By Tammy Richards
Executive Director, The Infinity Project

Welcome to the new Infinity Project newsletter! We are excited to offer you a resource you can count on every other month for the latest information on The Infinity Project. In this newsletter and others to follow, you will be informed of curriculum updates, training sessions, and funding opportunities. You will learn how other Infinity schools are implementing this exciting program and what teachers and students have to say.

We look forward to building a strong community of support for you with the Infinity Project newsletter. What is important to you is important to us, so please send your comments and success stories to ipmail@infinity-project.org. Together, we can provide students with broader career options while enhancing math, science and engineering education at your school!

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The Infinity Project is an award winning educational initiative designed to bring modern engineering and advanced technology education to high school students. It offers an innovative curriculum that emphasizes both the fundamentals and fun of engineering and prepares the next generation for the High Tech and Engineering Age.

The Infinity Grant Program was established to support high schools that incorporate this “turn-key” solution into their curricula. A one-time grant of $2,500 will be awarded to eligible Texas public high schools implementing The Infinity Project’s engineering curriculum.

To be eligible for this grant, your high school must meet the following criteria:

• Texas public high school with a minimum of 25% minority and/or disadvantaged student population.
• School must complete and submit grant application by June 30, 2004.

The funds made available through this grant program may only be applied to the following approved expenses:

• 40-hour professional development session
• Up to $500 in travel expenses to attend the professional development session
• Two Infinity textbooks
• Four Infinity technology kits

The $2,500 grant may be used to preview The Infinity Project.  Under this program, after exploring The Infinity Project in the summer of 2004, without any obligation, you may decide to apply for Full Program Membership and offer the year-long curriculum in 2005-2006.

If you are interested in offering this curriculum at your high school, please complete and submit a grant application today! Applications are available here.

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By Dianna Rey
Manager, Academic Relations
The Infinity Project

What an exciting place to be in the spring – New Orleans, Louisiana at the annual T³ International Conference! Sponsored by Texas Instruments, T³ (Teachers Teaching with Technology) is a conference open to all educators interested in using educational technology to enhance teaching and learning in mathematics, science, social studies, language arts, and world languages. The conference provides an excellent opportunity to network, participate in hands-on demonstrations, and enhance your professional development.

The reception the Infinity Project received from educators was outstanding! Our booth was busy non-stop with teachers asking for more information about the Infinity Project and how they could add this innovative program to their high school. Saturday morning started off with a standing-room-only crowd waiting to hear Aurelia Weil, from Cor Jesu Academy, discussing "Can High School Teachers Teach Engineering?" and how the Infinity Project allows students to explore the math/science behind high-tech devices. Richard Taylor, The Hockaday School, wowed the crowd with a hands-on demonstration of the Infinity Project software during his presentation of "Math and Science Through Design: Teaching Engineering in High School." Reactions to both presentations were enthusiastic and left educators wanting more.

Many thanks to National Instruments for hosting a reception for educators interested in learning more about the Infinity Project. This event allowed the Infinity Project team to get better acquainted with educators from all over the U.S. and answer additional questions. Over and over again, we found that educators feel a need to offer more challenging curriculum in the classroom. Teachers say the Infinity Project fills that need by helping students quickly understand how the concepts they’ve learned in math and science address the real-life challenges in the world around us.

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By Michael Hestermann
Development Officer
Colorado Springs Christian Schools

Cheryl Mahon, one of our high school math teachers, was introduced to The Infinity Project at a math conference she attended in the spring of 2002. She was excited and enthusiastic about the program and the potential impact it could have for the math program, teaching staff and students. We subsequently applied and were accepted to be a part of the program beginning in the fall of 2003.

As the person responsible for strategic and planned financial giving and development at the school, I was faced with a $20,000 start-up cost and developed a plan to acquire the needed funding. Those costs included: the purchase of computers, software and textbooks; providing the appropriate classroom furniture to accommodate the desired set-up for the class; wiring the classroom to handle the increased technological needs; and the costs associated with training for Cheryl which included travel and lodging costs and the cost for the actual training. It should be noted that not all schools may be faced with all of these costs. If you have an existing computer lab, the costs should be between $5,000 and $6,000 for the Infinity technology, textbooks, and training.

The first thing we did was identify school parents who were working in or closely associated with the technology industry. These individuals were invited to an evening forum at which Cheryl presented an overall overview of The Infinity Project and the potential benefits it would bring to our school. From that meeting came a number of contacts that I began pursuing.

These contacts included a professional engineering association, engineering and architectural firms, a realtor, a mortgage company, a construction company and several small businesses. In addition, individual parents who were employed in the technology industry were approached and presented with the opportunity to invest in our math curriculum and the future engineering profession. An alumnus of the school who recently received her engineering degree contributed to the funding needs as well.

In communicating to each of these funding partners I was careful to keep the message the same. The school had a unique opportunity to improve its high school math curriculum in several ways. Students would be given the opportunity to study and use an upper level math curriculum in a hands-on way. They, as investors, would be able to see the results of their investment for years to come, and they would be able to help impact the future of the engineering profession by providing an opportunity for potential engineers to be developed.

The success of the program can be illustrated with the following quotes:

The experience I gained in creating this funding model was invaluable and will help me develop strategies for future projects and funding needs. The key to forging successful partnerships with businesses and corporations is to remember to keep the message simple and consistent, and that people give to people particularly when they see how their respective professions may benefit. I can be reached at mike.hestermann@cscslions.org if you have a need for additional information.

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By Rebecca Willet, Rice University Graduate Student; 
George Milauskas, Operational Coordinator for Mathematics; 
Ron Hurlbut, Instructional Program Assistant for Mathematics, Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy

“I turned on a box fan, switched out the lights, and turned the knob on a strobe light. With each flash of the bright light in the darkened classroom, the high school students and I could see the fan blades frozen for a single instant. As I turned a knob to make the light flash more rapidly, the fan blades appeared to stop and then slowly move backwards, though the breeze we felt told us we were seeing an illusion. After I handed the strobe to a student I asked him to vary the rate of the light flashes. I then explained to the class that each time the light flashed our eyes were ‘sampling’ a view of the fan, and that if we don’t choose our sampling rate (i.e. the rate of the flashes) carefully, we’ll see this illusion which signal processors call aliasing.

“In the flickering light I could see their eyes glued to the fan. They had all seen aliasing before in movies: a car speeds off while the wheels appear to spin backwards because of the frame rate of the movie camera. But seeing aliasing is entirely different from understanding why it occurs, how it can be prevented, and what the mathematics of sampling implies for digital music and images. As George Milauskas (my teaching partner) and I explained the phenomenon from different vantage points, I could see subtle changes on student faces as the concepts being discussed clicked into place. This was material that is typically covered in college Electrical Engineering courses after extensive preparation in mathematics, yet the high school students before me were undaunted.”

Rebecca Willett recounted this lesson after teaching a weeklong survey of digital technology at the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA). Portions of the Infinity Project’s high school course were selected as the main content for an intersession at IMSA entitled “Digital High”. IMSA is a three-year residential high school that specializes in advanced mathematics and science education for talented students throughout Illinois. Intersession at IMSA is an annual event of one-week duration that occurs just before the beginning of the spring semester. This Digital High Intersession was configured as five half-day (three hour) classes. Although the Infinity Project supplied the majority of the course content, Ms. Willett also presented significant supplemental content. Ms. Willett is a graduate of IMSA and is currently completing her doctorate in Electrical Engineering at Rice University. Mr. Milauskas, an IMSA Mathematics teacher and operational coordinator served as the intersession sponsor and also helped with instruction. Ron Hurlbut, the IMSA Mathematics instructional program aid and retired research engineer, also helped with the intersession.

The intersession was advertised as an introduction to the mathematics behind digital technologies. Students came with interests ranging from MP3s and JPEG to MRIs and CAT scans. The skill sets of the students were as varied as their interests. All of the students had taken some trigonometry and some had already completed several semesters of calculus. Many were familiar with terms such as “public-key encryption” and “TDMA”, but few appreciated the depth of the mathematical theory underlying these technologies.

Ms. Willett began the Intersession with an overview of the differences between engineers and scientists and the technologies that utilize digital signal processing (DSP). This was particularly helpful because currently IMSA does not present these ideas to its students. She then presented a syllabus of the Intersession which outlined the exploration of several main areas from The Infinity course: digital music, digital image processing, music and image compression, communications, and biological signal and image analysis. Each day one of these topics was explored. Because of the limited course time and the varied backgrounds of the students, the class was made as interactive as possible. Short lectures were interwoven with lab activities and each lab was followed by discussion of the key concepts stated in the lectures and implemented in the labs. After Ms. Willett presented the key concepts of Fourier series, the students expressed a keen interest as she extended these concepts into spectral analysis and how these tools relate to the probability distributions underlying different types of noise contamination. Ms. Willett also supplemented the explanations with web-based demonstration activities to illustrate a variety of phenomena. Students, working in groups of five, were responsible for presenting material from the previous day to their classmates to help reinforce ideas that would be used in upcoming lectures.

In most cases students gained significant understanding from the labs and the presented materials. Surveys completed by the students after the intersession indicated a strong interest by most students in the course topics. Many desired that these topics be included in a regular semester class at IMSA, and the IMSA mathematics staff members working with this intersession strongly agree.

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Professional development is a major component of The Infinity Project.  In addition to arming you with a world-class curriculum and classroom tools, Infinity provides every new teacher with a week-long, highly interactive program at one of our affiliate locations around the country.

The training program covers every area of The Infinity Project curriculum and gives hands-on instruction in using the text and technology kit.  On top of that, teachers have the opportunity to network with other Infinity teachers and share ideas.

After training, teachers have instant access to a special teachers-only Infinity website that contains discussion groups, sample exercises and much more.

Training Basics:

• One week/40 hours
• Hands-on
• All the training you need to get started
• Taught by Master Teachers
• Typically hosted on a university campus

2004 Summer Professional Development Institutes

Institute	Location	Dates
Institute I	Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas	June 21 – 25
Institute II	Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas	July 19 – 23
Institute III	Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas	August 2 – 6
Institute IV	University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas	June 1 - 5

If you are interested in attending one of the Institutes, please contact Felicia Hopson at hopson@infinity-project.org.  Space is filling up quickly, so make your reservation today!

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The Infinity Project is pleased to announce the release of a new Instructor’s manual for Engineering Our Digital Future. The manual comes complete with a CD and includes the following:

• Homework Solutions
• Sample Test Questions
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Links To Interesting Web Sites

Click here to order your copy from Prentice Hall today.

 

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