Consolidating Ed-Tech Co-Design Best Practices through the TRAILS Project Chris DiGiano, Mike Griffin, Jeff Huang, Mark Chung SRI International, Center for Technology in Learning 333 Ravenswood Ave +011 720-920-6518 chris.digiano @ sri .com Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1 [Computers and Education]: Computer Uses in Education General Terms Design. Keywords Educational Software, Collaborative Design, Workforce running experimental course modules, publishing on-line resources, and recruiting experienced mentors. TRAILS course modules focus on mutual understanding of educational requirements, shared elaboration of designs with modeling tools, building prototypes from components, and field-testing prototypes with students. The course modules are being developed and taught at Stanford and the University of Colorado at Boulder. TRAILS is also working with Math Forum at Drexel University to publish selected software created by TRAILS students. TRAILS is focusing on three resources for co-design: (1) tools for designing and prototyping educational software, (2) shared spaces for design artifacts, and (3) access to a network of pedagogical and technical experts. 1. INTRODUCTION In 2002 the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded SRI International a $3.2 million grant to investigate the critical factors that will enable university students in education and computer science to play key roles in the creation of high-quality educational software for children in grades K-12. This poster reports on the current status of the resulting project, called TRAILS (Training and Resources for Assembling Interactive Learning Systems). The TRAILS project aims to generate software that engages children in learning difficult mathematical concepts. As the project matures, it is expected to expand from an initial focus on middle school mathematics to additional grade levels and other subjects. 4. BENEFITS Through the process of designing educational software, the hope is that we create powerful learning opportunities for university students and at the same time build future capacity for the production of educational technology. Computer science students will gain a better understanding of how to develop software that meets the needs of-K;12 classrooms, in addition to experiencing first-hand the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration. TRAILS will empower teachers with a better understanding of how to make the most of technology in their classrooms and to be critical and demanding of educational software. Further, TRAILS will provide enhanced opportunities for educators to deepen their content knowledge, so that pre-service teachers will begin their new careers with greater confidence about their mathematics knowledge and how to communicate it effectively with technology. 2. NEEDS As the PCAST [1] report argues, high-quality educational software has the potential to contribute to improvements in K-12 schools, and yet such digital content is in critically short supply. Traditional commercial approaches have led to only a handful of exemplary tools based on modern educational principles such as scaffolding, feedback, authenticity, and communities of learners. We need new models for a sustainable, high-quality software development pipeline serving education. 5. COMPETITION TRAILS offers several advantages over individual, one-off university courses. The multidisciplinary approach assures that content will be balanced between education and computer science and that best practices from both will be used. We anticipate that the project's centralized resources and distribution channel for course products will result in efficiencies over any single course approach. By applying these resources to an expanding set of institutions, we see potential for systemic impact. 3. APPROACH Our approach for a sustainable software production process is to create a general framework for involving university students in educational technology. This framework draws from best practices in project-based courses involving collaborative design. To help train the university students, the TRAILS project is 6.

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