From: Barry Kort Subject: MicroMuse and MuseNet To: ednet@noc1.oit.umass.edu Date: Wed, 7 Jun 1995 22:43:54 -0400 (EDT) Cc: bkort@musenet.org (Barry Kort) Greetings, EdNetters. This is the third installment of my story about innovations in educational technology. By the fall of 1990, MicroMush had been ported from the small Sun machine at Cal State Fresno, and had been renamed MicroMuse. The acronym 'MUSE' was suggested by Wally Feurzeig. It stands for Multi-User Simulation Environment. (Wally is also credited for naming the 'LOGO' language, which he had worked on many years before.) One of the first K-12 students to show up on MicroMuse was 'Calvin', a 9-year old boy from Boulder CO. In real life, 'Calvin' is the son of Ken Klingenstein, the K-12 networking pioneer who developed the Boulder Valley School District Network. When the Klingensteins returned from a summer vacation in Yellowstone National Park, 'Calvin' constructed a model of Yellowstone in MicroMuse, complete with working geysers and a wandering moose. While the code on the objects in Yellowstone worked quite well, the prose descriptions of the park's scenic areas was a bit light and riddled with spelling errors. We urged 'Calvin' to fix up his spelling before opening the park to public access. Calvin dragged his heels. Months went by, and finally Calvin asked again if he could open the park. Again we encouraged him to clean up his spelling. Grumbling mightily, he hunkered down and fixed his errant prose, whereupon Yellowstone Park opened to great fanfare. No one was more proud than Calvin. About a year later, Ken Klingenstein and his son traveled to Boston to visit an old friend, Alan Feldman, from TERC. My colleague on MicroMuse, David Albert ('Aslan') and I were invited over to meet young 'Calvin' in person. We were walking along the beach in Beverly MA, a few blocks from Alan's house, and I was getting to know Ken. I asked him what his son had learned on MicroMuse. Ken replied, "He learned spelling. He used to have atrocious spelling, but something happened to make him hunker down and learn it." I smiled. Ken went on, "Then he entered the Colorado State Spelling Bee, and won." I was floored. 'Calvin' is still with us on MicroMuse. He's now a member of the MicroMuse Oprations Council, and helps run the Muse. One of the first deep models on MicroMuse was the Solar System, which accurately recreates the motion of the planets, complete with Newtonian gravitational mechanics. It was built entirely by the students, led by two college students in Astrophysics from Utah. High school students build their own elaborate space ships which they navigate to the planets and beyond. Astro-navigation is not easy. It requires understanding of polar coordinates and the principles of Newtonian mechanics. When Rob Reilly turned up on MicroMuse with his students from the Lanesboro School, they took up a project based on Cyberion City's spacefaring theme. They built the AntiGravity Labs to explore the behavior of objects in a weightless environment, and they embarked on a mission to the far planets. I first met the intrepid 'gorzon98' (as Rob is known on MicroMuse) when he spoke at a professional society meeting in Boston. His tales of situational and project-based learning on MicroMuse reinforced our theory and belief that the Muse could sustain serious and substantial learning when used effectively by innovative teachers. Another jewel in the collection of models on MicroMuse is the Amazon Rain Forest, constructed by Boston University grad student, Erica Cleary, as a term project in Environmental Science. This was the first project for which a student earned an academic grade (A-). Erica went on to build a Mayan Temple, complete with working Mayan calendar. While volunteering at the Boston Museum of Science, I met David Albert, a fellow volunteer who was completing his graduate studies in computer science and artificial intelligence at Harvard. I invited David to check out MicroMuse. He adopted the character of 'Aslan the Lion' and built Narnia, a wonderful collection of puzzles set in the land made famous by C. S. Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia. Aslan is now a Director of MicroMuse, and has made enormous contributions to the development of our programming system and to the leadership of our community. The operation of MicroMuse has attracted the attention and interest of other educators and professionals who have set up others Muses, including the remarkable MariMuse at Phoenix College which reaches out to disadvantaged children from an inner city elementary school with transformational results. Recently, Xerox PARC has begun to work with the group from Phoenix to develop an even stronger program. BridgeMuse at the University of Southern Maine, EcoMuse at the University of Vermont, DeAnzaMuse at DeAnza Community College, and numerous student-run Muses have emerged to create a loose affiliation of educational Muses known as MuseNet (the Multi-User Science Education Network). In support of MuseNet, I have been salvaging donated, surplus, and rebuilt computers, and placing them into service at BBN and other sites. To date, we have salvaged some 3 dozen Unix Internet hosts on behalf of the MuseNet K12 Project. One of them is slated to go to Rob Reilly's Lanesboro School, where Rob will be able to set up his own Muse, Web server, E-Mail lists, etc. The price? Rob has to learn enough Unix administration to operate the machine. There is a core of dedicated students who collectively operate and manage MicroMuse, with minimal direction from the few adults who assist while trying to stay out of the way of the creativity of the kids. I have a small fleet of VAX and Sun machines at BBN which are managed by 16-year old students such as 'Frnkzk' (who connects from Maryland) and 'Zephyr' (who connects from Ohio). We run this fleet and this project entirely unfunded and with volunteers, including students, teachers, parents, and professionals. In the next message I'll tell you more about our collaborations with other sites and projects, and about the role of the NSF and ARPA in laying the foundations for further research and development. I'll also tell you about the theoretical underpinnings of the MicroMuse Learning Model. Barry