Center for Learning and Teaching Summer 2001 Pilot
A Joint Outreach Effort...
Faculty and students from the Department of Applied Math, the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, and the School of Education are working together with Sun Educational Services employees and interns on a pilot project that will integrate technology into classrooms. This pilot project began in the spring of 2001 with the goal that it will lead to a Center for Learning and Teaching. The departments have created three blocks of instruction, suitable for high school and introductory college courses, that will promote the learning of concepts. These blocks were tested in the Summer Institute 2001 and will also be piloted during this school year.
The blocks were developed as Java applets because Java is platform independent and runs on any web browser. That's very important for school teachers because it's difficult for their schools to buy expensive mathematical software packages such as MATLAB and Mathematica.
A group of five Sun interns, four Sun employees, one high school math/physics teacher, and four university faculty members worked together to develop these applets. One applet is a demonstration of the Central Limit Theorem and is geared towards a Probability/Statistics course. The second explores the idea of Minimal Spanning Trees and could either be placed in a discrete math course or could be integrated into most math curricula. The third applet is on Kepler's third law of motion and is appropriate for any high school or lower division college science course.
Many of the Summer Institute participants worked through both applets and were very impressed with them. The major themes in their feedback were that they appreciated (1) the opportunity to explore, (2) the instant feedback provided by the applets, (3) the simple format and (4) the variety of instructional possibilities they allow for. Most participants said they would like to use the applets in their classrooms because they offer excellent visual representations of complex ideas. The applets were created in such a way that they encourage students to construct their own knowledge, make predictions, and think critically about the situations they are analyzing.
Links to Participants and Groups Involved