• Overview
  • A Unifying Concept
  • Ask Gross Energy Questions
  • Content Standards
  • Contests & Collaborations
  • Energy Basics
  • Energy & Recycling
  • Events
  • Formulas Great & Little
  • Fun Facts
  • Games & Quizzes
  • Great Ideas
  • Gross Energy Glossary
  • History & Milestones
  • IPT
  • Knowledge Trees
  • Music
  • Science
  • Student Activities
  • Student Projects
  • Subject-by-Subject
  • Teachers Lesson Plans

    • Select a guide to learn more about energy basics:

    PROFILE: Electra loves to read. Just give her the facts! PROFILE: Geo loves to use his hands and work on projects. PROFILE: Windy loves to see patterns and save the environment.

    Integrated Project Team (IPT)

    The Integrated Project Team (IPT) oversees the Kids Zone. If you are interested in supporting this educational effort, one way is through the IPT. [Note: if you want to know what an IPT is and does, look at this IPT training overview.] Keeping in mind our vision, mission, goal and primary target audiences, we use the IPT to communicate with each other. These communications lead to improvements in the website.

    Our vision is:

  • All kids, young and old, will share a consciousness of energy usage and how precious it is.
  • The world will become filled with people who are energy and science literate.
  • Each person will use this knowledge to make informed decisions.

    • Our mission is to create an extremely friendly portal through which energy and science education resources can be accessed and learned. In this, energy is the unifying concept that puts all sorts of patterns and relationships into perspective.

    Our goal is to present all the various ways to learn this concept including the one or more that best match each person's learning style. Then there are other potential matches in our imaginations, under concept review, or being developed.

    Question: What’s the future look like?
    Answer: More:

  • Science: Yes. Energy is a unifying concept in science and the constant expansion of scientific knowledge is most easily handled in the context of unifying concepts.
  • Great Ideas: How do you rank the greatest ideas in science? What tools were used to demonstrate these ideas? What were the error terms and physical tolerances?
  • Students Activities: What activities spark younger students? and are suited for large semi-unruly classrooms?
  • Students Projects: Which hands-on projects excite older students? and are suited for populations with meager resources?

    • Staying on top of these can be a challenge - but there fun is here - by the gross. Would you like to share your ideas or expand these or any other areas? This too is within the Kids Zone IPT's domain.

    Audiences

    For teachers, we have organized age-graded subject matter that is available free of charge, providing a quick resource for most aspects of energy while linking to other energy-related sites. This is an area I am trying to make useful to the generation of teachers who are somewhat clueless when it comes to teaching science in general - or in dire need on specific subjects. If anyone wants to help reduce their burden, but doesn't know where to find like-minded good deed doers, you might go where these people are to be found - on the IPT.

    Somebody once told me that Carl Sagan once said, when referring to science and kids, something like, "Why is it we have them at age 6 and have lost them by age 16?" Could we say even further: If we can't make sure the spark for scientific thinking is permanently infixed by the 4th or 5th grade, something that will carry them through their next 8 or twelve years, we will lose them from the ranks of those able to make informed decisions on important topics of science and energy. The IPT wrestles with finding that spark for each kid and leveraging it into each teacher's and each kid's mind.

    How do we keep our customers engaged so this effort is a raging success?

  • Involve our stakeholders in figuring out how to raise the science and energy literacty rates from their current levels (dramatically less than 10%) to something reasonable (40%?). Figure out how to measure progress.
  • Suggest they support the use of modern technology to transfer interesting technology information to teachers through "Content Direct" (a work in progress).
  • Invite them to join the IPT.
  • Ask them to participate in the development of this website.
  • Use our best guesses to develop the stubs for the knowledge structure.
  • Create other personnas for kids to relate to (e.g., the audience views on your left - Electra, Geo & Windy).

    Contacts & Communication: Who is on the Kids Zone IPT?

    Jim Disbrow

  • Jim may be found at the Energy Information Administration (EIA) in Washington, DC - in EIA's Office of Information Technology. EIA is a part of the Department of Energy.
  • Partly because of the Collaborative Expedition Workshop, he works to increase the rate of innovation.
  • In addition to being the DOE Kids Zone Channel Manager, on own time he works with this IPT and a slew of other efforts as a volunteer.
  • He appears from time to time in classrooms (K-16) and at student assemblies, science teacher professional development workshops, school gatherings, parades and other civic functions, where he uses discrepent event props and graphics to answer any and all questions about energy, to talk about EIA's Kid's Page and to tell the history behind DOE's Kids Zone.

    • Greg Crowther

  • In addition to being a member of the chemical engineering faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, Greg is the webmaster of the Science Songwriters Association website.

    • Bruce Furino

  • Bruce is the Program Director of the Internet Science and Technology Fair (ISTF), managing the effort from the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida.
  • He recently posted the results of a survey that drew hundreds of detailed responses from practicing engineers: "Why Engineering?".

    • Website Status:

    The IPT oversees the Kids Zone website - a website that is in the public domain as a form of open source knowledgeware used for educational purposes. Educators and students are free to reproduce and use anything they want. Schools are free to download this entire website onto both their servers and their off-line computers.

    Currently, there is one proposed modification in the queue:

  • "Content Direct", an email technology information transfer tool. If you want to participate in the piloting of this project, please let us know.

    • Contact the IPT

    A copy of squeeky clean modifications to any web page is requested by the Channel Manager, so it can be loaded into the Master Copy. The most current 8 MB (or so) master copy is posted at http://faculty.washington.edu/crowther/KidsZone, where it can be downloaded file by file, or it can be emailed to you upon request. "Open Source" concepts and protocols apply.

    Date last updated: July 16, 2005