With some NIH pay lines running at or below the 10th percentile, and funding becoming scarce for large science grants, new approaches are necessary to secure large interdisciplinary grant awards. The UCSD Moores Cancer Center has developed a team approach, starting with the identification of a competitive opportunity and progressing to the…

Five years ago, Leon Strecker's technology education class at Darien High School came up with the idea of building a fuel cell-powered go-kart. In previous years, the class had worked on other creations, such as electric cars that competed in a state-sponsored race and a full-size hovercraft. But students had not taken on anything anywhere near…

Student-directed projects are increasingly becoming a common phenomenon in schools of social work across the United States. Students acquire a great learning experience from these projects, which sharpen their skills in leadership, innovation, and practice. Social work practitioners who go through such a process emerge having acquired knowledge…

You have to stick with it. It takes time, patience, trial and error, failure, and persistence. It is almost never perfect or finished, but, with a good team, you can build something that works. These are the lessons youth learn when building a robot, as many do in the out-of-school time (OST) programs supported by the initiative described in this…

Lab components of undergraduate science courses typically have students complete highly directed cookbook-like laboratory activities. These experiences rarely engage students in a meaningful manner and do not accurately convey what the work of science entails. With funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), we have created more…

The Summer Camp of Mathematical Modeling in China is a recently created experience designed to further Chinese students' academic pursuits in mathematical modeling. Students are given more than three months to research on a mathematical modeling project. Researchers and teams with outstanding projects are invited to the Summer Camp to present…

Living in the Adirondack Park and being an avid outdoorsman has often resulted in the author's love of the outdoors working its way into class projects. In 2010, the author gave a group of 25 students in grades 9-12 a challenge that required them to design and construct a prototype inexpensive, lightweight kayak for backpackers and fisherman. In…

The educational goals and objectives provide a reference for curriculum designers, teachers, and educators, and they are required for evaluation or accreditation processes. This article presents a systematic method to state the learning objectives and analyze the consistency of a secondary school science program developed in Spain. The method is…

This article describes how to construct a laser level. This laser level can be made using a typical 4' (or shorter) bubble level and a small laser point. The laser unit is detachable, so the bubble level can also be used in the conventional way. However, the laser level works better than a simple bubble level. Making this inexpensive device is an…

Teaching is a complex activity that requires making ongoing multiple decisions and sporadic, responsive actions all while performing preplanned prescribed tasks. Evidence of certain aspects of teaching can be best assessed with a well-designed observation instrument. This instrument was designed to assess the enactment of the essential elements of…

In this invited autobiography, the author describes the impact that educational gaming and simulation has had on his professional career. He begins by reviewing his early life and education in Aberdeen and his subsequent work as a research scientist, schoolteacher, and physics lecturer. He then shows how he changed disciplines from physics to…

This paper describes a simple, rapid and low-cost technique for growing bacteria (or other microbes) in an environmental gradient, in order to determine the tolerance of the microbial population to varying concentrations of sodium chloride ions, and suggests how the evolutionary response of a microbial population to the selection pressure of the…

This article summarizes a major e-Learning project recently funded by the National Science Council of Taiwan and envisions some of the future research directions in this area. This project intends to initiate the "Center for excellence in e-Learning Sciences (CeeLS): i[superscript 4] future learning environment" at the National Taiwan…

Open educational resources (OER) are gaining ascendancy in education, particularly in higher education. Logic suggests that the potential benefits of OER are likely to be greatest in resource-poor contexts such as Africa. However, little is known about the feasibility and sustainability of their use in African institutions. In the Health OER…

In this paper we describe a model for a science fair, within the context of an elementary science methods course. We first describe the theoretical perspectives from which the idea of science fairs derives and we provide definitions as we sketch the characteristics of commonly used science fairs. We then describe the context and processes of a…