
measure and mismeasure of physical perfection, and that
allows her students to load and analyze images, measure various
physical features in the images and compute ratios between these
measurements. The goal is to motivate students' thinking about
body type, measurement, and physical norms, and to allow them
to make comparisons and observations based on the images they've
selected and the measurements and ratios they've computed.
Possible tools include Director, Authorware and HTML/Java.
Comments: This is a rare and interesting project
that integrates the
study of history, along the lines discussed in Gould's
Mismeasure
of Man, with a practical concern for adolescents
struggling with issues of body type and self-perception. The
challenge will be to create a program that is both
instructive and flexible enough to allow for student explorations.
School: Brown University
Teacher: Joseph Hallett
Audience: Young pregnant women, ages 16-24
Project:
Poor neighborhoods usually receive their
health care through clinics and these clinics have less and less money to
hire physicians to care for patients, in particular pregnant teenager
girls and pregnant adult women (who may or may not speak English). Yet
this population is one that needs very much to learn how to have
healthy and safe pregnancies. Dr. Hallett would like a program that
would provide the information that clinics provide to pregnant young
women, evaluate acquisition of information without repeated testing,
and identify those who aren't learning so that short-handed clinic
staff can focus their attention on these most at-risk cases. The
program must be able to run on computers with modest speeds and
memory capacities. Possible tools include Director and Authorware.
Comments: As a project in community-based education this
program could have great and important impact. It poses a number of
design challenges, including how to provide information to people
of different ages, with different language skills, in a way that
is authoritative without being patronizing (or boring).
School: Brown University
Teacher: Dev Sinha
Audience: Undergraduates in Linear Algebra (MA52)
Project: In his linear algebra course, Professor Sinha
has an innovative way of teaching affine transformations in the
plane that
involves the introduction of fractals. Trying to develop students'
geometric intuitions about these transformations he introduces
fractals encoded by collections of affine transformations.
The encoding is essentially through the fact that such
transformations actually determine the
self-similarities of the fractal. Another way of saying this is
that by identifying different subsets of the fractal image that
"cover" the fractal, one actually defines the fractal uniquely.
The project calls for the creation of a program to be accessed via
the Web that allows students to visualize affine transformations
and to generate fractal images by manipulating parameters of the
transformations.
The software produced will not only be a teaching tool but a tool
for creating fractal art.
The likely environment for this project is HTML/Java.
Comments: For students interested in mathematics, this is
a fascinating project. You will be implementing procedural code
provided by Professor Sinha, but the questions of how best to
design and manage the interactions in the program are quite
challenging, and the the drama of fractal images provides
great opportunities for an effective engaging program.
School: Brown University
Teacher: Lin Domizio
Audience: Brown students in Multimedia Chinese (Chi0103)
Project: Professor Domizio would like a program that
would allow her students to do reading and listening comprehension
exercises based on short stories and fables that she has written
and narrated. Students would be able to read the texts of these
fables, hear them read in their entirety or simply have lines
read to them, and then answer questions that test both reading
and listening comprehension. The program could be used for
independent study and/or as preparation for class and exams,
and might allow users to hear different readers and select
questions at different levels of difficulty. Possible tools
include Director, Authorware, and HTML/Java.
Comments: For students with some interest or facility
with Chinese, this is a great project. Professor Domizio has
developed excellent materials, and the challenge is to design
the program that encourages practice, and allows students to
progress in their facility with the language.
School: Brown University
Teacher: Christine Zarcadoolas
Audience: Undergraduates in ES126
Project: Professor Zarcadoolas is concerned with
the public perception of the environment, and this particular
project concerns how people perceive and otherwise react to
the Brown University campus. She would like a program that
would allow users to manipulate familiar scenes on the campus
(e.g. removing or adding objects or paths) and answer questions
assessing how they react to the altered scene. Saving the
results of these changes and answers would help students
investigate how people perceive the connectedness of the
campus, the role played by structures like walkways and
monuments in this perception, and what features of the
campus people find most distinctive. Possible tools
include Director, Authorware, and HTML/Java.
Comments: There is a good deal of talk about
campus renovations these days, and ES126 is a course designed
to motivate careful thinking about proposed changes. A
program that allows people to simulate these changes and
reflect on their reactions to them, is a challenge to
program attractively, but could play a tremendous role
not only in ES126 but in the campus discussion generally.
School: The Big Picture Company
Teacher: Rachel Brian
Audience: New teachers and principals at "Met" schools
Project:
The Met school is an innovative new high school in Providence,
with a unique, "one student at a time" philosophy. Teachers and
students at the Met create individual
learning plans, and the curriculum is based around each
student's interest and passions. Students do project based work at
internships for two days a week,
and academic areas are incorporated into the
project work. There are no formal year-long courses.
Students are evaluated by exhibition and there are no grades.
The Big Picture Company, which runs the Met, is planning to
start 12 new Met schools (they will be called Big Picture schools)
around the country. They would like an interactive program, perhaps
a game, that would help new staff begin to understand the
complexities of the school. One possibility is a simple version of
something like SimCity (sort of a SimSchool), but they are open to
other suggestions; what is most important is that the program
provide an interactive introduction to the philosophy and practices
at a Met School. Possible tools include HTML/Java, Director and
Authorware.
Comments: The Met really is a unique educational environment,
and the program we did for 9th graders last year,
A Night Out, was a challenging and
interesting experience. Here we'll be working not with students as
much as faculty, and the challenge will be to create something for
teachers and administrators that
captures the ideals and details of the Met approach.
School: Brown University
Teacher: Thompson Webb III
Audience: Undergraduates in Geo135
Project: Professor Webb's course
is Meteorological Aspects of Climate Change, and he
would like software that will allow students to
analyze patterns on current and past maps of weather data. Gradients
in temperature and pressure field yield information about wind speeds
and direction, and the program would allow students
to calculate the steepness and direction of the gradients by
analyzing the map fields. The user would choose where to measure
and then the program will make the measurements by analyzing the
features of the image.
Mapping temperature and pressure data has been key to
meteorological analysis and forecasting for 50 years, and this
program would allow students to use the information on the maps
and work as
operational meteorologists.
Possible tools HTML/Java, Director and Authorware.
Comments: Because of the tremendous amount of weather
data and images that have become available on the Web, courses
like Webb's can be reorganized to empower students to do more
data and conceptual exploration on their own. The program requested
here is a programming challenge, however, because it requires
image processing in the absence of the numerical data that
generated the images. If you've taken CS15 and a higher level
CS or engineering course that gave you some facility with
image processing, this is a great project.
School: Brown University School of Medicine
Teacher: Robert Boland
Audience: 2nd Year Medical Students
Project:
Using a computer-simulated patient, students would learn some basic
psychiatric interviewing techniques, and integrate this into the
organization of a "mental status examination" (a concept used not
only in psychiatry, but throughout medicine to organize patient
observations). The goals of the project are similar to those of
the program created for the Family Medicine Department in 1999
(Patient++), but the emphasis in this
project is less on question and answers leading to a diagnosis,
and more on eliciting important symptoms along the way that
clue the user to an overall picture of a patient's mental status. A
further goal is more interactivity between the user and the
program, rather than a simple question and response type of
presentation.
Ideally the program would provide a "virtual patient" that
students could practice with. Students, on their own, would be
faced with either an animation or a videotaped patient with whom
they could interact. A variety of "patient types" could be
simulated (the paranoid patient, the depressed patient,etc.), in
which students
could first learn "ideal" or textbook cases before venturing into real
world variations of these.
Possible tools include Director, Authorware and HTML/Java.
Comments: Currently in medical education,
most instruction of this sort is on "real" patients, however this
is limited by time, and is unpredictable. Using actors to simulate
patient interviews is helpful, but expensive and time intensive.
This program could provide students with a more sustained lesson
as well as allow for practice, and the challenge is to make a
program that provides a richer educational experience despite its
artificiality.
School: Brown University School of Medicine
Teacher: Paul Malloy
Audience: Non-radiologists
Project: The purpose of this program is to teach the
fundamentals of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRNI) to
medical professionals who are not themselves radiologists or
especially familiar with MRI or fMRI.
CT and MRI scans are imaging techniques that provide information
about the
structural integrity of the brain. FMRI provides information about
the functioning of various brain regions (e.g. Left cerebral
hemisphere activity during speech). FMRI will soon be widely
available and a standard tool in
neuroscience research, but few scientists are trained in its use.
Professor Malloy would like a program that will adapt
written material and brain images used in existing
classroom courses, and include interactive quizzes. Ideally, it would
also present 3D brain images that can be manipulated and rotated.
The program will provide explanations of things like the physics
of image acquisition, the pros and cons of fMRI, using fMRI in
research, and clinical applications and examples of the use of this
technology. Possible tools include Director, Authorware and HTML/Java.
Comments: Although the material is specialized, what
is required is a rather classic instructional program, and there
is the pleasure of being able to present materials to a very
educated audience. The challenge will be to make the concepts
clear and allow for interactive learning by a wide range of
medical people.