The Project WHIRL Design Conference

SRI held a summer design workshop at the Penn Center on St. Helena's Island from July 8-11, 2002. The Penn Center was selected as a site for the workshop both because of its quiet, retreat-like atmosphere and because it was a significant educational institution within the African American community. The Penn Center was founded in 1862 as part of the "Port Royal Experiment," an effort by abolitionists in Union Army-occupied Beaufort County to provide education to former slaves (see Rose, 1999). Today, the Penn Center operates as a conference center, a museum, and runs pre-school and after-school programs for youth in the community. All of the design team teachers and the SRI team members participated in the workshop at the Penn Center, along with the three Beaufort administrators and the director of youth programs at the Penn Center.

The purpose of the design workshop was to build trust among the different members of the project team in Beaufort and Menlo Park, form design teams, and select three ideas for handheld-supported assessment activities to develop further through a year-long process of design and testing. To build trust, we spent the first of the four days of the workshop engaged in team-building activities. Those activities included reflecting on two video cases of science inquiry lessons and generating criteria for useful and effective learning technologies for the classroom. On the second day, teachers heard more about the project scope and began to brainstorm ideas for handheld software that could support classroom assessment in their science classrooms. On the third and fourth days, teachers began to form small teams, and they had two separate opportunities as teams to refine their ideas and present back their ideas to the whole group for feedback. At the end of the fourth day, the three teams completed charter documents that described the classroom need their tool would address, the assessment activities it could support, and what the expected benefits of using the tool would be for teachers and students.