More on Projects

Internet Honors for Students

http://mathforum.org/sum95/projects.html

Right now, it is too big an undertaking to do everything that might be done with this project:

• create standards for giving out awards for internet participation
• moniter students' progress and decide when each individual deserves an award
• distribute awards

We're hoping to leave the majority of this work to individual schools and teachers, who are in a better position to do it anyway since they know their own students. What we would like to do is to begin suggesting an outline for appropriate stages at which students might earn a new award. These would vary with age; students at each level (elementary, middle, and high school maybe) would be able to work their way up a ladder that looked something like Internet User -> Advanced User -> Expert -> Webmaster.

What the Geometry Forum could do:

• post the outlines described above
• be here for consultation, and as a token governing body
• adapt our triangle logo into a series of certificates that teachers/schools could sign and give to students.

Please help us by sending suggestions aboout what a student of a certain age should have to do before being recognized for Internet Honors.

Mail to Margaret Sinclair, sinclair@mathforum.org

The Math Mentor Connection

Matt Gehrett has created a page called The Math Mentor Connection at http://olmo.swarthmore.edu/sum95/matt/mentorpage.html.

It contains two forms, one for "mentors" and one for "mentees." For now, Matt has promised that a response will be recognized within 48 hours, by e-mail, and a match (mentee to mentor and vice-versa) will be made within 2 weeks. We expect that this process will eventually become automated and thus faster (and easier on us!).

If you are interested in mentoring or menteeing, please check out this page on the Web.

Day Five

The workshop participants here at Swarthmore College spent the majority of the day working hard on their projects. It is truly amazing to an observer how much progress has been made. Two days ago, these were abstract ideas, and now there are dozens of new sites on the Web, most of which are already intricately linked themselves.

The project that's moving the quickest is the one whose goal it is to organize math resources by topic. Each participant has picked an area of math and has set up a new organizational structure for the topic. All hope that by the time this workshop ends on Saturday, most of the work that will remain will involve simply filling in the holes (i.e., finding sites and linking them to the appropriate part of the topic's infrastructure).

Just before dinner we spent some time looking over each other's work and commenting on what we liked, would like to see done, and didn't like so much. We came out of the discussion with some general guidelines to be aware of when writing Web pages. Organization is the key. A well organized, easy to follow page is a good one. Simplicity is fine, as long as pages are also interesting enough to hold people's attention.

While keeping in mind the importance of avoiding redundancy of images or formats that might bore or annoy people, participants agreed that pages should be consistant. For example, it would be nice if they all had similar "Back To..." links that users could come to recognize and rely on.

Lastly, page creators should be aware that not everybody is using the same Web Browser, or even the same version of a browser. Steve Means' page had a great looking table, on Netscape 1.1. He knew it wouldn't show on version 1.0, so provided a nice list of links at the top of the page.

I can't stress enough how exciting this all is. If you have any capability to get on the World Wide Web, do yourself a favor and check us out.