Objectives

=Project Objectives=

Participants:
Middle school math and science students. They can be of any cultural, socioeconomic or educational background. We want our tool to be accessible to a diverse variety of learners, including those in 3rd world countries (with access to internet browsers), girls, minorities, students in disadvantaged or urban areas.

Educational Agenda:

 * We want to make science and math fun, and make these two subjects more integrated and combined together.
 * We want to create a learning tool that helps students make their own science projects, and particularly, one that helps them use math concepts in science.
 * We want students to become more intrinsically motivated in science and math, and we hope to accomplish this by creating a tool that empowers them. i.e., by:
 * giving them freedom and choices, fostering a feeling of control and autonomy in learning
 * scaffolding difficult mathematical processes and concepts, so that they can see math as fun and useful, not just tedious
 * i.e. with graphing tools, engaging visualizations of math equations, using math functions to do statistical tests for their science projects
 * allow collaboration between students, to take advantage of peer-learning and peer-tutoring benefits

Technology:
We anticipate creating this science and math project tool using flash. It will involve a section where students can input data and make graphs and other visualizations. It should also have a section where they can blog, and collaborate with each other and science experts in the field. It should have some video tutorial elements teaching students basic science or math concepts, and tutorials on how to use the science/math tool.

Environment:
We anticipate this tool, because it will be embedded in a web page on the internet, to be used both inside and outside classrooms. It can serve as a supplemental classroom tool that helps students create science projects, or used informally outside the classroom by students who want to pursue 'citizen science' on their own time.

=Discussions:= include component="comments" page="Objectives" limit="10"