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Distance Learning Project
The Importance of Parent Involvement
Parent involvement in a child's academic pursuits provides an important level of support, encouragement and accountability that spurs students to explore the Sciences and Technology as a way of more fully understanding the world, rather than as a topic to be memorized for an examination, or in the case of computer technology, as a tool to increased knowledge, rather than merely serving as an entertainment vehicle. Parental involvement in science education allows the family unit to become a testing ground for beneficial scientific explorations and promotes both K-12 and life-long cross-generational learning, enriching the lives of the youth and the adults. Camp Internet has been designed to foster parent/child science explorations by providing an inter-generational, Internet-based, distance learning program focused on using computer technology to bring parents and children together to consider and explore many of the wonders of our natural world. The primary goal of Camp Internet is to increase and sustain the number of American families involved in family-based science education opportunities by increasing their access to valuable online learning programs. The two primary methods used to achieve this are :
Assisting families to learn to focus on their home computer or Web TV
box as a home learning center that enables them to explore the world
together by participating in online Expeditions presented by noted
scientists and educators.
Develop a network of Official Camp Internet Outposts at rural and
urban public libraries, museums, classrooms and afterschool programs
nationwide that provide technology and science education access for
families that have yet to purchase in-home technologies, allowing the Camp
to reach at-risk youth and their parents, low income families, and the
traditionally underserved, with an emphasis on incorporating video and
audio streaming to make the materials more accessible to the non-computer
literate.
Computer telecommunication technology offers a significant new opportunity to stimulate parent / child learning activities. Through the Internet, the World Wide Web, and through web casting and virtual field trips, parents and children can discover facets of the natural world's amazing qualities they might otherwise not have an opportunity to experience. From live video during a space shuttle mission, to the landing of the rover on Mars, to undersea photography in the South Pacific, parents and children are beginning to gather around their home computer to witness and experience science breakthroughs with an immediacy and inter-activity never before possible.
The online medium has the capability of presenting inspiring learning activities that engender cross-generational enthusiasm for science and technology, and online technology has the potential to assist in raising the overall level of American participation in, understanding of, and literacy in the sciences.
The Camp Internet program applies advanced computer telecommunications technologies to take the next step beyond simply delivering science experiment suggestions online, the Camp actually involves the parent / child learners in a community of people - from scientists to teachers, from museum curators to fellow families - who are exploring and sharing new scientific data and findings together. Campers learn not just 'about' science, they learn directly from scientists, and respond to challenges assigned by their science mentors. Both parents and children are given the support and encouragement to personally get involved in scientific inquiry themselves, together as a family, and in connection with resources in their local community.
The important innovations that Camp Internet's technology allows the program to deliver, that can not be made available through other media, are :
Parent / child contact with a consortium of scientists,
environmentalists, and technology authors who contribute original study
units and serve as interactive online mentors year round, directly linking
the learners to the scientist's work places and field work sites. This
also enables the Camp to develop a public interface and end product for a
consortium of other NSF-funded science projects, such as The Project
Alexandria and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis,
both housed locally at the University of California.
Cutting edge video, audio and spatially-oriented GIS online
technologies that literally bring the study unit to life by featuring
dynamic interviews with participating scientists, with the Camp
participants themselves, out on site field trips to relevant museums,
excavations, or undersea, and that link the learners to these information
resources through sophisticated GIS spatial mapping databases.
Live video transmissions from remote sites that actually create a
'classroom with out walls', delivering live, real time field trip
broadcasts from beneath the sea, from the sites of prehistoric cave
paintings, from a physics laboratory, from a remote sea lion nursery on a
rocky island, from a rainforest in Central America, or from Antarctica or
the South Pacific.
The use of a personal home or free library computer, or a low cost
home Web TV box, as an intentional, family strengthening tool, bringing
parents into their child's learning experience, and bringing the child's
searching interests in the natural world to the parent's attention to form
a new family bond that promotes life long science and technology education
for the adults, and improved science education opportunities for the
youth.
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