Project SEED is a four week summer workshop for middle school teachers that focuses on the use of inexpensive materials to teach the basic concepts and principles of physical science. The core of the program is a manual of over 150 experiments and a kit of supporting demonstrations. In addition to workshop sessions visits to local research and industrial facilities and talks by Northeastern University research faculty are included. Teachers who have participated in SEED workshop will then receive two years of leadership training(PRO-SEED) to prepare them to conduct in-service activity based workshops in their own school districts. This after school program of "teachers teaching teachers" will be named EX-SEED. An additional component of the project is to train retired scientists to act as Science Resource Agents(SRA'S) within the schools(RE-SEED) Over the 46 months of funding 48 leader teachers, 16 peer teachers and 70 retired technical professionals will be taught. Additional features of the program involve the use of: * Live interactive telecasts distributed by Massachusett's Corporation for Educational Telecommunications(MCET) satellite network to EX-SEED leaders and participants prior to each EX-SEED workshop. * Museum-style corridor exhibits to be distributed within the schools for students. Cost sharing is estimated at 85%.
