Nameless Company now Big Time Science

Tim Ericson of eeps.com and I decided on a name for the new company receiving an NSF SBIR grant (which he won). We chose Big Time Science (for kids). Our former project officer, Sally Nerlove, commented that naming a company is difficult. You would like to call it something like the gritty, delicious stuff you scrape from the bottom of a pan, which had a name in Bantu she learned while in the Peace Corps in Africa. Our intent is to give kids a real experience of the Nature of Science on a scale that reveals the essence of participating in a scientific community looking at a common data set and writing about it from the empirical perspective of many researchers, each of whom has a partial view. Our next step is to move the kids' tools for writing about science online so we can share them with you all. Stay tuned.

Google Science Foo

Google recently invited Learning Friends' CEO, Ann McCormick and her colleague, Tim Ericson from eeps.com to the first Science Foo at the Googleplex, a remarkable event attended by 100 scientists "doing interesting things" in their fields. Among the remarkable things about this conference were the openness to new ideas of all attending, and the fact that they all "showed up" with their whole selves, including their humor and intent of being helpful to the planet and its people. Larry Brilliant spoke about ridding the world of Smallpox, and included a photo of his guru in the PPT. Tim Ericson gave a hands-on demo of science journal writing tools for kids, with real scientists trying out the prototype system along with the National Science Foundation Project Officer who awarded a new grant for continuing this work. Eric Case from Google met us approaching the campus and guided us through registration with grace and care, and introduced us to very important people, including the incredible chef from Google who masterminded food for the event. Everyone present could create their own presentation for this event, and attend any the others invented. There was an awesome science-modeling cartoonist, science fiction writer, Jaron Lanier of VR fame (Ann's former boss when she was VP of VPL Research), and scientists in an array of fields who usually don't comingle. It was great! Thanks Google, and thands, Nature Magazine.

NSF Grant Awarded

Tim Ericson just won a Phase II grant from the Small Business Innnovative Research branch of the National Science Foundation. With encouragement from NSF, he invited Ann McCormick to serve as CEO for a new company that will carry out the SBIR project, creating online science collaboration software for kids who become a community of scientists running a series of miniature experiments, writing journal articles citing their hypotheses and findings, experiencing editorial review of their articles, and doing peer review.

The purpose of the grant is helping young people in Middle School and High School experience the nature of science. Tim is known for superb work in physics education, writing Den of Inquiry during the last NSF SBIR grant. The new company will focus on online applications in math and science. Ann is also CEO of Learning Friends, too, so will assure a close cooperative relationship between the companies. An NSF Project Officer called Ann and asked her to take good care of Tim, who NSF considers a National Treasure.

Children's Institute

We had two great meetings with Joey Pan from the Children's Institute in Nanjing. He's helping our interns with plans for entering the China market. Meeting with him I was delighted to find an ease and trust that is rare in any country. I have great hopes for Learning Friends and Children's Institute working together.

Learning Friends

We have been very busy entering every single business competition we could get our hands on! These include

BASES (Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students) Social E-Challenge

(http://bases.stanford.edu/site/socialechall/index.jsp) – We made it to 2^nd round!

William James Foundation Socially Responsible Business Plan Competition (http://www.williamjamesfoundation.org/) – We made it to 2^nd round!

HKUST (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) International Business Plan Competition (http://www.bm.ust.hk/mba/BusinessPlan2006/) – We made it to the semi-final round!

For the HKUST, we already won a $1000 cash prize, and will be flying to Hong Kong on May 4th to pitch the Learning Friends idea to top businesspeople and venture capitalists in China. This is a very exciting time for us, in which we may see our dreams come to reality!

We even had the opportunity to present Learning Friends in another competition at University of San Francisco, but had to withdraw because it was right smack in the middle of our finals week!

In the mean time, we will be very busy preparing for the next round of competitions! Looks like its going to be a very busy spring break for all of us at Stanford!

article about video/sims helping kids learn

here is a recent article in the s.f. chronicle about video and computer games being great supplemental learning tools for kids in the classroom:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/20/BUG86H9SBD1.DTL&hw=video+helps+kids+learn&sn=001&sc=1000

Hand waving boosts mathematics learning - Breaking News | Print | New Scientist

Hand waving boosts mathematics learning:

Gestures that complement rather than simply illustrate verbal instructions can boost children's ability to complete problems in mathematics, researchers report.

'The teachers are giving the kids two different approaches to the problem - one by hand and one by mouth - and somehow they seem to complement one another,' says Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago, US. She adds that early findings also show that students who copy the gestures of their teachers are more likely to learn.

Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues gave 160 children between the ages of eight and 10 a set of mathematical problems to solve. The students were randomly assigned to receive either verbal instructions alone or also with gestures. Those in the latter group either received gestures that copied or complemented the spoken guidance.

As part of the experiment students had to complete the equation "7+6+5=?+5". Teachers told the youngsters that they had to make one side of the equation match the other side.

The gestures simply duplicating these directions involved the instructors pointing to the left-hand and then the right-hand sides of the equation. When using complementary gestures, however, the teachers pointed to each of the numbers on the left and then signalled the subtraction of the five on the right side by scooping their hand away from the number."

Great clarity about China in the world

Dean of the School of Journalism at UC, Berkeley is quoted in an interview in California magazine. It's great to find a writer who has studied China for 50 years and also writes for Wired. Maybe we can get involved with some of his Journalism students, who are photographers, writers and have great freshness and life.