School: Vartan Gregorian Fox Point Elementary School
Teacher: Ellen Lynch
Audience: Kindergarten
Project: A second possible project proposed by Mrs. Lynch
is a "word expander" program that would let students try to spell
or identify words based on visual images and/or audio cues. She
envisions a program that would let a student stretch a word out,
based on something they hear or see, using some sort of engaging
point and drag interface. Possible tools include Hyperstudio,
Authorware and Director.
Comments: Mrs. Lynch teaches an ESL Kindergarten class,
and so the challenges here include designing effective interfaces
for very young children who may have limited background in English.
School: Vartan Gregorian Fox Point Elementary School
Teacher: Mandy Katz
Audience: Gifted students, grades 3-5
Project: Mrs. Katz teachers a content-driven advanced literacy
class and is currently working on Greek culture (2nd grade),
Roman culture (3rd grade), and Medieval culture (4th grade). Her students
study several aspects of each culture and history (e.g. daily life, art,
architecture, literature, the agora, gods and goddesses). This year, as
there are only girls in the group, she is focusing on the role of
women in Roman and Medieval culture. She would like a program that
would help students review material but would also give them a chance
to apply what they're studying to problem solving or construction
projects (e.g. building a Mt. Olympus family tree, or an agora).
Possible tools include Hyperstudio, Director and Authorware.
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. A program that focuses on the life of women
in all of these cultures is possible here.
School: Charles N. Fortes Magnet Academy Museum School
Teacher: Marcella O. Weinberg
Audience: Bilingual 2nd graders
Project:
Ms. Weinberg would like a program that shows her students how
Providence firefighters and their equipment have changed over the
years. She envisions
an interactive program where the students will be able to
choose a decade from a timeline and then identify
the equipment
and uniforms that they will need to fight a fire in the community from a
visual library that describes what, how and why the equipment and
uniforms were made as they were. She suggests the program might
explain and investigate major fires that have been recorded in/near
our community throughout our history and these could be fires that
the students would virtually fight. The program would eventually
be included in the Fortes School kiosks in the library and the
first floor hallway. Possible tools include Authorware and Director.
Comments: The Fortes School is itself an interesting
project. Their vision
is to create a living museum through the
study of the life, work and culture of the laborers and public
servants that worked in this community throughout the years.
The challenges include designing a program that can be used to
great effect by young bilingual children and one that is nicely
integrated with the School's mission/activities
School: The French-American School and Brown University
Teacher: Annie de Groot
Audience: Ages 7-14
Project:
Dr. de Groot would like an interactive educational 'package' to teach
K-12 students about vaccines. To do so, the program will have to:
1) introduce some basic immunology concepts; 2) discuss some
diseases and their vaccine-preventable causes; and 3) describe
how the immune system can be trained to fight infections using
vaccines. Her rationale for using a computer-based tool is that
captivating visualization of scientific information is one of
the best means of teaching students in this age group, and she
imagines a program that would present interactive illustrations
and would be linked to Web-based resources as well. Possible
tools include Director, Authorware and HTML/Java.
Comments:
"Club DNA" is a program that Dr. de Groot has been teaching to
students at the French-American School for 6 years. Though
formally an "afterschool club" the program is an integral part of
the French School, which has no formal science program for children
under 5th grade. This is a great opportunity to design a science
education program for students who have already learned to read,
but who are just learning basic science concepts.
School: The MET School (MET West)
Teacher: Laura Maxwell
Audience: grades 9-12
Project:
Ms. Maxwell would
like a Web-based program that encourages students to review books they have
read and recommend them to other students. The MET does not
have a required reading, though students are required to document
reading 20 books in the course of their four years at the School.
The goal here is to use peer recommendations as a motivation
for students to read and talk about books. As teachers have found
that the avid readers are a little shy about speaking up in school
assemblies, a virtual forum might make this task less intimidating.
Possible tools include HTML/Java and HTML with a scripting language
like (but not limited to) Perl.
Comments: The MET is an innovative approach to
schooling in Providence. Although issues of authentication
and database structure will require some work in this project,
the primary challenge is to create a tool that engages and
inspires a book culture among students who are pursuing
individualized education plans.
School: The Wheeler School
Teacher: David Johns
Audience: Grades 7-12
Project: Mr. Johns would like a program that provides
a template for note-taking from lectures and reading based on
the Cornell note-taking system, but with additional capabilities
for organizing and sorting the data, as well as the capability
to generate study aids (in the form of note cards).
The ability to use keywords, graphically organized and
linked from their different instances in notes, the ability
to create and associate written summaries with
specific sets of notes, and the
ability to generate "cards" that combine information from
notes into a study aids (e.g. term -> definition -> example)
might be among the innovations.
Possible tools include Director and Java.
Comments: Although we usually avoid proposals
like this, preferring to focus on instructional software,
the challenges of implementing a sort of "hyper-Cornell"
system for Middle and High School students are many and
interesting.
School: The Virtual Medical School and Brown University
Teacher: Steve Smith
Audience: Medical Students
Project:
Brown is one of the 52 schools worldwide involved in
the Virtual Medical School Project, based at the University of
Dundee, and Professor Smith is particularly interested in
structuring the experience of students in such a "school" using
the idea of the "virtual practice." He would like to develop a
program that would allow students to "see" a patient (who would
present with particular statistics and a narration of some sort),
and write a report suggesting what may be the problem(s). The
program would then provide intelligent
feedback on this report, noting errors in the diagnosis and
suggesting concepts and areas of medical knowledge that might
be further studied. The program might also include a
second visit by the patient, to allow the student to revisit
and revise her/his report. Possible tools include Director,
Authorware and Java.
Comments: This project can draw on the lessons we've
learned from the two patient-interviewing projects we've done
since 1998, and the challenge will be to create an engaging
and effective program that is versatile enough to accommodate
a variety of patients/modules.
School: University of Oregon
Teacher: Dev Sinha
Audience: Undergraduates in Linear Algebra
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. The
fact that you'll be working at a distance with Professor
Sinha, who was at Brown until last year, adds a further
challenge the design and testing process.
School: Brown University
Teacher: Roger Mayer
Audience: Students in Visual Art 10
Project:
In 1998 a group of students in the Seminar created
a Web-based program for Professor Mayer called
Color Theory. The program has been
used in VA10 for the past few years with great success. This year
he would like to redesign the program to include a complex
tiling unit and improve the pedagogy of the 1998 project.
The tiling module will allow
his students to develop a complex modular design in which the
experience gained in the color mixing and color contrast modules
might be applied.
This entails developing geometric or free form designs in individual
modules which would then hold mixtures of color to be ramped to other
locations in the larger modular design. These ramps should be able to flow
horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. Other directions might also be
explored (e.g. a spiral). The required new module would be a
drawing/design program that is linked to the very useful color chooser of
1998 project. This program needs to be developed and (re)designed
in HTML/Java
Comments: This is a great opportunity for both
programming and design, and it's the first time we will try to build
improve a project completed in a previous year. This is a
project with an interesting user-study
component as well, since the redesign will be based in part on
feedback from users of the Color Theory program.
School: Women and Infants Hospital
Teacher: Stephen Carr
Audience: Post-Graduates studying fetal echcardiography
Project:
Fetal echocardiography is the study of structural heart disease in
unborn babies. It requires evaluation of very small structures that are in
constant and rapid motion. Fetal ultrasound only renders images in two
dimensions, which makes evaluation of three dimensional structures extremely
challenging. Teaching this material is even more challenging. Dr. Carr
would like to be able to use a program that presents an interactive
3-D model of the fetal heart that will rotate, revolve, and allow
the user to "slice" in various planes to show what the 2-D image
will look like. Possible tools include Director, Authorware, and
HTML/Java.
Comments: This is a great and challenging project for
anyone interested in scientific visualization.
School: Brown University School of Medicine
Teacher: Mark Aloia
Audience: Community Patients
Project:
Dr. Aloia has
developed an intervention to improve treatment adherence in
patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea. The intervention is based on
psychological theory, is interactive, and is designed to get patients
to think
about the barriers they have to treatment. The intervention is
currently
scripted for clinicians
to give to patients in 2 45-mintue blocks. He would like to make
the intervention into an interactive program that would provide users
with personalized and otherwise intelligent feedback regarding their
disorder based on the interaction.
Possible tools include Authorware, Director, and
HTML/Java.
Comments: Aside from its obvious value for patient
education, this is an interesting and challenging
project both from the point of view of HCI and
medical informatics.
School: Women and Infants Hospital
Teacher: Jeff Peipert
Audience: OB/GYN Patients
Project:
Dr. Peipert would like a program that will teach women about
smoking cessation. The intended audience is patients who
have had abnormal Pap smears (or an abnormality of the
cervix), which could lead to cervical cancer -- a cancer
associated with smoking. He envisions a
computer-assisted individualized intervention based
on a behavioral model his group has used successfully in
the past to counsel young women on how
to avoid unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted
infections. Possible tools Director, Authorware and HTML/Java.
Comments:
This project provides classic design challenges, and
the goal will be to implement and automate the intervention
as or more effectively than can be done in person.