September 10, 2000

With California Department of Education Funding 92 New IMMEX Problems Created by Teacher-Student Teams During Esperanza's Innovative July 2000 Workshops

A red water-balloon streaks through the air, expertly timed and strategically thrown to break on the ground just in front of Annie’s Nikes at the very moment she opens the back door to Dr. Sprang’s classroom. Her pant legs are drenched and Garrett, the missile commander, clenches his fist with a “yesssss,” as the girls and their shrieks scatter across the courtyard. “Last year,” he explains with a mischievous, satisfied grin, “the girls attacked us.” He boasts that this year’s water-balloon assault was much better planned and much better executed. The boys, it seems, took notes and learned from last year’s water war and that is not surprising considering these twelve, freshly graduated seniors, are IMMEX experts who have just spent the last six weeks instructing teachers and students on how to make IMMEX problems for the web.

Tricia, Garrett, and Annie are three of Marcia Sprang’s twelve Computer Systems Trainers (CSTs) who mentored over 80 teachers and 50 students during the Education Technology Professional Development Program: IMMEX/TK-12 workshop 2000. This innovative professional development, funded by the State of California (AB 1942) and administered through the California State University system, was designed to accomplish four things:

1. To broaden the implementation of technology into school sites throughout the Yorba Linda/ Placentcia school district

2. To build IMMEX problem sets and integration plans for each teacher’s classroom this school year

3. To create a school and district wide climate in which taking risks in learning, for teachers and students, is encouraged and supported

4. And finally, perhaps most ingeniously, to forge new teacher-student relationships by breaking down, if even for six weeks, the paradigm of instructor-learner roles which are typically so restricting.

Aware that technology is a reality in the modern classroom and armed with IMMEX, Dr. Sprang and cohort, Elise Simpson, have invested the great deal of time and effort necessary to launch their students, their school, and their district into the new frontier of technology based education and assessment.

“We wanted to get teachers in touch with their own learning,” explains Dr. Sprang. “But to do this we needed to get them outside of their own content expertise.” By deliberately modeling the sensations of starting an IMMEX problem and replicating the uncertainty students struggle with when they learn something new, Dr. Sprang tossed her teachers into the vast and terrifying lake of technology. So that the teachers, some of whom had trouble at first manipulating a mouse, wouldn’t feel like they were drowning, Dr. Sprang coached the student-technology experts on how to put new learners at ease. “I noticed that the teachers took more risks with the technology when the students were around to help. It was like they were afraid it would break if they experimented too much on their own,” Garret said. By the end of the workshop, teachers who had admitted they would have walked out if they had initially been told that they were going to author software, were eager sign up for the next workshop. “We provided a warm, friendly environment that encouraged discovery, which allowed for teachers to make mistakes and garner meaningful information from them.”

While the students were key to setting this tone, they were also instrumental in raising the aesthetic bar of IMMEX problem environments. Garrett notes that, “[t]he new web format allows for animation and graphics that are amazing, and because students understand what the programs are capable of doing, they can be very creative.” The impact this has on IMMEX: “the more [students] see [the problem space] like a game, the more likely they are going to want to win,” Tricia adds.

An incredible seventy-two problem sets, spanning multiple disciplines and grade-levels, were authored by the student-teacher teams and many will be available on the IMMEX web-site by this October. “Blast to the Past,” a physics problem challenging IMMEX users to choose a car which is capable of literally blasting them into the past a la “Back to the Future” style, is among one of the workshop’s highlights. “Dino Dinoflagelate,” another outstanding problem designed by CTSs Tricia and Annie is a mini-“Puffy Paramecium” which provides multiple pathways for middle-school solution seekers to discover which cell organelles are missing. “Jatrix,” time travel meets “The Matrix,” and “The Mating Game,” math meets genetics, are other exciting examples of IMMEX problem sets available to teachers this school year.

But for these three MIT and Penn bound students, the real learning had little to do with technology. “It was good for me to have to think outside my own way of doing things; to adopt and translate other people’s ideas into a workable IMMEX problem,” Trisha shared. “It allowed me to think in broader terms about multiple pathways and when building problem sets, that’s ideal.” Dr. Sprang also noticed that the workshop structure greatly empowered her students. They were put in the “expert” role with the realization that the problems could not be built without their input; “[t]heir communications skills increased, their confidence shot up and their leadership abilities flourished.”

So when all of the water balloons were spent, and the girls sufficiently soaked, the attacked huddled together, seniors with juniors, drawing x’s and o’s in the muddy aftermath, innovating a new attack on the boys for next year’s workshop. When asked if it is to be another water fight Annie smirks, “please, it’s already been done.


IMMEX Goes to Washington
The Department of Education has invited the IMMEX Project to the Secretary's Conference on Educational Technology in Washington D.C. September 11-12, 2000. Singled out as one of the country's exemplary programs influencing the use and innovation of technology in classrooms around the nation, the IMMEX lab is gearing up to show educators, funders and congressmen what tomorrow's education can look like today.


Look for the September 15th "What's New" to experience IMMEX in Washington D.C!

Presenters: Dr. Ron Stevens, Dr. Joycelin Palacio-Cayetano, Dr. Marcia Sprang, Terry Vendlinski, Jennifer Underdahl, and Tricia Um.