9355806 Schlenker The goal of the proposed project is to establish a community of scientists, teachers and learners who are investigating real world problems in science using a variety of innovative tools. These tools will include computational tools which will allow participants to model scientific processes as well as communication tools which will allow participants at multiple locations to work together, to share information, and to retrieve information from remote sources. Implementation of the 'virtual high school' project will help us determine how peer and mentor support, additional technical advice and technical resources, and a source of problem-solving activities related to science and mathematics can help teachers adapt to new technology and methods, and help to equalize the learning opportunity for all levels of students at diverse schools. preparing students to "do" science in the real world of the future means guiding them in "doing" science now. This project entails bringing to the classroom the same team problem solving, technology rich approaches currently used in research and business. Computational science has become a powerful paradigm to complement other approaches. Computational tools, ranging from spreadsheets on microprocessors to advanced molecular modeling tools on supercomputers, are allowing scientists to model processes too costly or impossible to investigate in other ways. This project will support the creation of the 'virtual high school' in two ways. Interdisciplinary problems requiring many levels of expertise and solvable with computational techniques across a communication network will be developed by a team of teachers who are interested in using these problems in their classroom. Workshop training will enable these teachers to lead their students and other teachers through the team building and content learning necessary to create computational models. Secondly, the computational, communication, and teaming tool s will be evaluated in a testbed environment involving selected school sites and industry. Use of these tools and the global Internet will enable schools to leverage the use of 'low end' microcomputers currently available in schools to achieve access to databases and more powerful high performance computers. As the project matures, the schools in Maryland will be linked together solving 'realworld' problems. Students from different age groups, with varying mathematical and scientific backgrounds, with all levels to computer expertise, and from schools geographically distant from one another will collaborate on problems of common interest. Students will no longer wonder why they are learning disjointed facts nor will they wait impatiently to see the uses of their high school education. Instead, they will be motivated to learn because they are solving 'real' problems now. ***
