The RET Program in the Center for Materials for Information Technology at the University of Alabama

The Center for Materials for Information Technology has a mission of outreach to middle school students. For the past two years our Center has run a summer research experiences for teachers (RET) program. A primary emphasis of the Center’s educational outreach activities involves collaboration with a very innovative 6th to 8th grade Integrated Science (IS) curriculum based in the Center for Communication and Educational Technology at the University of Alabama. Each summer three teachers from the IS program spent ten weeks working in the Center to develop demonstrations or activities for use in their classrooms. The emphasis was on demonstrations of magnetism and magnetic materials. In addition to these activities, the teachers have also assisted in the development of Computer Aided Instructional (CAI) software for use in their science classrooms. Both the activities and the software developed this summer will be made available to all of the teachers and students participating in the IS curriculum, approximately 1400 teachers and 170,000 students.