TEXT B Computers, and especially
connecting to the Internet, provide unique opportunities to enhance science and
math education. Take, for example, the project called
Chickscope, a program that would only be possible with the Internet. Which came
first, the chicken or the egg In schools across the country, many teachers use
the egg as a springboard to a demonstration of how life begins and develops,
setting up an incubator to hatch chicks in the classroom. Fascinated kids
watch as a chick pecks its way through the shell and finally struggles
out. But what if the kids could see inside the egg and observe
the changes in the chick embryo during its three weeks of growth, gathering
egg-related data along the way Chickscope, an interdisciplinary program based
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, permits just that. Kids see
inside the egg courtesy of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology. Without
leaving their classrooms, East Central Illinois high school students and
teachers can access and operate an MRI system via the World Wide Web, and watch
as the chick embryo matures. "They actually run the MRI system,
collect data, and run experiments," says Clint Potter, Chickseope project leader
and a researcher at the university’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and
Technology. A key side benefit: Students not only learn about the subject at
hand, they feel as though they are part of "a community of learners," as one
teacher put it. This community concept is key to many of the
prevailing theories about how best to learn science. Kids tend to learn
faster and more deeply when the learning experience is shared. And that’s what
makes the Internet, with its built-in ability to promote interaction, so
powerful. Students can use the Net as a tool to construct solutions to problems,
learning from one another in the process by doing, not by rote
instruction. And community learning can benefit the community.
In an environmental science class at Covington High School in Covington,
Louisiana, for example, students used the Internet to focus on cleaning up a
local polluted stream by researching water-quality improvement techniques. With
the help of a computer, they put together multimedia presentations for local and
state political leaders. The Army Corps of Engineers awarded the city a grant to
proceed with cleanup in large part because of the students’ work, which the
Corps said was the equivalent of ＄ 50,000 of research and preparation
time. Because the Internet is not limited in time and space, it
can transport kids to realms that are intrinsically more exciting than their own
classrooms. Thousands of elementary school students connected by the Internet
are joining biologist David Anderson in collecting satellite data that tracks
the marathon flights of two species of albatross that nest on Tern Island in
Hawaii. The Albatross Project, which is sponsored by the
National Science Foundation, seeks to learn how the availability of food affects
the large seabirds’ extremely Mow reproduction. But it has another purpose:
sparking children’s interest in science by involving them in actual research.
The project seemed the perfect opportunity to engage school-age kids in
science, says Anderson. According to the passage, which of the following should be encouraged to enhance learning of math and science 1. Problem solving. 2. Actual research. 3. Repetitive in-class drills. 4. Group work. 5. Rote learning.