Cornell Theory Center's SciFair Invited to Participate in Innovate 2007
May 4, 2007
Ithaca, NY
Contact:
Laura Cima
607.254.8757
The Cornell Theory Center's (CTC) outreach program, SciFair, has been invited to participate in the Virginia Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology's Innovate 2007 conference. The conference will take place May 8, 2007 in Richmond and is Virginia's first exposition devoted to new and emerging technologies for education. CTC's highly successful SciFair science communication program uses the medium of online virtual worlds to attract and retain middle school students in education.
SciFair will appear in the Educational Applications Pavilion where visitors can enter a virtual science world on biodiversity, crop genetics, asteroids or tsunamis. Students of the SciFair program at Albert Hill Middle School in Richmond will be on hand to present their world on the founding of the Jamestown Colony, which was created with the help of undergraduate mentors from Cornell University. "Part of the appeal of the SciFair Model is participation in a learning community for students of all ages, including teacher/coaches at participating sites," says SciCentr director Margaret Corbit.
Major sponsors for the event are Cisco Systems, Dell and the Virginia Society for Technology in Education (VSTE). All presentations and exhibits at Innovate 2007 will focus on the five major components of Virginia's long-range technology plan: technology integration, professional development, connectivity, educational applications and accountability.
SciFair is the science communication fair of CTC's online research outreach program SciCentr.org. Primary funding for SciCentr comes from Cornell University and New York State; additional support comes from the National Science Foundation, GE Foundation, corporate and community foundations, and participating sites.
About the Cornell Theory Center
CTC is an interdisciplinary research center at Cornell University focused on providing cyberinfrastructure resources for research and education; these resources include high-performance and data-intensive computing hardware and expertise, visualization, and K-12 outreach. Scientific and engineering projects supported by CTC represent a wide variety of disciplines, including bioinformatics, behavioral and social sciences, computer science, engineering, geosciences, mathematics, physical sciences, and business.
