EDC Center for Children and Technology
Director: Katherine McMillan and Margaret Honey
Contact: Kallen Tsikalas
Funder: National Science Foundation
CCT's Portals Project involves the design of a flexible piece of web-based
software and an instructional process. Portals is intended to facilitate
communication between students working on computational science projects
and scientists who are serving as their project mentors. It may also be
used by teachers to assess students' progress in project-oriented classes.
Portals facilitates effective communication between students and external
- Providing students with an environment that encourages them to
communicate, and thereby to think, about their ideas in multiple ways;
- Providing scientists and other external reviewers with tools that enable
them to directly annotate students' thinking process documents on the WWW;
- Providing teachers with easily accessible and reviewable web-based
archives of students' thinking over time; and
- Providing students, teachers, and mentors with strategies for creating,
clarifying, and reflecting on thinking process documents.
In addition to the development of the Portals software and process, CCT's
work on this project includes a program of research around student learning
in the Portals environment.
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Last Update: 8/18/97
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