A fifth-grade student from Champaign, IL studies a real-time surface analysis map and the latest radar summaries to make the same prediction that the weather forecaster would make on the evening news that same night. Several inches of snow, accompanied by blustery winds, would hit much of Illinois the next day. Is this the work of an exceptionally precocious Willard Scott? Not necessarily.
Students in John Blair's fifth grade class at Champaign's Washington School are using NCSA Mosaic, a global hypermedia- based information discovery, retrieval, and collaboration system built atop the World Wide Web (WWW) technology [see access, Fall 1993; Spring 1994], to access up-to-date weather data on the university's Weather Machine, a service provided by the UIUC Department of Atmospheric Sciences. With the help of Blair and Don Crockett, a graduate research assistant in NCSA's Education Group, the students forecasted the February 25 winter storm that closed highways over a large portion of the state.
Blair's fifth grade students like the change. "Once we had the system [NCSA Mosaic] working well, they were very enthused and wanted to learn as much as possible," he says. "They are interested in anything they can learn on the computer."
"School is unique in the amount of isolation it forces on the learning process," says Fishman. "In many [schools], even collaborating with the student sitting next to you is considered 'cheating.' We are trying to foster an atmosphere where students, teachers, and scientists can work together as peers--regardless of their physical location. For that, the technology is absolutely essential."