Metadata:

Name

The River City Project

Overview

The River City Project, is a National Science Foundation-supported simulation environment for learning scientific inquiry and 21st century skills. River City is an interactive computer simulation of a river town, based in the late 1800s, that combines digitalized Smithsonian artifacts with an inquiry-centered curriculum to engage middle and high school students.

As visitors to River City, students travel back in time, bringing their 21st century skills and technology to address 19th century problems. River City is a town besieged with health problems. Students work together in small research teams to help the town understand why so many residents are becoming ill. Students use technology to keep track of clues that hint at causes of illnesses, form and test hypotheses, develop controlled experiments to test their hypotheses, and make recommendations based on the data they collect, all in an online environment.

Resource Type

• Research Projects, Programs or Centers
• Virtual scientific environment for middle or high school students

Intended Audience

• Middle School (6th through 8th grades or age 11-13)
• High School (9th through 12th grades or age 14-18)
• Teachers/Educators

Topic Area

The River City Project concentrates on the areas of:

• epidemiology
• scientific inquiry
• experimentation

Objectives of project
Learn the principles and concepts of science;
Acquire the reasoning and procedural skills of scientists;
Devise and carry out investigations that test their ideas; and
Understand why such investigations are uniquely powerful.

River City is a 17 hour, time-on-task curriculum that includes a pretest and a research conference at the end of the unit. Teachers are not expected to find extra time in the school year in order to implement River City. On the contrary, the River City Curriculum is designed and intended to replace existing lessons. The River City Curriculum is interdisciplinary in scope, spanning the domains of ecology, health, biology, chemistry, and earth science, as well as history.

Author(s)

• Federal Organizations
  The National Science Foundation
• Smithsonian's National Museum of American History - Division of Information Technology and Society
• Universities
  Arizona State University's Educational Technology Graduate Program - M.Ed. and Ph.D.
  Harvard University's Graduate School of Education
• Participating States
  In spring 2006, approximately 60 teachers implemented River City with almost 4,000 students on two continents (North America and Australia).

• Chris Dede, Principal Investigator. Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies

Copyright Status (choose one - add a new one if needed)

©
Site content copyright © 2004-2006 Harvard University.

Keywords/Tags

virtual world, high school science, science education, epidimiology, scientific inquiry

Link to resource (add a URL to a resource, demo, etc)

http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/index.html