Students stare blankly at the faded periodic table as an old man scribbles on the board. The lights buzz. Lids droop.
If you're like most people, that's how you remember high school science class -- which is why you may not remember much at all about science.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are trying to change that.
Over the past two years, professors, graduate students and undergraduates there have built a Web-based platform designed to make science class a more engaging, and educational, experience.
Called the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment, or WISE, the project eschews lectures, worksheets and tests. Instead, students explore a "learning environment" that includes activities, online discussion groups, creating maps and graphs, and links to more information.
"The whole thing rides on the effective design of learning activities," project director Jim Slotta said. "How do we make a meaningful curriculum that challenges students to think and leverages the technology?"
WISE launched last summer after several years of development, and about 3,000 K-12 teachers have already registered to use it. Denver, Colorado's school system and two others in the San Francisco, California, area have committed to using the technology in all their classrooms. Developed with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the service is free.
The program uses sophisticated database sharing software to keep track of every student, giving them their own account where they can save their work and hold their place. Teachers can access their students' accounts to review work and make comments, even customize the activities.
Beyond just building an impressive learning tool, the team of 25 researchers has worked to populate the platform with "projects" on topics including lessons on malaria, earthquakes, genetically modified foods and growing plants in space. When schools open, teachers will have about 50 different projects to choose from, twice as many as last year.
Berkeley faculty and students have partnered with other institutions to build particular sections. Partners include NASA, National Geographic, Monterey Bay Aquarium and the American Museum of Natural History.
WISE lets teachers customize offered curriculum. They can create their own activities and lesson plans, or alter content included on the platform. Monitoring students' progress is also automated. Teachers can access their students' work to comment on it and when students log back on, the comments pop up on their account.
Slotta and his team have made an impressive attempt to take computer-based learning beyond Web-page bookmarks and automated quizzes where so many computer labs still linger, according to education experts.
The earthquake project, for example, is designed to take five class periods. Students proceed through a series of activities, including writing down their own experiences with earthquakes, assessing maps and data about earthquakes and making their own predictions about when the next quake will strike, then revising their guesses based on new evidence.
The technology has had a positive impact in classrooms, according to teachers who used the technology last year.
"WISE has completely changed my teaching style and approach," Ariel Owen said. She teaches Earth Science to junior high students in suburban San Francisco. "I had to learn to ask probing or guiding questions, instead of giving broad hints about the 'right' answer."
Some teachers even used the technology to develop original projects. Tom Azwell, a high school science teacher at Indio high school in Southern California, even traveled to Thailand to gather photos and data for a project on rainforests. Now other teachers can use the project, Rainforest Interactions, in their own classrooms.
Azwell had his students working on the WISE Malaria project in his absence, adding to the suspense by informing them he had a good chance of catching the disease while he was gone.
"I had also brought a laptop computer and was actually able to grade my student's work while away!" Azwell wrote in an e-mail.
Although it's designed for teachers, the project is open to everyone and is free. It only requires filling out a short form. The homepage gives a brief description of the project as well.
In the course of changing the way kids learn, WISE is also designed to change a teacher's role in the classroom. "We want teachers to move from being the 'sage on the stage' to a 'guide on the side,'" Slotta said. The idea is to get teachers out from behind the desk to support students working independently.
Although designed for K-12 education, soon the program will make its debut in higher education. The same research group that built WISE has received a federal grant to make computer science courses offered at Berkeley available to students at the University of California's new campus in Merced, set to open in 2004.
It turns out that breaking the reliance on the "sage on the stage" makes WISE an attractive tool for distance learning. Using WISE as a prototype, the group plans to build a system that brings Berkeley-grade material to UC Merced, but will also allow instructors there to customize it.
Mike Clancy, who is in charge of the introductory computer science courses at Berkeley, will design the course, and is working to improve the WISE platform. "We're trying to develop a system that simplifies the process of designing a course," he said.
That entails putting the various components of a class -- video lectures, tests, exercises, projects -- into a database, and then letting the local instructor arrange the pieces, Clancy said.
The trick is to give teachers flexibility while ensuring the essence of the course isn't lost. Clancy envisions a warning sign popping up to warn teachers when their design gets too creative -- like scheduling a test on material that hasn't been covered yet.
While three courses is a small start, Slotta envisions platforms like WISE providing the basis for delivering high-quality courses from anywhere, to anywhere.
In fact, he's worried some corporations may already have their eye on the technology. He finds MCI's new online content program, called MarcoPolo, suspiciously similar to WISE. "We're not really protected," from borrowing, he said.
Nevertheless, Slotta is confident his product is superior to anything private industry has put together, and he continues to add features. This summer, Palm donated 500 PDAs to the program, and Slotta has already written the program to integrate them into the main program.
Now, students in Denver and suburban San Francisco (Mt. Diablo school district) will be able to enter data collected in the field into their Palms.
For example, one project requires measurements be taken at various points along a local stream to determine its health. The data is then put onto an aerial photo of the area. With the Palms, students can enter the data on the spot.
