Ahead By A Country Mile
The Age
Wednesday November 28, 2001
WORMS, pigs, chooks and the Internet; it's an award-winning combination for Ararat Community College. Teacher Jo Tate has led a group of Ararat students to a global award for using the Internet for positive purposes with the Lab's Alive environmental project.
As the teacher responsible for integrating computers and technology across the curriculum at Ararat, Ms Tate decided two years ago to move into the science area.
The project she conceived, Lab's Alive, combines computer and Internet use with hands-on projects relevant to students living in this large country town.
She worked with other teachers to come up with ideas; students can work on developing a ``wasp-free zone", wine-grape growing or develop a ``creative" machine that can pour a glass of orange juice, among other projects.
Ms Tate says she wanted the students' interest to drive Lab's Alive: ``When you design this type of project, you try to put up as many options as you can first of all."
There are 450 students at the school; about 300 of them, mostly in years 7-10, are involved in Lab's Alive this year.
A key feature of the project is that the students work closely with similar projects around the world. A solar-powered cooker project, for instance, runs in conjunction with a school in Miami, Florida, sharing information. Students use e-mail, live text chat and videoconferencing to communicate with their overseas counterparts.
The split between hands-on work and technology is usually about 60per cent hands-on and 40per cent Internet and other work. Ms Tate says: ``Uploading stuff isn't nearly as important as responding (to partners)."
The ``organic survival unit" has partner groups in Ghana, Israel and South Australia, all comparing results and discussing issues from keeping snakes away from the chooks to adding a bee-keeping component to the project. Ararat students have helped raise money to assist the Ghanaian project.
In Ghana, the project is called a family survival unit, the idea being to set up a system that will allow a family to survive for a year. It has already helped some Ghanaians make it through a recent drought. It was originally based on a local organic-enthusiast's work.
In late September, the Ararat project was recognised as a global leader, winning an award from the Stockholm Challenge organisation. The challenge is devoted to finding projects that use the Internet for positive purposes; Lab's Alive was the joint winner not in the educational category, but in the environmental area, from 49 other entries.
Previous Australian Stockholm Challenge winners include a Victorian computing resource centre for community organisations, a site dedicated to combating Year 2000-related problems in computers, and a project bringing together indigenous people on the Internet.
The education section of the challenge is the mostly keenly contested; this year it was jointly won by a ``virtual high school", with 300 participating schools in 11 countries, and by a New Zealand project bringing computers into disadvantaged communities.
Students were invited to write about their work on the Internet children's magazine Junior Journal, at http://journal.jrsummit.net
www.araratcc.vic.edu.au/users/web/labsalive/index.htm
www.challenge.stockholm.se/challenge.html
© 2001 The Age
