A number of separate documents explain the WHY and some of the WHAT associated with ExploreNet and the Virtual Academy. The current set of Lesson Plans is intended for experimental use at Coral Springs Middle School in the Spring of 1996, by one or more classes of thirty students under Joel Rosenthal's care.
Maitland. This material was developed at Maitland Middle School by Michael Moshell and a class of twenty seventh and eighth graders, of whom approximately ten actually worked with ExploreNet. At Maitland, this was a computer-intensive experience, with each student having 7.5 hours per week of hands-on time (they came in a half-hour early to work.) The materials are intended to be self-paced, and to be used by one or two students per computer. Maitland's students needed around three hours per lesson, but some of this time was consumed due to the preliminary nature of the materials.
Coral Springs has a very different logistical situation, and the materials must be adapted accordingly. Thirty students will share four machines x 5 days a week, or 20 access hours. This means that in essence, each individual student has only (20 machine hours/30 students) or 40 minutes of hands-on time in a week. This will be extended in some cases by use of a separate computer lab, for art-work. However, a group-orientation must be considered. For instance, if four students formed a group and planned their work before going to the computers, that group would have 160 minutes (over three class periods) of machine access in a week.
A Guest School may be provided through the Department of Defense Dependents' Schools, or we may in fact just use Maitland and Coral Springs as guests for one another. The objective is to make the logistics for guest schools as simple as possible, but there will still need to be some teacher materials prepared so that they know what to expect and how to evaluate the outcomes. We expect this activity to occur in May 96.
Logistics.
We propose to provide the lessons as camera ready masters. The lessons are being posted on the WorldWideWeb as they are developed. When feasible, Coral Springs personnel will down-load the Web pages and print them out for students to use. Alternatively we will provide camera ready master copies of lesson hand-outs.
We are providing Joel R. with a pocket cassette recordes, so that he can simply dictate remarks as they occur. We will also provide a supply of pre-stamped mailers so that the tapes can be mailed directly back to UCF. We don't want to burden the teachers with note preparation, though we will of course welcome any written feedback.
Tools: at Maitland, we have used Paint Shop Pro (PSP) for artwork. We chose it because of its ability to support .GIF files (for the WorldWideWeb portions of our multimedia course), its ability to produce .RLE bitmaps, and its intuitive user interface. However, PSP does not gracefully manage the successive poses of an animated character sequences, as Animator Pro does. To get around this problem, we use pre-drawn animated characters, and simply have the students customize them for their own use.
ExploreNet is shipped as a self-extracting archive. You can download the current ExploreNet and its reference manuals at any time from the ftp site at
ftp://ftp.cs.ucf.edu/pub/~ExploreNet/
EXPL33z.exe is "ExploreNet version 3.3z, self extracting." We expect to be using EXPL34 in various versions by the time CSMS begins to use the curriculum.
These items are stored as self-extracting archives (.exe files); just execute EXPL34 (or whatever) and it will install itself on your C: drive, creating the EXPLORE.NET directory as they go along. If you have a previous version of ExploreNet on your system, the new components will automatically replace the old ones. It's a good idea to rename old World-directories before expanding new software, so as to keep a copy of old work.
We will also provide the respective worlds for each lesson at that FTP site. LESSON1.exe would be the self-extracting archive for the ExploreNet materials for Lesson 1.
After you have set up ExploreNet in its own Program Group, add Paint Shop Pro (or your paint program) to this same Program Group. This helps the students find their tools.
Prior Knowledge.
The students should already know how to use Windows or Windows 95 (whichever system is in use). They should know how to use the File Manager or Windows Explorer to move through subdirectories, search for files, open them with NotePad or WordPad, associate tools with document types (by extension), copy and delete files.
At CSMS, Jane Vigna has taught the students how to use Animator Pro and they will have access to it on systems that are not tied up with ExploreNet. Thus, they can be tasked to create new animated characters for projects that the class wants to undertake. We also hope that CSMS students can create animated characters for use at other schools.
IDEAS - a paragraph which describes what is to be learned.
OUTCOMES - a description of what you should have produced by the end of the lesson
TOOLS - the things that are needed to complete this lesson
Then, the lesson proceeds in a highly guided fashion, to walk the students through the actual implementation of whatever they are doing. Each activity has a mixture of explicit "do-this", and of "create something". As the lessons go along, the proportion of "create something" increases until in Lesson 12, the students are invited to make up their own world. In fact, Joel and Jane may decide to do this world-design concurrently with the skill-building lessons.
In the skill building lessons, we try to isolate WHAT and HOW so that we can find the HOW instructions and update them later, as the software changes. In general, HOW is inset like the following:
This, for instance, would be a "HOW" instruction.
WHAT instructions are set to the left margin, like this.
Evaluation. We have not attempted to construct quizzes or a grading mechanism. We limit ourselves to expressing what we hope the outcomes of each lesson will be, and we hope that our teachers will design their own evaluation mechanisms and tell us what they used. We have structured the software so that it is possible for each group of four students to build its own customized version of Dino World, which can serve as a portfolio piece. Within the world, students will each have their own specialized dinosaur (or, later in the material, a tribe of same-species dinos) and two scenes over which they have editorial control.
We hope that the students will also have a separate directory on the NT server, so that they can work on any available machine rather than being bound to one machine's C drive.
Each machine will need an installation of Paint Shop Pro, if you decide to use it; or of whatever paint or animation program you use. We do not recommend using the built-in Windows Paint program because it cannot use the special ExploreNet color palette. This palette is necessary in order to create animated figures with transparent backgrounds.
Other than that, the only thing we now anticipate needing is some poster paper and marker pens, along about Lesson 12.