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 Urbane-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, Chickscope 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 slow 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. The Chickscope Project enabled students to do all of the following EXCEPT ______.
A.to set up an incubator to hatch chicks B.to actually operate an MRI system C.to get involved in actual research D.to watch the changes in the chick embryo