
Generic Instructional Model for a Typical Three-Hour Day:
- One hour of formal instruction (introduce one or two new concepts
or skills).
- One hour of structured activity related to new instruction.
- One hour of unstructured activity (including such activities as
exploration of the World Wide Web, working on personal home pages,
e-mail correspondence, etc.).
For each week of the four-week camp, instructional activities were
related to a specific "theme." The following list details the
instructional themes for each week:
- Welcome/goals of Camp T-Equity; basic computing and Internetworking
skills:
- The value of self-esteem in selecting non-traditional career
paths.
- Authoring World Wide Wide pages using HyperText Markup
Language (HTML).
- Remote sensing and satellite imagery.
- Weather radar (including Doppler weather radar) imagery.
- Oceanography-related topics (including sea surface temperature, ocean
currents, El Nino, etc.).
Guest speakers were given some guidance regarding our expectations, but
generally left to set their own agenda. Whenever possible, we attempted to
provide pointers to online information resources that related to and/or
extended the topics presented by guest speakers.
Several structured activities were especially successful:
- Generating various weather graphics animations. These "movie loops"
were then used to calculate the direction and speed of motion of weather
systems. In turn, this information was used to make 24-hour weather
predictions. These forecasts were presented to the group as part of the
routine "daily weather briefing" in which students discussed their answers
to the questions, "What is the weather like today?" and "What is it going
to be tomorrow?"
- Forecasting the weather (daily weather forecasting contest for
selected U.S. cities).
- Searching
interactive aerial photographs of Washington, D.C. to locate West Springfield High School.
- Taking a virtual field trip to the Smithsonian Institution's online
"Ocean Planet"
exhibit.
Long-term project: develop a personal
World-Wide Web home page.
Electronic mail (e-mail) proved to be extremely popular among the
girls--given the opportunity, some participants would have spent the
entire morning reading/replying to e-mail! We discovered that by providing
approximately one-half hour at the start of each day to read/reply to
e-mail, it helps to limit time spent on this activity, thereby helping to
keep students more focused upon the day's primary activity. It also helps
to bring closure to e-mail messages posted the preceding day.
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Walter Sanford, wsanford@wsanford.com