The Pas Researcher Pack

Pas

Pas stands for "Project, Activity, Step", and loosely derives from the previous WISE program, which offered a Web-based learning environment where students performed projects that consisted of a small number of activities (usually between 2 and 8) which in turn consisted of individual steps to bve completed by students. Steps are discreet chunks of content with a specific type, such as note-taking, online discussions, drawings, Web-page viewing, models and simulations, etc. Activities are logical groupings of steps that can be performed by students working in a single class period or in a certain portion of the project. The Project consists of an overarching theme, usually with an inquiry question or challenge, such as "Design a house for living in the desert", or "Are humans causing global climate change?" The steps don't necessarily need to be performed by students in sequence, but they usually are. Projects are launched via the Web, and conducted by students on their classroom computers, or from home. All student work is saved on a specially configured server that belowings to the research project. A student and teacher portal coordinates all student accounts and gives teachers (and researchers) access to the student work for purposes of assessment or anlysis.

Pas is the first software framework implemented using SAIL (but very likely not the last, as we envision many "non-Pas" type environments to come). It includes an authoring tool for creating curriculum and a learner environment that allows students to work through your curriculum. A good strategy for understanding Pas is to first look at the predecessor project, WISE. An overview can be found through the WISE flash introduction. After that, you can sign up for a teacher account on WISE and explore. You can "preview" projects, edit them, and experiment with creating some simple curriculum materials. Refer to the help documentation for using WISE which is available once you are logged in.

• Here is a more detailed discussion of the Pas Suite, in terms of its relation to SAIL.

WISE

WISE stands "Web-based inquiry science environment". WISE functions as a stand-alone Web application that was (and still is) available to researchers as a platform for developing and delivering WISE content and collecting student data. But was not available to them for purposes of developing new features, tools or user interfaces. Nor could it easily interoperate with other java-based tools. A group of researchers, computer scientists and programers from the University of California, Berkeley and several other institutions, have rendered the WISE model as a Java framework, carefully separating the portal from the authoring tools and student learning tools, and offering the whole package under and open source (LGPL) license.

• More about WISE

SAIL

SAIL stands for "Scalable Architecture for Interactive Learning". It is a java based open source framework (API) to support the development of E-Learning systems. It has been designed to support distributed learning and authoring, to be adapted for use by many diverse education scenarios, to continuously evolve (rather than becoming obsolete within a few years as many E-Learning projects have done) and to allow content (curriculum and bits of curriculum) to be re-used and revised. The SAIL framework is still under development and is evolving in response to needs and requirements that emerge.

• More about the SAIL framework and specifically the sail-core java code upon which Pas is based

Curnit

A SAIL-based curriculum unit which is created by an author is called a curnit (from "curriculum" and "unit" squeezed together).