Principal Investigator
Carl Pennypacker's Report for the New Year, 2002
Hello HOU Teachers and Collaborators,
I wish you all a star-filled and Happy New Year and trust you are doing well.
Every year at this time, I like to send a report to our international community
of teachers. Here I will describe recent developments in the HOU collaboration,
and some of our aspirations and goals. All progress seems to take longer
than I predict, but many positive results are realized. HOU has been a project where
we continuously develop or improve curricula and tools per teachers' and students'
needs, so it will always be undergoing some changes and improvements. We must keep
changing to keep pace with changes in technology, science, and education. A note
on HOU has been written for a book, by Tim Barclay and me, edited by Terry Oswalt,
and published by Kluwer Academic Press. The URL for this note is: http://hou.lbl.gov/info/houtelescopes.html
Workshops are progressing --approximately 800 teachers in the United States,
plus another 500 teachers total in Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Australia,
Russia, and two teachers in Senegal have been trained in HOU! Virtually every school
district I go to, anywhere in the world, I find teachers interested in various aspects
of our program.. As the Internet irrevocably binds our world together, we hope
to provide valuable content and activities that have meaning for many students
and teachers in every country.
Let me wax philosophical for a couple of paragraphs -- it is clear to me --and
I hope to many of our HOU teachers and students -- that HOU is still approaching
ever closer the goal of integrating scientific research and education. This is
desired by leaders in science education, government, and in our schools. Seeing how
hard a road HOU has had in achieving this integration, maybe it is clear why few
other educational projects have been able to get this far. We have succeeded
in making the tools, methods, data, content, and collaborative skills of real
science available to a growing number of students and teachers. HOU can serve the
education community by making data and real science available to a broad spectrum
of teachers and students -- and by proving that this approach works works in measurable
way.
All of you, the -- HOU collaboration -- are co-creators of HOU. When a student or
teacher begins to understand some fundamental aspect of science or math through images,
then we are building this collaboration. When teachers help students learn a little
bit more about the cosmos by measuring it, HOU is succeeding. When teachers help
students and other teachers to be excited and to see a future in science by using
HOU, then we have made good progress. I feel that we are achieving our goal of
using science to makie the world a better place. We are growing closer as a collaborative
community with a clear mission and destiny. I know the future will be brighter,
and that HOU can serve as a means for us to work together to understand the
cosmos and to appreciate each other.
Sincerely,
Carl Pennypacker
HOU Founder and Co-PI
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