PRESENTATION OUTLINE

I.  Motivation for the website

A.  Personal Experience: Started an elementary school math club in high school and ran it with friends from the high school math honor society, biggest challenge was for a few of us to rotate coming up with new and engaging material on a weekly basis

B.  Take advantage of the internet to consolidate educational resources and information that has recently grown in availability on the web, but which is scattered and sometimes difficult to find.

C.  Additional broader hope: to channel some of the huge potential of high school math and science students who are interested in giving back to their community through math and science (but may not necessarily know how or may just need a little inspiration – I think this is a pretty significant population), and encourage them to help and inspire young children

II.   Objectives

To provide a central site where high school students can easily find the information and resources to start and successfully run elementary school math and science clubs

B.  To build an online community and network among people working on a similar project (elementary school clubs).  I think this could be very useful, but I haven’t heard of one that is widely used yet, to my knowledge.

III.  Layout for Website

Information and Tips for Starting a Club

Resource Share (with varying degrees of user flexibility as listed below):

• Fully ready-to-use worksheets / activities
• Individual problems (users can pick and choose problems to use in making their own worksheet)
• *Possibly for future: drag-and-drop application so users can select problems, upload club header, and… instant worksheet!  Helpful, user-friendly tool that’s intermediate between #1 and #2.

Forum: students can discuss and exchange ideas, experiences, tips

Club Highlight: highlight a club each month, nice for highlighted club and gives other clubs ideas!

IV. Target Users

A.  Primarily high school students and groups who are interested in starting or already running an elementary school math/science club

1. Individual students / groups of students
2. High school math/science clubs, community service clubs

B.  Also individuals who would just like to contribute problems, resources, and discussion

V.  Possible Future Expansion: Split website into separate sections for high school students, elementary school students, teachers, and companies (which also involves expanding target audience)

A.  For Teachers

1. Match elementary school teachers/ elementary schools interested in having a club at their school with local high school students willing to run the club
2. Teachers can also volunteer to help edit and review user-submitted material (although I’m not sure yet if review is necessary) – hopefully if the website grows, I can’t do it all!

B.  For Companies

1. Corporate sponsors interested in outreach can host/help with specific activities, or mentor high school students
2. Companies can sponsor a “club of the month” award – hopefully can encourage and inspire high school students, and provide more incentive for people to join and participate on the website

C.  For Elementary School Students

1. Online fun & activites, “problem of the week” contests, etc.

VI.  Issues to Think About

A.  Establishing a user base – the success of this website is highly dependent on its users!

1. Obviously, website quality, features provided, is important.
2. Can attract users through advertisement – word of mouth, national honor societies such as Mu Alpha Theta Math Honor Society, even facebook ads (likely to reach main target audience)
3. Possibly corporate sponsorship such as “club of the month” award, scholarship, which may be attractive to high school students

B.  Many ways to expand site (discussed some of these above), but it probably won’t work very well to do it all right now.  Need to have clear plan to make a well-managed website that can attract users from the beginning so it can grow, and then the other features can be added. But there must be enough attractive features to attract the users the in the first place?  Not quite sure how this works…

Page last updated 06.08.08 by Serena Yeung