Right now we seem to be in the minority, having not yet picked the one and only project we're going to follow to the end. Since that's a bit peculiar, I thought I'd walk you through how we got to where we are, and where we're going from here.
Like any group of creative people, we started out by just tossing out a ton of ideas. In addition to the three we're still pursuing, we had a number of ideas that had a lot of merit. One notion that was pitched was a trigonmetry tablet: a board with that would let you set various triangles on a radian plane and lets you see the physical representation of the trigonmetric functions. Another was a system of clickers allowing students to anonymously (to other students) indicate when they were confused or lost in subject matter during a teacher's lesson. Going more towards life sciences, one Splatter suggested a system of sensors attached to a garden pot, to monitor the process of growing a plant. Another math oriented idea was a cartesian coordinate game board--essentially a game board with xy axes and buttons or touch pads at every natural number point (e.g. (1,2)). Using it, games could be developed around teaching cartesian coordinates and simple functions.
Helping us sort through all of this was Kristen Bedell, a local elementary school teacher, and Greg DeKoenigsberg, CTO for ISKME (Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education). In addition, we brought in the opinions of any educators in our extended social networks. With that input, we narrowed it down to the three we're currently working on. But why haven't we picked just one?
last Tuesday, we got together to decide, among other things, which project we were definitely going to throw our resources behind. It rapidly became evident that we had the resources to pursue all three of our ideas for a time, and that none of us were ready to throw one of the ideas away until something else had really been proven better.
So why make a choice now?
We decided to give it at least a week, until this Tuesday. At this Tuesday (which is also Splatspace's usual open meeting time) we're going to compare some notes and implementation ideas for the three projects (or, if you like "semi-finalists") and see which one feels the strongest.
Stay posted for updates!