IPRO 330 has one clear and main purpose: to increase high school student interest in Science and Mathematics in Chicago Public Schools. This is a very lofty and broad goal, so IPRO 330 has chosen... Show moreIPRO 330 has one clear and main purpose: to increase high school student interest in Science and Mathematics in Chicago Public Schools. This is a very lofty and broad goal, so IPRO 330 has chosen to use the Chicago Public School Science Fair program as a vehicle to achieve this purpose. IPRO 330 is a continuing IPRO, meaning that we have a foundation and a base of work that has already been accomplished. As a result, one of the project goals of this team will be to obtain in-depth feedback from professionals within IIT, from Chicago Public Schools, and certainly from other professional education venues as well. Specifically, we will be looking to obtain feedback from the three most involved sources in high school students’ lives: students, teachers, and parents. This may be the most vital part of our project, because we want to make sure that our projects and guides are of high quality and high interest to high school students. IPRO 330 has an existing bank of Science Fair projects and guides which are located on the website sciencefair.math.iit.edu. In an effort to make our website more effective and more appealing, we will have team goals to create more Science Fair projects, and guides which will target areas that Chicago Public High School Students typically have trouble addressing, such as data analysis. We feel like the guides are a way to really implement more mathematics into the Science Fair program as a whole. In addition, there will be a group of students in our IPRO focused on improving the website and implementing new projects. IPRO 330 will address these objectives by first having all members, including faculty advisors, attend and judge a Chicago Public School Science Fair. This will allow everyone working on this project to get a better sense of what we are working on, make some contacts with teachers and Science Fair Coordinators, and even get feedback from students who used the website as a resource for their project. After this initial phase, the group will break up into three teams, an infrastructure team, a communication team, and a project and guides team. In these sub teams, IPRO 330 will be able to more effectively deal with more specific issues that arise Show less
