Do you know how the number pi (3.14 . . .) came to be? You would if you were in the classrooms of Betty Ganas or Georgette Moore, two Illinois teachers who participated in NCSA's Resource for Science Education (RSE) Program last July.
For instance you would learn that in 1897 a doctor from Indiana tried to get the so-called irrational number legally changed to 3.0 for simplicity's sake. What's more you would be excited about knowing it because you would feel your teacher's excitement about something as ordinary as pi. "It's an opportunity to look at math as more than a bit of information for a formula," Moore says.
"We wanted to get kids interested in thinking about and saving for their future, so we decided to do a stock market project," Peterson explains.
"It [the stock market exhibit] helps them learn about math, which is great; but it also works with other areas like social studies, history, and English," Peterson says. Teachers in the program are excited about the possibilities for integrating the World Wide Web into their classrooms and into the curricula of their schools.
"I think it's important to go back and involve other teachers in Web-based learning," states Elaine Westbrook, a high school science teacher from Omaha, NE, and RSE participant. "I'll be able to use what I have learned here and have the confidence to expand it."
Westbrook's project partner, Dave Stone (Urbana, IL) agreed: "I have a much better foundation for integrating the Web into my classroom." The projects designed by the teachers are meant to be used not just in their classrooms, but by all the teachers in their schools. Anyone who accesses the RSE participants' projects on the Web is free to use them as well.
In addition to creating Web-based curricula, teachers attending the RSE Program heard speakers daily and discussed readings related to the integration of Web resources into their curricula.
"All of the readings gave us much to think about in developing our project," says Urbana Middle School's computer coordinator, Pam Van Walleghen. "As a result, we tried very hard to create activities that would engage our students in the 'real' world. We tried to develop activities that were gender friendly and thought carefully about standards as we developed. We found the readings to be very useful."
Van Walleghen also found the presentations to be useful, as did her middle school colleague, Peterson. For example, "I can use what one speaker explained in my computer class to show the relationship between supercomputers in one area of the country and the data from another part of the country that the supercomputers are processing," Peterson says of one presentation. "It actually shows the power of the Internet and its possibilities for the future."
"We've committed ourselves to empowering teachers," says RSE program coordinator Umesh Thakkar. "The RSE summer program created a relationship between school classrooms and NCSA scientists. In so doing, RSE truly became a resource for science education."
"The RSE summer program has been excellent," Van Walleghen adds. "We need the exposure to ideas and resources that the presentations and readings provided. We need to know what is going on outside our classrooms. We need the time to collaborate and develop. This is the best program I have ever been involved in at NCSA." World Wide Web-based learning is becoming more and more of a reality, thanks to the teachers who participated in the RSE Program, the RSE staff, and NCSA/UIUC speakers who helped participants explore the possibilities of the Web in education.
As some students hook up to the Internet across the country this fall, they will benefit from what their teachers did this summer at NCSA -- including the discovery of how pi came to be.
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