Gaming Education

Classic ed-tech games and build-your-own methods are now joined by the "gamification" movement.

There are at least three different classes of digital games in schools. Which you prefer speaks volumes about the role you believe schools should play.

The first group, the classic edu-tech games, have danced in and out of schools for so long that many kids take them for granted. Most of these programs are cute, but they fall short on pedagogical ambitions and graphic design. That doesn't make them worthless; it just limits their effectiveness. (One person's drill-and-kill can indeed be another's guiding light. When educator and blogger extraordinaire, Scott McLeod, asked, "Do most educational games suck?" he drew fire from just about all sides.)

By contrast, a handful of educators a few years ago sought to put game controls directly into students' hands by teaching them how to build their own games. Scratch, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT's Media Lab, is the reigning champion here. (See my take on Scratch below). There are a few others, too, including Microsoft's Kudo, a programming language that kids can use to build games for the Xbox game platform.

Screen from "The Fly," a game built with Scratch.

And now comes what I would dub a third approach, something that has picked up its very own buzzword before it has even reached most school gates: gamification. The term is as elegant as a teenager jawing a mouthful of bubble gum. But it suggests adding far more sophisticated game mechanics to applications -- no matter how stuffy or serious the application has been. Gamification probably has more momentum outside of schools than in. Case in point: Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat has written about how DevHub, a place for web developers, added gaming feedback and watched in awe as the percentage of users who finished their sites shot up from 10 percent to 80 percent.

Most games are naturally social, which means gamification depends on that other ubiquitous web trend, social networking. Sure, go ahead and play Solitaire. But most of us take a certain pleasure in besting the competition -- whether it's the Texas Rangers or some ugly troll in World of Warcraft.

Academics are creating a skin of respectability for gamification. Byron Reeves of Stanford University has recently co-authored "Total Engagement" to outline his ideas about how gaming can turn the erstwhile plodding company man into an engaged and motivated worker. (Reeves is also putting his ideas to the test by co-founding a consulting firm, Seriousity, that will coach companies on how to do this.) The first gamification summit is slated to take place in January in San Francisco.

What does each of these approaches say about education?

The first type of games were willing to entertain kids to keep them engaged -- the "just-make-it-fun" school of thought. But any standup comedian will tell you how tough it is to keep people entertained for long. It's even harder with kids who outgrow the "fun" of a game faster than most games can evolve.

The Scratch camp is more about empowerment. Scratch appeals enormously to kids who want to control their environment and be in charge. Those who build Scratch games get feedback from others when they post their games. They say they love the comments and feel great when hundreds of others play their games.

Ultimately Scratch aficionados bring their ambitions to learn with them. I'd wager that if these kids were born a generation or two ago, they'd be building transistor radios. The Scratch kids have to be self-motivated: most use Scratch outside of school. No one makes them do it. All it took to get them going was for someone to introduce them to Scratch in the first place. That's a great argument for exposing more kids to the tools.

Gamification, by contrast, doesn't rely on internal motivation. Instead, it's using the oldest tricks in the book: providing instantaneous feedback, egging on the competition, and rewarding even tiny steps of progress. Gamification assumes that the player isn't especially motivated -- at least at the beginning -- and then provides barrels of incentives to ramp up that motivation.

I'm betting that gamification, in spite of its throat-clearing name, is going to be big in the commercial world -- and in schools. Gamification can help build kids' competitive spirits. As they gain confidence, they may become hungry for tools that put them in control. At the end of the day, those who know how to create the rules of the game, know how to win.

reposted from: O'Reilly Media Edu2.0

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Cracking An Educating Impasse

By Elizabeth Corcoran 10.28.09, 12:01 AM EDT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.--

In 2005, Bronx middle school IS 339 was a wreck. A slim 9% of the students could do math at their grade level. Classes were regularly locked down to dampen conflicts. Ambulances and police cars frequently vied for parking spots with school buses.

Four years later, IS 339 is a very different school from the one principal Jason Levy inherited several years earlier: 62% of the students are at grade level in math now. Teachers share lesson plans with one another and are inspiring students to take on complex challenges, including interviewing city planners about what it would take to create something like Times Square in the Bronx.

What did Levy do?

Turning around IS 339 took tremendous--and in some instances, radical--efforts that included changing more than half the teaching staff. From Levy's vantage, however, he couldn't have done it without an infusion of technology--including giving laptops to every student and training teachers to use Google docs to share lesson plans, put out assignments and stay in touch with their students. ''We don't see laptops as toys or tools but as megaphones,'' Levy said. ''The internet is just another language that we need to speak.''

Levy shared his story at a day-and-half conference, ''Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age,'' hosted at Google's headquarters and sponsored by a trio of organizations long involved in education: the MacArthur Foundation, Joan Gantz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the San Francisco-based Common Sense Media organization. Questions were also moderated online. ''We have the leaders of industry, education and philanthropy in the room. This is our moment,'' declared James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media.

The undercurrent of the meeting: The Internet has changed most of the business world and lives--but for the most part, it hasn't touched public education. That means the chasm between what students experience in and outside the classroom is widening--so much so that 1.2 million teenagers quit school every year, a rate that translates to one kid dropping out every 26 seconds.

Apart from agreeing that education is fraught with problems, educators have long argued about where to start: Improve teacher pay? Get rid of tenure? Get rid of school boards? Add more standards or set schools and teachers free to experiment with novel teaching techniques? Add computers? Get the parents more involved?

Even as policymakers, educators and philanthropists debated the different approaches, a handful of speakers shared inspiring stories about individual projects that are working, much like Levy's school in the Bronx. A number are bubbling up in New York City: Geoff Canada, who runs the Harlem Children's Zone, described how his project offers educational, social and medical services to thousands of children--and has turned out nationally ranked teams of chess champions. There are plans to try to build similar projects elsewhere around the U.S. Last summer, New York also sponsored a unique experiment called School of One (see "Tools For Learning") that used computers to create personalized learning programs for individual students. Test scores jumped; New York hopes to expand that program too.

In Chicago, Nichole Pinkart, who founded the Digital Youth Network, described how her team has created a space where urban kids can experiment with digital media tools as well as become experts in constructing multimedia projects that tie into school curriculum.

And in Maine, Susan Gendron, commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, discussed how all middle school students in her state are given laptops. The students ''are networking and doing research all over the world,'' Gendron said. ''The ways they're presenting what they learn is much like how people present information in companies every day.''

There were also hints of projects to come: Slated for released in 2010 is Waiting For Superman, a movie that lays out the heartbreaking frustration of bright, economically disadvantaged kids struggling to get a good education. The film is produced by Internet executive Jeff Skoll's movie production company, which also sponsored An Inconvenient Truth. Former chief of Lotus Development Corp., Mitch Kapor, who now runs the Level Playing Field Institute in San Francisco, suggested that he's seen prototypes of a new class of low-cost, handheld devices like netbook computers that will debut in 2010.

Yet as educators and teachers shared their stories, one thread ran through many of the comments: In spite of the spread of Internet technology, few teachers, administrators or even parents have found easy ways to share the technologies and best teaching practices that have worked in classrooms. ''I'm a little unhappy because we're not addressing the issue of how you scale what kids need,'' said Mike S. Smith, a senior counsel at the U.S. Department of Education.

Twenty years ago, when the National Writing Project began offering teachers workshops on how to teach writing, ''we'd see innovations in teaching practices that would spread,'' noted Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, who directs national programs and site development for the NWP. ''I'd say in the last 10 years, it has been harder to do that.''

Exactly how to get the best ideas to spread hasn't been worked out yet. But the need has never been stronger. ''In every other sector, technology has been an essential part of how to do more with less,'' noted James H. Shelton III, an assistant deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of Education. ''Pressure, relentlessly applied, causes change.''

Elizabeth Corcoran was an editor and writer for Forbes for 10 years. She left recently to create a start-up devoted to sharing best practices for technology in education.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/27/google-computers-internet-technology-personal-education.html

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Getting To The Top Of The Class

Smart Technologies aims to change how kids learn

by Elizabeth Corcoran, 09.16.09, 06:00 PM EDT Forbes Magazine dated October 05, 2009

Connecting more than just the dots: David Martin and Nancy Knowlton with a Smart board.

Children who marched into their grade school classrooms this autumn found the usual assortment of crayons, glue sticks and light-up globes. Thousands found something else: large interactive screens affixed to a classroom wall, known in playground lingo as "Smart boards."

When attached to the Internet, these boards are a portal to the digital world. Students can manipulate what's on the screen with a finger or a stylus. Changes get saved to a laptop computer and then printed or sent home via e-mail. Teachers like the boards. They're cool and digital--but if you want to use them like a blackboard, you can do that, too.

Sales of wall screens, which cost between $700 to $4,500, have zoomed from 170,000 units in 2004 to 700,000 worldwide this year, mostly to schools. Almost a third of k--12 classes in the U.S.--and three-quarters of the schools in the U.K.--now have one. "This is the first tool that's transforming our classrooms and showing how they're different from the past hundred years," says Diane A. Garber, principal of Lincoln Elementary School in Burlingame, Calif.

To see interactive boards in action, see: "Chalkboards Get Smart."

The leader of this spurt of silicon is not in Silicon Valley. More than half of the world's interactive whiteboards (and 63% of those in the U.S.) are made by Smart Technologies, a 22-year-old privately held company in Calgary, Alta. run by husband-and-wife cofounders David A. Martin, 60, and Nancy Knowlton. "We think these need to go into every classroom," says the soft-spoken Knowlton, 55, the company's chief executive. "There's no silver bullet in education, but we see these increasing student enjoyment and decreasing behavioral problems, and that translates into better student achievement."

Many of the past efforts to load classrooms with electronic gadgets have been bitter disappointments. U.S. school districts have spent billions on technology over the past two decades. Test scores haven't budged. Broken, dusty computers languishing in corners of classrooms and school libraries are as commonplace as skinned knees on the playground.

For many reasons, including the erratic budgets of school districts, selling educational technology is a treacherous business. No one knows that better than Knowlton, who jokes that she and Martin have been so intensely devoted to building Smart that if they had married anyone else, their spouses would have long ago quit on them.

Their story began 20 years ago. Martin, who has a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics from Concordia University and had started an earlier company, got rights to LCD-panel technology developed by itt. Knowlton, who earned an M.B.A. at St. Mary's University in Halifax, N.S., had been hankering to run a company. In 1987 they became the Canadian distributor for InFocus Systems, a digital projector maker, and started imagining what they could do with flat screens.

At the time that took some powerful imagination: LCD screens were expensive, clunky and limited to black-and-white. Research groups such as the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center were experimenting with interactive boards in meetings, but the devices were novelties.

In 1991 Martin and Knowlton built their first Smart board and hauled it to Comdex, the big tech trade show. Their demo caught the eye of a wandering executive from Intel, Les Vadesz. He wrote the couple a check from Intel-- "barely seven figures," recalls Knowlton--for an undisclosed stake in the company, but the timing and the endorsement were crucial. In the years that followed, Vadesz and Intel provided Martin and Knowlton with advice and guidance but no additional cash, even though Vadesz would go on to start Intel's venture arm.

Martin poured his efforts into the unglamorous underpinnings of interactive board technology. The screens were based on resistive technology: They used two conductive layers separated by a few thousandths of an inch of air. Applying pressure to the board--with a stylus or a finger--connects the layers and sends data or commands to a computer. Martin's most important patent involves software that registers the location of that pressure in an x-y grid and calibrates the image even if it's not neatly aligned. (Smart holds 29 U.S. patents and has 200 applications pending.)

Knowlton's and Martin's budget was gaunt. They had lost the right to sell InFocus supplies in 1991 after a reorganization--and without that, 97% of their revenue. Most of what they built they sold to schools. They scraped by on bank loans.

As they teetered on the edge of insolvency, Knowlton remembers their lawyer advising them to pack it in. The couple reflected on their motives. "One of us said: 'We want to change the way the world works and learns. And we're not done.'" Knowlton pauses. "It was such a preposterous statement that we both laughed out of control for 10 or 15 minutes." The next day they were back at it.

Other technologies were catching up. By the late 1990s the cost of flat-panel screens was plummeting. Screens grew thinner. The Web and wireless connectivity were both booming. Those changes made the boards not just fancy blackboards but interactive tools that students use even more than teachers. Smart racked up sales of $21 million in 1999.

In 2004 the British government decided to spend $90 million on interactive whiteboards for grade school classrooms. The main suppliers: Smart, Hitachi and Promethean, a U.K. company. Private equity firm Apax Partners became Smart's third minority stakeholder in August 2007. Smart revenue for the year ending Mar. 31 was $430 million.

The future for digital suppliers to the classroom looks pretty bright right now. "Technology is becoming so ubiquitous outside the schools that it's requiring us to rethink technology inside the schools," says Steven Hargadon, founder of a popular social networking group devoted to education, Classroom 2.0. "As digital tools permeate the classroom, kids get more actively involved with learning," adds Scott McLeod, a professor at Iowa State University. "They become doers."

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1005/technology-smart-technologies-getting-to-top-of-class.html

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Intel Inside--Classroom

By Elizabeth Corcoran, 10.17.08, 05:43 PM EDT

The chip company is pursing a classic, long-term strategy by investing the minds of the world's young.

Brenda Musilli is just the sort of no-nonsense executive who has helped build Intel Corp. into the world's largest computer chip company. A 30-year Intel veteran, she's done stints in marketing, finance and other corners of the corporation.

And she has a swift no-nonsense answer if you ask her what will be one of the themes at Intel as the company works its way through the current global economic crisis: It's got to keep up its support for education both in the U.S. and abroad.

"These kinds of investments are about remaining competitive as a company," says Musilli, president of the not-for-profit Intel Foundation, which was founded in 1988 and devotes more than half its resources to supporting education efforts in the U.S. and overseas.

Yet even the best-intentioned programs in education face some thorny challenges. On the top of the list: high-technology companies figure their future workers will need a complex set of skills that go far beyond the classic reading, writing and 'rithmatic. But U.S. public schools are still wrestling with how to deliver even those basic requirements--and under the Bush Administration, they face severe penalties if they do not raise their standardized test scores in those subjects. The concern within educational circles is that schools are becoming obsessed with test-taking at the expense of teaching more flexible critical thinking skills.

Those pressures are likely to become even more extreme as school budgets grow more pinched in a chilling economy.

Musilli points out that Intel has supported education since its days as a start-up and that its leaders--starting with Chairman Craig Barrett and Chief Executive Paul Otellini--are deeply supportive of education initiatives.

See "Intel's Chairman On Innovation."

About 10 years ago, Intel dramatically stepped up its education programs. It now values its annual support for education programs supporting math, science and technology at $100 million, a combination of cash grants, equipment and services. (Although we only published the top 10, Intel would have ranked 13 on our list of the most generous corporations in terms of total cash donations.)

When Intel went through layoffs in 2006, the foundation scrutinized its programs, too. "We looked at how we could scale more efficiently and at which programs were getting the biggest impact," Musilli recalls. But the $100 million commitment--about 1% of its fiscal 2007 operating income of $8.2 billion--stayed steady, she says.

That support goes into a host of education programs, both ones aimed at grabbing headline attention and ones providing more subtle backstage efforts.

In 1999, Intel took over the grandfather of all science fairs--the now 66-year-old "Science Talent Search" contest, which attracts something like 1,600 entries each year from U.S. high school students and a similar program internationally that attracts another 65,000 students around the world. The programs aim to make student scientists into heroes--a sort of "American Idol" for the geek set. The financial awards are significant, too: The winner gets a $100,000 scholarship and, each year, the top 40 U.S. winners split prizes that together are worth $1.25 million.

Additionally, Intel annually awards prizes to schools that demonstrate strong science and math programs. In September, Intel lauded Sojourner Elementary School, a 170-student magnet elementary school in Milwaukie, Ore., as a "star innovator." (Sojourner will share cash and prizes worth about $1 million with five other finalist schools.)

There are also fun programs, such as a constellation of more than 100 "computer clubhouses" that Intel sponsors around the world. (Two-thirds of those are in the U.S.)

But Intel's also counting on its behind-the-scenes efforts to pay big future returns. Since 1999, it has offered workshops on how to use technology in the classroom for teachers of grades K through 12. Originally, then-Chief Executive Barrett set a goal of training "100,000 teachers in 1,000 days."

But no company understands how to scale projects better than the computer chip giant. By developing workshops that train senior trainers to teach "master" teachers, who then convey those lessons back to teachers at local schools, Intel estimates that its program has now touched 5.5 million teachers in 40 countries.

"We don't charge for it; it's not for sale," notes Stephen Andrews, the U.S. manager for the Intel Teach program. The programs are technology "agnostic." "We provide the professional development that teachers need, no matter if they're using Macintosh computers or PCs. It's all about the subjects and [grade-levels]," Andrews says. Local school districts have to put support into the programs, too, by giving teachers time off to take the programs and encouraging technology use.

But then there are those standardized tests.

Driven by the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind program, which demands increases in test scores at the risk of withholding funding, schools have become obsessed with tests, even spending scarce funds and school hours to practice test taking and working on skills such as "bubbling"--properly coloring circles on multiple choice tests forms.

By contrast, high-technology companies are strong advocates of developing what they call "21st century skills," namely the skills and knowledge that they feel will be needed in the coming years. These involve improved communicating and thinking skills, problem solving skills, creativity and "self-direction" skills.

Intel tries to dance between those two demands, using its funding to help schools with the basics while steadily emphasizing the skills that its executives feel will be essential in the future. It has poured significant efforts into coming up with its own metrics for grading the success of its programs, contracting with outside organizations to assess and monitor its programs. "We believe the metrics and evaluation of the program are critically important," Musilli says.

Intel's assessors look at whether teachers who have gone through its workshops are working more collaboratively with other teachers, using technology to advance the curriculum in interesting ways and are engaging the minds of their students.

"But no, it's not directly correlated to test scores," Musilli concedes. "If you believe the research that talks about why the 21st century skills are so important, then one would hope those skills would lead to improved test scores," she says.

And that classic, long-term investment strategy may be one of Intel's greatest gifts to U.S. schools.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/17/intel-foundation-education-tech-corprespons08-cx_ec_1017intel.html

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WHY KIDS LOVE COMPUTER NETS

FORTUNE magazine

Using technology to escape the bounds of the classroom, children are learning to work in ways you never dreamed of when you were their age.

By Elizabeth Corcoran
REPORTER ASSOCIATE Jacqueline M. Graves
September 20, 1993


THE RALPH BUNCHE public school sits squarely in Harlem, surrounded by the splintered glass and concrete trappings of inner-city life. Nearby avenues echo with police sirens, blaring music, and angry shouts. But upstairs in room 409, Hamidou Diori is exploring another world altogether -- by way of electronic networks. On the Macintosh screen before him, the 13-year-old seventh-grader maneuvers his computer mouse across a collection of icons that represent stored files and programs. With a few quick clicks, Hamidou has hooked into Internet, the sprawling electronic highway system that by a recent estimate connects more than 15 million people and thousands of universities, government offices, and businesses in 60 countries. Another click and Hamidou has called up a gopher, a kind of electronic guide. Once programmed to search for information on a given subject, it will burrow through databases and bulletin boards that are connected to Internet but reside on computers scattered around the globe. Hamidou's goal: Find a topic for a science project on recycling. He gives the gopher a few key words; in seconds the program makes a preliminary search and flashes a list of possible sources on his screen. Soon Hamidou is scanning feisty, fact-filled messages posted on the bulletin boards by graduate students, professors, and managers in many countries, debating the merits of recycling. If those exchanges don't provide the inspiration Hamidou needs, he will float a few questions of his own across the network. ''I use a whole bunch of databases,'' he nonchalantly tells a visitor. ''You ask these people for help -- and they give it to you.'' From Harlem to Honolulu, electronic networks are sparking the kind of excitement not seen in America's classrooms since the space race. That contest in the 1960s inspired a generation of students to become scientists and engineers. The advent of computer networks could have even more profound effects. In scores of programs and pilot projects, networks are changing the way teachers teach and students learn. Last spring, for example, instead of merely reading about life in Russia from outdated books, schoolchildren in Minnesota exchanged electronic mail with their peers on the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Siberia. Students across America tracked the progress of four men biking 10,000 miles in Africa, via reports filed by the riders on an international teachers' network. In the process, the kids learned the continent's geography. Still others got a taste of scientific collaboration by measuring the oxygen in local lakes and comparing results with peers around the world. By tapping into the nets, kids discover ways of working and communicating that weren't available to their parents -- and that will powerfully enhance their prospects when they join the work force of the 21st century. The networks may also play a key role in helping U.S. schools overcome their notorious weakness in teaching math, science, and geography. That's partly why network projects have grants from influential high-tech donors such as IBM, Boeing, AT&T, and Xerox. Bob Hughes, Boeing's corporate director of education relations, looks to computer networks as a key to turning out students who adapt readily to change and who solve problems by seeking out and applying new ideas. The traditional classroom, he says, is singularly ill suited to producing lifelong learners: ''Right now, you've got 30 little workers who come into a room, sit in rows, follow instructions from a boss, and can't talk to one another. School is the last time they'll ever see that model.'' As many as 750,000 U.S. lower, middle, and high school students took part in networking projects during the past school year, estimates Seth J. Itzkan, an educational technology consultant in Houston. National Geographic Kids Network, the largest and most sophisticated, helped students in more than 10,000 elementary school classes plunge into science by conducting experiments and then pooling data with kids doing similar work in other parts of the world. Some 35,000 kids plugged into the Learning Network, a 23-nation social studies and literature program run by AT&T. Tens of thousands of students traded electronic messages and did research using Internet and education networks managed by state and grassroots organizations. IS NETWORKING just another fad? For decades, educators have fantasized about computers as a classroom cure-all: a way to engage slow and hard-to-reach students while letting smart kids race ahead. But each wave of techno- enthusiasm has led to disappointment. Too often schools scrimped on teacher training, software, and maintenance, ensuring that the technology remained alien to all but a few. After the hoopla subsided, the computers wound up as institutionally approved videogames or dusty, unused fixtures in classroom closets. But connect a computer to a network, and the technology can come to life, bringing children the excitement of the outside world. ''I have kids nudging each other to get off the computer,'' says Sandra McCourtney, who runs a computer lab at Sarasota High School and co-founded Egret International, a nonprofit network in Florida. The networks also offer much-needed help in an age when teachers often feel overwhelmed by large classes and the problems that many kids lug to school instead of a brown-bag lunch. Says Fenn Ketchoyian, who has spent nearly 12 years teaching inner-city kids at East High School in Salt Lake City, and whose students got access to Internet this year for the first time: ''I have never seen my students so involved, interested, and excited. Using networks may be a way to really hook these students into staying in school.'' As students join communities outside their classrooms, too, the role of the teacher changes. ''You need to be a manager, not a dispenser of information,'' says Ed Barry, who jointly teaches 50 sixth-graders at the School Street School in Milton, Vermont, a serene, red-brick building perched on a small rise not far from dairy farms and maple trees. Half a dozen Macintoshes ring Barry's classroom. Two have modems, connecting the class to the Vermont EdNet, a state-funded network for teachers and students. ''I have sources all over the state,'' Barry says. ''If I can't answer a question, someone else can.'' Since putting his students on-line, Barry has spent less time lecturing and more time coaching students in where to find answers. When the class studies Egypt and the flooding of the Nile, Barry sends the kids to the office of the town clerk to ask how the cycles of the nearby Lamoille River affect zoning and to the computer network to collect data on how the Lamoille affects other towns. ''Physically the students go into the local community, and electronically they go into the world,'' he says. Network-assisted teaching is demanding. Barry had to provide most of the equipment himself, and put in long hours figuring out how to use it. Even so, he says, he often finds himself having to admit to students how much he doesn't know. Increasingly the students learn as much from one another as they do from any adult. On the AT&T Learning Network, elementary, middle, and high school classes take part in creative writing groups, contribute to an international student newspaper, and learn about other governments and cultures. AT&T organizes activity on the network in six- to 15-week ''sessions'' that have names like Society's Problems and Computer Chronicles (cost per 15-week session: $375). Students swap essays with their peers around the country and abroad, and then questions -- and critiques -- fly back and forth. At the end of each session, the program publishes the best work in a booklet mailed -- the old-fashioned way -- to participating classes. THE EXCHANGES spur students to work hard on their writing, according to Margaret M. Riel, a consultant in Encinitas, California, who helped develop the network. ''When kids are writing for their peers, they take on a different style,'' she says. In a study she conducted with colleagues in Israel, Riel found that students typically wrote more clearly and carefully when they knew that other students would scrutinize their work. National Geographic Kids Network aims to teach by propelling children into the thick of scientific debates. In the past four years, well over a half- million elementary school children have taken part. Each class pays about $450 for teaching materials, software, maps, and on-line time in an eight-week course; among this year's offerings was an ecologically minded project called Too Much Trash. Students started by defining trash and plotting their own location and those of their network teammates on a map. In the weeks that followed, each class analyzed its own garbage output and cooked up schemes for generating less of it. (A typical task: ''Calculate the weight of the trash generated per student in each trash category . . . ((and)) send trash data to your research team.'') Besides having fun, students experienced the thrill of real science: collaborating internationally to piece together new knowledge. Kids Network is the brainchild of Bob Tinker, chief scientist at Terc, a nonprofit science and math education organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which developed the network and in 1989 turned it over to National Geographic. Earlier attempts to get kids on-line had fizzled, largely because teachers lacked the time and motivation to struggle with what seemed like fancy pen-pal systems. Tinker made networking easy by structuring the program like a regular lesson plan. Teachers get detailed instructions about how to run the science projects; the network serves mainly as a tool for sharing data and getting answers to questions. Tinker and his colleagues are now experimenting with a high school program called Global Lab. During last December's winter solstice, students around the world took part in a pilot project, rising before dawn to measure air and soil temperatures. Later they tapped into the network to analyze how their data reflected their geographic locations. Tinker recalls, ''One student wrote, 'I know the solstice is too big to grasp, but I feel like I touched it a little bit.' '' A growing number of on-line experiments partially funded by the National Science Foundation are putting kids in direct contact with scientists. Last year the Institute for Research on Learning, a nonprofit group in Palo Alto, California, founded by Xerox, helped middle-school math teachers work with scientists from the Sandia National Laboratories to develop a curriculum based on designing a mock research station in Antarctica. The object, says director Shelley Goldman, was ''to attract kids who traditionally drop out and make them feel confident that they could see the world mathematically.'' When 160 seventh- and eighth-graders in the San Francisco Bay Area drew up blueprints and built models of their Antarctica research stations this spring, once vague concepts like proportion became real. As the students spent time converting polar temperatures from Fahrenheit to Celsius, negative numbers finally made sense to them. Rather than thumbing through textbooks to resolve questions, classes consulted the Sandia scientists via electronic mail. Like many experts, Goldman believes that networks have powerful social potential: They put students of all backgrounds on an equal footing. At the Ralph Bunche School in Harlem, the computer center is the focus of a school- within-the-school for 160 volunteers from the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Teacher Paul Reese says angry youngsters often cool off and come into their own when they work with the machines. Adds David Sherwood, a Columbia University sophomore who is a volunteer tutor at Ralph Bunche: ''Access to the network seems to give some kids their own space and make them feel powerful.'' When he first began putting students on-line, Reese recalls, he wasn't convinced they could learn to navigate the networks. Many still need guidance. ''It's not just having the technology,'' says Reese. ''You need a good teacher.'' But the students' excitement when they uncover a new source of information or make a faraway friend sold him on the power of the nets. Communicating via computer, he says, equips kids with skills that will help them thrive in the work force -- and gives them a vision of a future beyond the city streets.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: FORTUNE TABLE CAPTION: WHERE KIDS CONNECT

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