About Southern Tier SciFair
The SciCentr outreach program at Cornell University is partnering with MST-Connect, a consortium of businesses, educational institutions, and state agencies in the Greater Southern Tier of New York State, to offer summer camps for middle school students across the region. This program, Southern Tier SciFair (ST SciFair), expands on the SciFair program developed at Cornell as an innovative use of online multi-user virtual worlds in education. ST SciFair matches mentors at MST-Connect partner Corning Community College with teachers and teams at eight middle schools affiliated with the Greater Southern Tier BOCES, all supported by master mentors and staff at Cornell and across the partnership.
This year, the five-week ST SciFair program will begin with a week of teacher and mentor training at Corning Community College on July 14. The next week eight teams of virtual campers at regional schools will begin to explore the medium of virtual worlds and to learn to build their own worlds about science and technology. Participating districts include, Addison, Bath, Campbell-Savona, Corning, Elmira, Elmira Heights, Horseheads, and Spencer-Van Etten.
Teams of summer campers from these districts will work in a secure online environment from computer labs in their schools. They will log into a private universe of online multi-user virtual worlds for education, hosted by the SciCentr program at Cornell. Teacher/coaches, students, mentors and support staff will work “inworld” together from computer labs at Cornell, Corning Community College and all involved school districts.
With the guidance of their teacher/coaches and mentors from Cornell University and Corning Community College, students in grades 5-8 will research a scientific topic and present it using the virtual platform. Sample topics include Genetics: Engineering the Cure; My World; Conserve & Protect!; Highways of the Human Body; and BioDome—preparing for Life on Other Planets. Participants will work together to gain new computing skills as well as learn about the subject on which their team has chosen to concentrate.
At the conclusion of the program, all teams will showcase their work and present the virtual world they created, displaying the knowledge they have gained. This showcase will be a real-world celebration at the Wings of Eagles Discovery Center, in Horseheads, NY.