Computer-Intensive Classroom

Computer-Intensive Classroom The Computer Intensive Classroom (CIC) project is truly a partnership. A coalition comprising public school districts, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a non-profit educational foundation, hardware and software vendors and a research university--Carnegie Mellon--it was formed in the Spring of 1987. The partners entered into the relationship with separate but complementary goals. The CIC project is located in the western Pennsylvania region known as the Monongahela River or simply the Mon Valley. The area is a collection of small towns created around the once-prospering steel mills lining the rivers of Greater Pittsburgh. Families in the valley traditionally have not encouraged their children to consider higher education. The children of this moribund industrial center followed their fathers and grandfathers into the mills and earned substantial income for the hard work of steelmaking. Going to college meant four years of lost wages and seniority, a lost opportunity to marry your high school sweetheart on graduation, and postponing the purchase of cars and homes. All of these postponements were contingent upon the promise of regained rewards in the future, and the job market for college graduates in the valley way very weak from the post-war 1940s until the early 1980s. If you chose to be a schoolteacher, one of the most common professions for college graduates, the rewards were few and slow to obtain. Then, in the 1980s, the economic decline of the steel industry changed the valley. Today the security of the mill and the union hall is gone; the valley is a paradigm of Rust Belt America. Unemployment in the valley is high and the talents of those seeking work do not match the requirements of those seeking workers. The U.S. Department of Labor recently reported that 20 percent of the U.S. workforce has a four-year college degree and that another 27 percent has completed from one to three years of college. Of Pennsylvania students, 76 percent graduate from high school, but only 13 percent of them complete college. Further exacerbating the problem, the loss of the industrial base together with high unemployment severely curtails the tax income available for the financing of the public schools. This, in turn, imposes limits on innovative programming and capital acquisition. These are the conditions that cemented the relationship between the CIC partners. The schools and the foundation desired to increase the use of technology in the classroom beyond the current budgetary limits; the state desired to increase the quality of the workforce by encouraging more students to pursue higher education. System vendors wanted to showcase their products; the university wished to test the applicability of technology in the education of young children. Thus the Computer-Intensive Classroom was born. Foundations In many ways, the CIC project is the child of a 1984-1987 program called Computer Literacy in the Public Schools (CLIP). This project placed computer labs in middle and high schools for use in the social sciences and art curriculums. Both the CIC and CLIP projects believed that the student should see the computer as a rather than a taskmaster. For this reason both projects selected a computer system that featured the WIMP (Windows, Icons and Mouse Pointer) interface. We considered then, and still consider, the Apple Macintosh computer to be the most robust hardware option available; it was selected for both projects. Direct teacher and student time has been kept at a minimum. Teachers received ten days of just before the start of the academic year and students learned to use the systems under an on-the-job training method. The common user interface of the Macintosh computer allowed an intuitive knowledge of software applications, so that tool learning accelerated during the project year. …