Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 10:00:23 -0800 (PST)
From: Deborah Hunt <dhunt@exploratorium.edu>
To: IFI listservs <advanced1@exploratorium.edu>, intro1@exploratorium.edu,
Subject: NSF Internet goodies (fwd)
Message-Id: <Pine.SUN.3.95.970317095844.14694D-100000@isaac>
Science Fairs and other useful web sites from NSF.
Deb
---------------------------------------------------
Deborah Hunt
Internet Resource Specialist
Exploratorium
3601 Lyon Street
San Francisco, CA 94123
Voice: 415-353-0485
Fax: 415-561-0307
email: dhunt@exploratorium.edu
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 11:57:57 EST
From: Ron Stanley <rstanley@astc.org>
Reply-To: "ISEN- Assoc. of Science-Technology Centers"
<ISEN-ASTC-L@home.ease.lsoft.com>
To: ISEN-ASTC-L@home.ease.lsoft.com
Subject: NSF Internet goodies
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Title : NSF SCIENCE FAIR `STARTERS' ON THE WEB
Type : News
NSF Org: OD / LPA
Date : March 13, 1997
File : tip97313
March 13, 1997
***SPECIAL EDITION***
***NSF SCIENCE FAIR `STARTERS' ON THE WEB***
Spring traditionally is the season when schools give
students -particularly elementary school students --
the opportunity to develop science fair projects
that showcase their knowledge and ingenuity.
Finding ideas, however, can test parental mettle and
student inventiveness. Below are some examples of
the educational resources available on the
Internet's World Wide Web that either are supported,
or produced, by the National Science Foundation.
Also listed are some resources to help professional
educators improve their science and mathematics
programs. Through its Education and Human Resources
(EHR) directorate, NSF will devote more than $640
million this fiscal year to improving science and
math education. The EHR home page is at:
http://www.nsf.gov/home/ehr/start.htm
For more information on NSF education programs,
contact Peter West at (703) 306-1070.
STARTING POINTS FOR SCIENCE LEARNING
Science In the Home is a link on the EHR home
page aimed specifically at parents and students. It
lists Internet resources on science, scientists, and
scientific investigations. Students can learn about
geometric patterns, and create their own, through a
page maintained by the Center for the Computation
and Visualization of Geometric Structures, an NSF
Science and Technology Center at the University of
Minnesota. They can find plans to learn to build a
seltzer tablet rocket from a page maintained by Los
Alamos National Laboratory. Or they can find out
more about James Lovell, the commander of the ill-
fated Apollo 13 lunar mission. The Science in the
Home page is at:
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/EHR/scihome.html
EXPERIMENTS ON THE INTERNET
Dragonfly magazine, published jointly by the
National Science Teachers Association and Miami
University of Ohio, is another source of good
science projects for students.
The NSF-supported bi-monthly printed magazine
contains numerous examples of investigations
suitable for elementary school students. The
November/December 1996 issue, for example, contains
a project on the feeding habits of barn owls that
was conducted by a 6th-grade class in
Washington, D.C..
An electronic version of the magazine features
several interactive articles and experiments. In
one, students read about trees and how their
component parts -- such as stems, leaves, and roots
-- allow them to adapt to a particular ecological
niche. Students are challenged to design a tree of
their own to survive in a particular niche.
Immediate feedback tells students how well they've
done.
Too often, elementary school science consists of
memorizing a list of terms from a textbook which
stifles curiosity. The activities in both versions
of Dragonfly "are a model of what active science
learning should be," notes M. Patricia Morse, of the
instructional materials development program in NSF's
division of elementary, secondary and informal
education. Dragonfly can be found at:
http://www.muohio.edu/dragonfly
STUDENT-SCIENTIST PARTNERSHIPS
NSF's strategic goal to improve the integration
of research and education is seen in a number of
projects at the K-12 level that allow individual
students, or whole classes, to take part in real
scientific investigations. Project FeederWatch,
organized by Cornell University, involves many
students and teachers as volunteers, throughout
North America to monitor birds at backyard feeders
from November through March. FeederWatch data show
how populations of winter birds are growing or
shrinking, and how species distributions are
changing. FeederWatch and many similar projects
were discussed at an NSF-sponsored national
conference in Washington D.C. last fall. The
conference proceedings, and descriptions of the
projects, can be found at:
http://www.terc.edu/ssp/ssp.html. FeederWatch may
be found at:
http://www.ornith.cornell.edu/CS/main.html
ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF
MATH AND SCIENCE COURSES
Professional educators who would like to be able
to evaluate the quality of science and math
education in their schools may obtain a series of
detailed checklists developed by Horizon Research,
Inc. of Chapel Hill, N.C.. The assessment tools
were created to measure the effectiveness of
programs in NSF's Local Systemic Change initiative,
but are available freely to other interested
educators and any Internet user. The Horizon page
is at: http://www.horizon-research.com. NSF also
maintains a Web page that lists resources for
teachers, primarily elementary school teachers, who
are anxious to teach science but unsure of how to
begin. The teacher links page is at:
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/EHR/teachlinks.html
-NSF-