Mission Statement

This site provides information, tools, and progress on the implementation of a 2006 Hewlett Packard U.S. Higher Education Technology for Teaching grant. The purpose of this grant is to redesign general chemistry courses and create real world problems for computer science students in Parkland College pre-engineering courses. In addition, the grant provides funding for the development of customized assessment software developed by students in Parklands Computer Science and Information Technology (CSIT) department. The grant includes 21 tablet PCs and associated wireless hardware to create a fully mobile computer lab. Students from the Network System Administration program set up the wireless lab for the chemistry classes.

In support of the goals of this grant, Natural Sciences has implemented a powerful software package developed by the Concord Consortium in Concord, Massachusetts. The Molecular Workbench software package is a free, open-source modeling and authoring program specifically designed for use in science education. Funded by the National Science Foundation, it allows instructors to develop fully customized interactive classroom assignments that model chemical processes and reactions. The Concord Consortium has generously offered their time and expertise to implement and support changes to their software platform.

A major goal of this grant is to form a working partnership between the Natural Sciences and CSIT departments at Parkland. Computer science students act as consultants and programmers for software tools to support the assessment goals of this grant. The chemistry faculty and their students act as clients. The tools being developed will provide a powerful way to assess the effectiveness of this technology being used in the classroom.

Parkland recognizes Hewlett Packard for their generous grant, the Concord Consortium for their technical support, Parkland's Campus Tech personnel and all the students and faculty who have worked on developing and testing the hardware and software tools used in conjunction with this grant.