ExploreLearning News

Freefall Gizmo Update

A change was made to the Freefall Gizmo which solved several problems, but introduced another new bug. This one is all my fault, sorry about that. It will be fixed before Monday (April 5) evening at the latest, or tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. The Exploration Guide is currently being written for this Gizmo.

Addtional update (8:45 pm): I have been working on this one a bit before leaving for Atlanta tomorrow morning. I'm sometimes amazed that the physics behind the Gizmo is 'easy' to understand, but the final bit of programming often presents a true challenge! I guess I know what I'll be doing during my plane flight tomorrow morning.

Say Hello in Atlanta

Dave Shuster and I will be heading down to Atlanta for the NSTA national convention. The convention runs from April 1-4 in Atlanta. If you will be there, be sure to stop by the Apple booth, where we will be showing off our Gizmos - live and in person! Hope to see you there!

ExploreLearning is currently featured on the Apple site as a Curriculum Solution.

International Users: Font Issue

We have recently become aware of a problem for international users (reported in both Israel and Poland) where the font inside the Gizmo is not legible. The problem is shown in the image to the right.

Thanks to a few emails with our users, we have found a way to deal with this problem which is due to having anti-aliased fonts within Shockwave-based content. It may take a week or two for us to integrate the solution in to the Gizmos. Please check back here for an update in the next week or two.

Subscription Changes

After being out in the market for several months, today we made some changes to the prices for our subscriptions products. These changes are also based on customer feedback. We hope that we've made our product offerings easier to understand.

To learn more, visit our pricing page.

We really do value your feedback and questions, so if you have any regarding this change or anything else, please let us know: support@explorelearning.com

'Fab Five' Make Rare Appearance in Night Sky

Five planets are arrayed across the evening sky in a spectacular night show that won't be back for another three decades.

For the next two weeks, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - the five closest planets - should be easily visible at dusk, along with the moon.

"It's semi-unique," said Myles Standish, an astronomer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "They're all on the same side of the sun and stretched across the sky and that's what is kind of pretty."

Link: Sky and Telescope article
Link: NASA article

Freefall Gizmo

We are currently aware of several 'bugs' in the Freefall Lab which were recently pointed out to us (thanks Ken). Changes should be made by early next week.

Outsourcing Report Blames Schools

From Wired News:

A new report by a U.S. high-tech trade group says companies aren't shipping jobs overseas because of cheap labor. No, they're doing it because American schools don't teach enough math and science.

Of course, it's not like the teachers aren't trying their best to impart math and science skills to students, but rather it's difficult to convince kids the importance of advanced math and science in their adult lives. We've all heard the ubiquitous "Why am learning [fill in the blank] when I'll never use it in real life?" chant.

Here's to hoping that Gizmos help make the math and science teacher's job easier, for the overriding idea behind our multimedia simulations is to make difficult math and science concepts easier to teach and easier for students to understand.

Using Title 1 Funds with ExploreLearning

Two of our EL Team just returned from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASDC) annual conference in New Orleans where ExploreLearning was in the Apple booth promoting the Accelerate Achievement initiative.

During the conference several educators commented on the fact that the the deadline for submitting Title 1 grant funding proposals is May 1.

Keep that deadline in mind as you consider the following:

• Title 1 grant funding may be available in your district to cover ExploreLearning.com subscription and training expenses.
• Other districts are already using Title 1 grant funding this way, e.g., Baltimore County in MD.
• We (EL) are experienced working with schools on Title 1 programs and would be happy to discuss ways to support your subscriptions.

To Boldly Go...112 Feet.

Spirit and Opportunity are on their final missions on Mars, and NASA has upgraded the software that controls them so that they can try to make it out of the small craters they have been in during the entire mission.

Spirit managed to travel 34.3 m (112.5 ft) in just one day, and Opportunity is having a tough time with the loose soil so it has been slipping down the hill as it tries to climb up. I think I can. I think I can!

Useful Links:
CNN Story
Mars Rover Mission Home Page

"A Helping Hand for Teachers"

This sounds like a fantastic idea:

"iLoveSchools.com is a free matchmaking service – for education! School teachers request materials and supplies while school supporters search for a school in need of their gifts of money, new or used goods or other educational supplies."

I just signed up to be on the donor list for a couple of schools.

Gizmos Correlated to State and Textbook Standards!

We have now correlated Gizmos to state standards for six states and four textbook series! We continue to add states to our list of covered states, and all fifty states will eventually be covered. The states covered now are:

• California
• Florida
• Maryland
• New York
• Texas
• Virginia.

The four textbook series are:

• Glencoe/McGraw-Hill Mathematics
• McDougal Littell Mathematics
• Prentice Hall Mathematics
• Houghton Mifflin Precalculus.

We posted the correlations to the site this afternoon. For every listed standard, you will find links to the Gizmos that cover the standard.

Have a look!

New Science Exploration Guides and Assessment Questions

We are happy to report that we have posted three new Explorations Guides and three sets of Assessment Questions for our the following Science Gizmos in our catalog:

• Density via Comparison
• Heat Transfer by Conduction
• Herschel Experiment

Look for plenty more of these throughout the coming weeks and months, as we continue adding to our science catalog.

Nine Planets? Or Eight, or Ten?

As a child I had to memorize the names of the planets. There is Mercury, Venus, Earth (that's us!), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Will Sedna (named unofficially after the Inuit goddess of the sea) now be added to that list. Or will Pluto be removed? Does Sedna really have a moon? How far away is Sedna?

So many questions. As science and technology advance there always seem to be more questions than answers ;)

Link to BBC News Stories: 'New planet' forces rethink, 'New planet' may have a moon
The legend of Sedna (a personal home page)

Keep Them Coming!

Susan Socha, a math teacher in Fairfax Co, writes:

Thank you for being so responsive. It's a terrific feeling knowing that someone actually listens to you when you write them.

Thanks Susan!

Here's the backstory behind her email: Late Tuesday afternoon, Susan had emailed our support team (support@explorelearning.com) to say that the random problem generator in the Modeling the Factorization of ax^2 + bx + c Gizmo occasionally generated problems that had a common factor. She suggested that we eliminate these, as she strives to get her students to eliminate common factors prior to factoring.

Needless to say, we agreed with Susan, so one of our ace developers, Dr. Qiuli Sun, went 'under the hood' in the Gizmo and implemented the change, and we managed to test the revised version and put it live on our site the very next day. I was happy to report back to Susan that the fix had been made, and she wrote us the very nice email above as her response.

I wanted to post this little story for a number of reasons. First of all, I'm pretty proud of ExploreLearning's ability to repair, evolve and improve its content so quickly. (In particular, Qiuli is one of the fastest developers I've ever worked with, anywhere -- around ExploreLearning, we sometimes joke that Qiuli can have a Gizmo coded and ready for testing even before we've designed it!)

Sometimes a fix is more complicated than others, of course, and there are 300+ Gizmos to look after, so we can't guarantee that everything gets turned around as quickly as 24 hours, but we do promise to do our best. Everyone here at EL is committed to making our Gizmo library the best it can be — I can assure you all of that. If we believe a change to a Gizmo is in the best interests of students and teachers, we'll find some way to make it happen.

Another reason for posting this story is that I want to keep encouraging even more of our users to email their suggestions to us -- that's one of the beauties of a Web-based product: we can integrate your bright ideas and make them available for everyone's benefit much much more often than we could with a CD-ROM or LAN-based product.

So please keep your suggestions, feedback, and new Gizmo ideas coming!

Gizmos have them excited in Canada

Longtime ExploreLearning user (through one of our predecessor sites ExploreMath) Bruce McGillivray is Technology Integration Facilitator for Black Gold Regional Schools in Alberta, Canada http://www.blackgold.ca/). Bruce recently purchased a subscription for 11 teachers and their classes. On the day they first logged in, here's what he had to report: "We used the first account this morning and everything went well. The student excitement about the Gizmos was infectious." Thanks, Bruce, for your patronage and kind words!

Piedmont Regional Science Fair

Hi from the road! I'm here at the Piedmont Regional Science Fair in Charlottesville (just a few hundred yards from our office). I'm amazed at how sharp the students are, and have enjoyed chatting with several local teachers this morning.

Maybe next year I'll be a judge ;)

Bring in Da Noise

I've always been impressed by the noise that one cicada can produce. This spring is looking to be a very loud year due to the unusual insect.

Periodical cicadas, a species of the grasshopper-like insects best known for the scratching, screeching "singing" of the males, will emerge this May, filling forests in more than a dozen states. Almost as abruptly as they arrive, they disappear underground for another 17 years.

— start of CNN news story

Link to CNN story

We're on Apple!

I'm proud to announce that we have been selected by Apple as a "Complementary Solutions Provider" in their education division's "Accelerate Achievement" initiative.

You can view our page here.

The first computer I ever touched was an Apple II in my 10th grade computer science course in high school, and I've been hooked ever since.

Spam Spoofs Problem

As you probably know, spam email is one of the most significant problems on the web. Particularly offensive are the so-called "spoof" spam messages that make it appear like the email is from a legitimate source like, for instance, ExploreLearning.

Yes, we've recently been spoofed. You may have received an email like this one below:

Dear user of Explorelearning.com,
Your e-mail account will be disabled because of improper using in next
three days, if you are still wishing to use it, please, resign your
account information.
For details see the attached file.
Sincerely,
The Explorelearning.com team

The email above is NOT from ExploreLearning. And, of course, the attachment referred to in the email contains a virus.

If you've received this email, please delete it. In general, attachments to emails are very dangerous and you should be very careful about opening them. Bear in mind, too, that we never send email with an attachment unless you are specifically requesting something from us like the Quick Start Guide.

If you're ever unsure whether an email is legitimate or not, just contact at us and ask: support@explorelearning.com

Henrico is Gizmofied!

You've all probably heard of the Henrico County School District in Virginia, right? There the ones who started the first ever "laptops for all teachers and students" program which has won awards and received much press attention. Indeed, Henrico County is seen as one of the most tech-savvy, forward thinking school districts in all of North America.

It shouldn't come as any surprise, then, if I tell you that they use Gizmos in Henrico County:

ExploreLearning's product is exactly what we were looking for — excellent exploratory content that is easy to use and integrate in the classroom, motivational for students, and supportive of teachers.

— Steven Lapinski, Math Specialist
Henrico County Public Schools

Awesome.

You heard it here first: Gizmos are going to become the "killer app" in education technology for math and science. And all of you using Gizmos today will one day be able to say proudly, "I was one of the first teachers to introduce ExploreLearning to students." I kid you not.

Art and Science

Last week I saw a story about a Hubble image being compared to the van Gogh painting "The Starry Night." I couldn't help but think about a book I read a few years ago called Art & Physics by Leonard Shlain which begins:

Art and physics are a strange coupling. Of the many human disciplines, could there be two that seem more divergent? The artist employs image and metaphor; the physicist uses number and equation. Art encompasses an imaginative realm of aesthetic qualities; physics exists in a world of crisply circumscribed mathematical relationships between quantifiable properties.

Another Presidential Award Winner Loves Gizmos!

We recently received this lovely email from one of our customers:

I LOVE the Gizmos!! My school doesn't have a computer lab that a classroom teacher can take classes into so I'm using them as a demonstration tool in my classroom. The kids love them also! They love the "interactive-ness" of them. I love that I can show them so much mathematics in just a short time.

I was showing my Algebra I students different graphs of quadratic equations and we were analyzing how the graphs change when the different parts of the equations change (a, b or c). My students had graphed some already and most had "a" values of 1. One of my students noticed that when he picked additional x values to graph after graphing the vertex, that the new y values were up or down one from the y-coordinate of the vertex. He asked if all parabolas would do that. We were able to analyze different "a" values and show him how changing the "a" value changes that relationship of the additional points to the vertex and answer his question!!!

Mary Lou Beasley
Southside Fundamental Middle School, FL
2001 Presidential Awardee - Secondary Math

This email really brought a smile to my face, because it gets at the heart of what we're trying to do with Gizmos -- and that's to bring more and more of these "A-Ha!" moments to the classroom. We love to hear that Gizmos are helping students get more excited about learning -- stimulating them to generate their own 'what-if' questions, and then giving them the tools to explore and answer these questions.

On a personal note, I want to thank Ms. Beasley and everyone else who has taken the time to write in and tell us about the impact Gizmos are making in their classrooms -- I (and our entire content development team) really do appreciate it, it definitely makes us even more eager to jump back to our computers and make more Gizmos for you all!

Making the Invisible and Abstract Visible and Concrete

Randy Bell, who coordinates the secondary science teacher education program at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, is an enthusiastic supporter of Gizmos.

Here Professor Bell explains why:

While many scientific phenomena are part of students' everyday experiences, their explanation are neither easily visualized nor commonly understood. This difficulty stems from the invisible nature of many key scientific phenomenon, like sound waves, and the fact that traditional representations do not allow students to interact and experiment with the phenomena.

That's where ExploreLearning Gizmos come in. The computer simulations are able to get past these limitations by making the invisible and abstract more visible and concrete.

For example, one of my students' favorite Gizmo is the one that simulates sound waves emitted by moving objects. Being able to see representations of the sound waves emitted by moving objects helps students to visualize concepts such as wavelength, frequency, and even the Doppler Effect. Even more impressive, the Gizmo allows students to manipulate various components, such as the speed of the object, the speed of sound, and the frequency of the sound emitted by the object. Such interaction encourages students to pose questions, try out ideas, and draw conclusions.

Yes, that every Gizmo in our catalog is designed such that it "allows students to manipulate various components" is one of our main pedagogical design philosophies. Indeed, the notion of using manipulatives to explore new knowledge and practice applying it is one of the keys to the research that provides empirical evidence of the effectiveness of Gizmos.

Water Soaked Mars

There have been six landings on Mars over the past three decades. The most recent data from Spirit and Opportunity have provided a wealth of information for scientists to study for many, many years.

NASA held a press conference yesterday to announce that Mars was once a very wet planet according to the data.

More information can be found at the following URL's

• BBC News Story
• NASA Mars Rover Page

Meet A Developer In Atlanta

In just about a month the National Science Teachers Association will be holding their 52^nd National Convention in Atlanta. Two of us from ExploreLearning will be there for the meeting, so if you would like to say hi we would love to chat with you.

I'll post more detailed information about how to find us in the upcoming weeks. Hope to see you there.