EDC Center for Children and Technology
Portals

CCT's Portals Project involves the design of a flexible piece of web-based software and an instructional process. Portals is intended to facilitate communication between students working on computational science projects and scientists who are serving as their project mentors. It may also be used by teachers to assess students' progress in project-oriented classes.

Portals facilitates effective communication between students and external reviewers by:

1. Providing students with an environment that encourages them to communicate, and thereby to think, about their ideas in multiple ways;
2. Providing scientists and other external reviewers with tools that enable them to directly annotate students' thinking process documents on the WWW;
3. Providing teachers with easily accessible and reviewable web-based archives of students' thinking over time; and
4. Providing students, teachers, and mentors with strategies for creating, clarifying, and reflecting on thinking process documents.

In addition to the development of the Portals software and process, CCT's work on this project includes a program of research around student learning in the Portals environment.