One Mouse Click

On Friday afternoon (Oct. 31, 2003) I was invited to click a mouse. Most of the time I would never think much about such a tiny thing as one mouse click, but with just one click, I shut down the ExploreScience web site.

And with that one mouse click, as the creator of the original ExploreScience website, I closed a major chapter of my life while opening another.

The History of ExploreScience

I sat down during Christmas break and learned enough Lingo (the programming language associated with Macromedia Director) to create my very first Gizmo. ExploreScience was born on December 27, 1995. It sat on my desk at the NSCL on a Mac IIsi with a 20 meg hard drive, 4 meg of RAM, and a URL of cycrip.nscl.msu.edu (does anyone remember my site back then?). My one Gizmo may have been the very first Shockwave-based simulation on the entire web! It only took three days for my first site visitor to show up in the log file.

The site rapidly grew during the years. It won awards. Thousands of people would visit the site every day. After millions of visitors and eight years, I clicked the mouse. I may have been the very last visitor to ExploreScience. It was a bit sad. Trying to go to the site now redirects you to the brand new ExploreLearning site which offers one Gizmo each day, or subscription services which have a wealth of features and hundreds of Gizmos.

Why did I click the mouse?

Many years ago the web was a different place. Scientists were using it to transfer information quickly. Since then maintaining a web site has become far more complex than just running one program (does anyone remember starting a full web site with one mouse click in MacHTTP?). Hosting costs continue to increase. Free time is limited. There are many small reasons why I clicked, but the biggest reason is because I care about quality in education.

It takes more than just one person to create a site that is developed with educational standards in mind, quality assurance of Gizmos gets done, and instructions for middle school, high school, and college students are complete and matched to standards. Peer review of the full functionality of Gizmos is key to effective use in the classroom. Research on that effectiveness is important. One person can not do all of this for hundreds and hundreds of Gizmos. One person can't do that many things in their spare time.

ExploreLearning has put together an amazing team since I first joined four years and three months ago.
In 1995 I was a graduate student learning all about the ins and outs of radioactive nuclear beams at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). I had started taking a few courses offered in the Education Department and my interest in educational technology was rapidly growing. I began to explore some of the multimedia tools available at the time, and had been web-browsing since 1993.

When the Shockwave Plug-in was released late in 1995, multimedia and the web merged, and I saw a tremendous potential for use in education.

With this team we can create great Gizmos, and provide a beautiful web site. We all care about education, and want to create a great product. If we could put it out on the web for free we would, but we can't. ExploreLearning is a full time job and we work long hours to create some amazing stuff. I clicked on the mouse and ExploreScience is no longer on the web, but ExploreLearning is now charging ahead at a rapid pace that has just begun.

Some amazing things are planned in the future. My very first Gizmo was very simple compared to what our team is currently creating, and I am just glad to be a part of the new ExploreLearning site.

Every time I create a Gizmo it is hard to say what will happen in the future. I still feel that excitement when I take part in the creation of a great Gizmo. I love seeing students and teachers learn something from the Gizmo. ExploreScience will still be in my mind years from now, but I have a feeling far more people will think of ExploreLearning when they think of education on the web. I can't wait to see ExploreLearning eight years from now. I'm just one part of a team that feels the same way!

Did you ever think one mouse click was that important?