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| ***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) 292-8070. Contents of this Tipsheet:
STARTING POINTS FOR SCIENCE LEARNINGScience 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 INTERNETDragonfly 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 bimonthly 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:80/dragonfly/index.htmlx STUDENT-SCIENTIST PARTNERSHIPSNSF'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 COURSESProfessional 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
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