Project Goals

The project has six major objectives:

1. to encourage connections and mutual reinforcement between high school math and science
2. to foster greater creativity through "hands-on" science learning -- that is, to make science more fun!
3. to give greater flexibility and more opportunities to show the relevance of classroom topics to "real world" issues.
4. to help demonstrate the essential nature of mathematics in science and technology by creating new and imaginative applications for math modeling
5. to use a broad range of math procedures -- including graphics, geometry, algebra, and basic data analysis -- in scientific experiments.
6. to teach students a better and eminently "marketable" approach to scientific experimentation that they can use either in further coursework or in their scientific careers (especially in industry).

In sum, the project is designed to make science and math more exciting and more relevant to issues that students can see and understand. The underlying pedagogical theme is the essential importance of doing real science. It exploits the simplicity and power of basic DOE to allow students to systematically investigate practically any issue that they can experiment with. This has led to many imaginative (some might even say, "off the wall") projects .

Although they may not result in Nobel prizes, these projects enable students to apply what they have learned to questions that interest them. They also learn that real scientific work involves challenging choices of what and how to measure, how to deal with both avoidable and unavoidable variability in their procedures, and how to organize and conduct experiments to get precise, unbiased results. These matters are vital, but are often ineffectively dealt with in conventional science instruction. We believe that students who have had such experiences better understand and retain what they have learned, better understand the nature of the scientific method, and, perhaps most important, are more likely to continue on in science and math than those who have only participated in rote laboratory exercises. Certainly, their comments indicate that they find this approach a lot more enjoyable and more effective.