The Women's Adventures in Science project has extensive material to use in your classroom: ten books plus the interactive content on this web site, including scientist home pages and scrapbooks, comics, the Ask It! forum, games, and a timeline. This section describes each of those content areas and suggests how you can use them.

Book Series

Ten inspiring biographies tell the stories of the scientists’ personal and professional lives. Through lively text and plentiful photographs, readers learn how each woman was led to a career in science and what makes her passionate about her work.

Scientists' Home Pages and Scrapbooks

Each of our 10 featured women scientists is introduced via her home page. The scrapbooks give students the opportunity to explore the lives, backgrounds, and passions of each scientist. Interactive comic strips explore one important scientific discovery, telling the story through text, pictures, and animations. (Encourage students to use their mouse to roll over each screen to find fun science facts that expand the story.) On each home page, there are videos to watch, science labs to try [link to page 3: Focus on Science Labs], and related Web sites to visit.

Kids will discover that being a scientist is only partly about academics—who you are as a person contributes greatly to who you are as a scientist!

• Cynthia Breazeal
• Diane France
• Inez Fung
• Heidi Hammel
• Shirley Jackson
• Mimi Koehl
• Adriana Ocampo
• Marta Tienda
• Amy Vedder
• Nancy Wexler

Ask It! Activity

Ask It! helps develop your students’ inquiry skills and motivates them to become part of a larger community of learning. Students pose questions about anything scientific that they wonder about, provide answers to questions they think they know the answers to, and comment on other students’ questions or responses. Students even have the opportunity to vote for questions that they would like to see answered by science experts. To participate fully in the activity, students must register but it is possible to post questions and vote without registering. (Note that each student needs a unique e-mail address to register. More than one student cannot be registered under the same e-mail address.) Once the students have registered, they are provided with a homepage that they can return to often to see how their questions have been answered and to read the comments of other students and classes!

There are many ways that teachers can easily incorporate this activity in their classrooms. And the activity works well in a variety of education settings—both formal and informal—including regular classrooms, pull-out programs, and intervention or after-school programs.

Ideas for using this activity in a classroom setting:

• Whole Class: Use the Ask It! activity to discuss the power of questions and collaboration in the world of science. Model how to develop and answer scientific questions. Have the class work together to craft their questions as well as responses to other students’ or classes’ questions. A class can register as the whole class (e.g., Mr. Miller’s Class) and track both the questions they have asked and their favorite questions on their class homepage. Classrooms in the same school can try to answer each other’s questions, or they can chose to answer any of the questions posted by other kids or classrooms from around the country.
• Small Group Inquiry Station: Use the AskIt! activity with small groups as part of an Inquiry Station. Using a small number of computers with online access, have students register and participate in the AskIt! community. The small groups can find questions they are interested in and offer responses based on information in their textbooks or other classroom materials, or they can make educated guesses based on what they think might be a correct response. Students can work in the small group or even in pairs to write questions or responses. They even can work together to research possible answers to questions they find interesting.
• Cross-Age Science Buddy Inquiry: Older students can work with younger students to explore the world of science. Older students can show their younger “buddy” how to surf the iWASwondering.org Web site to find the AskIt! activity. Together they can look for interesting questions and answers. The buddies can also work together to post questions and comment on the questions and answers of other students. Not only will this build the science background knowledge of younger students, but it also encourages informational reading and writing.
  
• Individual Exploration: Encourage individual inquiry and exploration by having individual students ask questions, answer questions, comment on the questions or answers of others, and identify favorite questions that the student would like to track or see answered by an expert. Not only can students participate in the online learning community during school, but they also can bring the learning home to encourage home-school connections. Encourage students and parents to check the site often to see how other kids or real scientists answered their favorite questions!

Teachers are encouraged to share their ideas for using the AskIt! activity in their classrooms. You can submit your ideas to WASComments@nas.edu to see them posted in the News You Can Use section of the iWASwondering.org Web site.

Games

Gorilla Quest

Gorilla Quest takes players on an adventure through the jungle in search of a gorilla family.

• Encounter challenges unique to the world of a jungle and to the work of a wildlife biologist like Amy Vedder.
• Make decisions about how to navigate the jungle terrain and what to do when faced with interesting challenges.
• Share in Amy’s commitment to understanding and protecting gorillas.

• Before playing the game, ask students to predict possible hurdles that scientists like Amy Vedder face when tracking gorilla families. Encourage them to do research and be as specific as they can.
• After students have played the game ask five small student groups to choose one of the "gorilla clues" in the game. Give each group time to conduct additional research on their gorilla clue, then set up the room with a trail. Choose a volunteer scientist (perhaps your principal) to travel the path and have each group give a brief presentation about their gorilla clue along the way.

AstroScope

In a scavenger-hunt format, AstroScope players are challenged to explore our solar system, the Milky Way, and the universe beyond, and learn "Far-Out Facts" about objects in space.

• Develop an awareness of the similarities and differences between our solar system, the Milky Way, and the wider universe.
• Develop a sense of spatial relations in the universe.
• Develop beginning understandings of comets, nebulae, galaxies, planets, and their moons.

• The game could serve as an introduction to a unit on our solar system or the universe more generally.
• Students can work in pairs as travel agents for their chosen destination (one of 15 locations in the game). Give them 3 minutes to share enough information with the class to entice the class to visit this location for their next family vacation.

Make a Robot

Make a Robot engages players in constructing their own robot like Cynthia Breazeal’s Kismet. Players will…

• Develop an understanding of humans’ reactions to emotional responses.
• Consider the potential value of artificial intelligence and smart machines.

• The game could serve as a foundation for writing about the "life" of a robot.
  • Start by having students create a robot using this game and print it out.
  • Then students should create a purpose for their robot, and a set of rules to operate by. Examples include: When you hear someone crying, sit down and ask “Can I help?” When you see someone new, greet them by saying "Hi!"
  • Use these rules and the robot’s purpose to write a science fiction story, in which the robot follows the rules and struggles to accomplish its mission.

Read the interactive comic book, Creating Kismet the Robot, to find out how Cynthia Breazeal created her robot Kismet. Check out the seven video clips showing Cynthia Breazeal and Kismet in action! Discuss how programming machines to exhibit “intelligent” behavior is no simple task. Encourage your students to brainstorm what abilities they would want a robot to have for it to be considered “intelligent.”

Time Travel Timeline

Learn about the accomplishments of female scientists of the past and present.

The interactive Time Travel Timeline gives students a sense of how each female scientist’s work has contributed to her field. Invite your students to consider the challenges women faced in different time periods and consider what challenges Lia—the scientist of the future—might encounter.