The Community of Explorers project will develop and study the growth of a new kind of wide-area computer network for high school biology and physics instruction. The network will support a distributed community of teachers, students and scientists who will share ideas for classroom investigators and instructional activities in physics and biology. They will also share concrete exemplars of how these topics can be investigated using Explorer, a modeling and simulation program. Our experiment in building a community of explorers will focus on a communications technology that will make it straightforward to send and receive Explorer laboratories that convey all the parameters and data of a simulation experiment in progress along with an optional text annotation. We have two related hypotheses. The first is that a distributed community in which teachers can exchange the actual "live" experiments and data from their classes will be more robust and educationally productive than a network over which teachers can exchange only text, or which is designed primarily as a delivery system. Second, that teachers will use Explorer more effectively and will take advantage of its extensibility to a greater extent with the support of a networked community than those who use Explorer locally in their schools without networking facilities for communication with others in the Explorer user community.
