ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
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Dear isen-astc-l,

I work at Swarthmore College and the Math Forum, 
http://mathforum.org/, and we're developing something that might be 
of interest to science museums. I thought I'd ask for suggestions and 
possible partnerships before we move beyond the prototype stage.

Inspired by an empty glass case in the hallway of the new Swarthmore 
Math Department building, I thought it would be nice to put a 
flat-screen computer in the case that shows, screensaver style, some 
of the beautiful computer images that exist on the web and that come 
from mathematics. We'll have it set up that a viewer can click on an 
image and go to an information page about the image.

This summer I worked with four undergraduates who harvested some 1200 
images from the web that they found interesting and related to math. 
They also have been setting up a site, programming and web designing 
to handle this. It's not quite ready to show off but I'll be able to 
send a url to interested parties soon.

We have a lot of work to do. This collection of raw visual treats can 
be made even more rich and engaging. To bring out the learning our 
approach will be to make the site as interactive as possible, working 
with the Math Forum to set it up so that users can ask questions 
("Ask Dr. Math Image"), allowing users to submit their own images, 
and pointing out sites and software that allow people to do this. 
(There are already lots of nice possibilities for young kids with 
tessellations, for example.)

Moreover, I'd like to develop the site so that people can use it as a 
screensaver, putting all the learning potential at their fingertips! 
I haven't even begun to get permissions from the image authors so I 
can "go public" yet. Actually, I expect that turning this into an 
educationally useful, interactive web site will take a fair amount of 
work so I'm going to have spend some time knocking on the doors of 
funding agencies, too.

Where the Informal Science Education Network comes in to this is that 
the idea of a display in a hallway case seemed to me a bit old time 
museum-y, while making things highly interactive matches my idea of 
contemporary museum practices. Especially since I ran across Falk and 
Dierking's ideas on making museums better learning experiences, 
http://www.swmlac.org.uk/mli/learn/fandd2.htm, a checklist we'll 
follow as we go forward with this project.

So, if you have ideas for making this a better project, we'd love to 
hear them. If you might be able to use such a project in museum work 
we'd like to know now so we can design accordingly. If there are ways 
we might work together we'd love to talk with you.

Gene Klotz
Swarthmore College Department of Mathematics,
The Math Forum @ Drexel University

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