The Shodor Education Foundation, Inc. and its National Computational Science Institute (NCSI) in partnership with Noyce Program Scholars and Fellows, is building cultural bridges connecting US and Thailand to promote an international research and training initiative to improve teacher preparation in mathematics and science and in the authentic uses of computational and communication technologies. The introductory (pilot) workshop is exposing teachers in both cultures to computational thinking, modeling and data analysis. Materials for the workshop are drawn from the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), in particular Shodor's extensive Interactivate collection of lessons, discussions, activities, and supporting materials, all aligned with National Council of Teacher of Mathematics (NCTM) and Common Core Standards. Given the initiative in Thailand to give nearly a million tablet computers to students, special focus is given to Shodor's Interactivate materials, and in particular those that have been converted to run on mobile platforms. Lessons learned from this initiative are improving materials in the National Science Digital Library (nsdl.org) and providing practical lessons conveyed by the Noyce participants and NCSI back to their US colleagues. This first collaborative step between US and Thai teachers provides an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and lessons learned in the future. This international project is jointly funded through the Office of International Science and Engineering and the EHR/DUE Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship and Fellowship Program.
As an extension to two NSF-funded projects (Commputing MATTERS and the Computational Science Education Reference Desk) Shodor and the University of Houston-Downtown partnered with the Noyce progrm to bring 8 US participants to a workshop conducted by Shodor staff at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. The goal of the workshop was to share with the Thai education community advances in inquiry-based learning so that they could experience new modalites of teaching beyond the traditional lecture. With 22 in-service teachers from 16 pre-college institutions, newly-converted interactive explorations were tested on a dozen different mobile device environments to showcase dynamic, interactive, and visual learning tools from the National Science Digital Library (nsdl.org). The workshop also included a brief introduction to both system thinking and agent-based modeling softare environments to explore predator-prey, epidemiology, and forest fire models. Teachers also explored using dynamic functional graphing tools developed by Shodor to build a deeper connection in functional representations. The workshop schedule was complemented by a cultural exchange with a local teacher guiding the Americans to visit palaces, pagodas, and parks, while trying many varieties of Thai cuisine. Students rode their first elephants, traveled to a floating market, and experienced the rush of shopping at an open-air market conducted on active railroad tracks. Through many exchanges with the teachers, many improvements were made to the on-line materials resulting in a robust roll-out of Interactivate (www.shodor.org/interactivate) now used more than 3 million times per month, with thousands of those accesses coming from the Thai schools represented at the workshop, even 2 years after the initial contact. After the Thai component of the workshop, US-based Noyce participants organized workshops by Shodor on their campuses resulting in additional training for many more pre-service and inservice teachers along with their STEM and Education faculty.
