The VISTA New Technology Curriculum

Project Status

The New Technology curriculum is currently in the high-level design stage. The high-level design for this curriculum that follows was developed by a group of computer scientists who met in Chicago in April 2006 for this purpose. The meeting was called by Roger Schank and was attended by Elliot Soloway (Michigan), Ray Bareiss (Carnegie Mellon West), Jaime Carbonell (Carnegie Mellon), Chris Riesbeck, (Northwestern) Anatole Gershman, (Accenture), Alex Kass (Accenture), Tammy Berman (Socratic Arts), Michael Wolfe (Socratic Arts) and Greg Saunders (Socratic Arts). We are currently seeking funding to begin development of this curriculum.

Curriculum Overview

The New Technology will be a nine month curriculum in which students learn about various aspects of modern day computing. It is intended for high school age students and was planned to fit as the third year of a four year science and technology high school curriculum that can be delivered on line. It is also intended to stand alone -- so that it can be used as job preparation for a variety of technical careers for people who have already finished school. It is designed in modules so that pieces of it can be used for other purposes (such as after school programs.)

The New Technology curriculum is a story centered curriculum (NT-SCC) that consists of projects in which students engage, sometimes in groups and sometimes on their own. These projects require deliverables, that once delivered allow students to proceed on to the next project. Each project is designed to be fun, relevant to young people, collaborative, and to allow individual expression and the pursuit of particular interests that a student might have. In addition, the projects serve as a context for skills that can be learned in situations in which they are actually used. The projects increase in complexity and tell a story of life in the world of computers. At the end of the NT-SCC there is a choice of intense internship-like experiences that prepare a student to get a job in an aspect of the world of new technology that the student has found to be of interest.

Following is a preliminary list of projects that came out of the high-level design meeting in April 2006, to be refined through further design work:

Project 1: Blogosphere -- Students are asked to create their own blog about an emerging technology or a new technological event that interests them.

Project 2: My Alternate Space -- Working with an open source version of MySpace that we will construct, students will begin to expand the possibilities within that sort of framework.

Project 3: Web Site -- The curriculum now shifts into an individual mode. Each student needs to build his or her own web site.

Project 4: Enhanced Web Site -- Now students need to make their sites highly interactive, use Java-script (and possibly AJAX), Flash and other means to make the sites first rate.

Project 5: Create Something -- The student is given a month to build an artifact of some kind. There are three possible tracks a student could follow: a) The Software Application track, b) The Physical Component track, or c) The Artist track.

Project 6: Web Magazine -- Students create a web magazine and produce two issues in one month’s time.

Project 7A: Mini-Search Engine -- The next project students will tackle is to build their own search engine for use within their own pages.

Project 7B: Viral marketing -- For those students who have no interest in becoming techies, their alternative project is to create a person-to-person feature in the MySpace equivalent.

Project 8A: Mobile technology -- Students add mobility (e.g. delivery via a web-enabled cell phone) to whatever they have been working on.

Project 8B: Mobile Content -- Non-techies work on adding content to a mobile device.

Project 9: Build a Business -- Students form teams to propose and execute a technology business, some team members are writing the business plan and others building a prototype of their product or service that derives from the work they have been doing.

Internship -- The curriculum ends with an internship.