Implementation of Science by Mail (SBM)
“Science by Mail” (SBM) offers school-children in grades 3 to 9 a glimpse of the cutting edge research that is
taking place at one of the world's leading research institute, The Weizmann Institute of Science. The program
too, includes four in-depth topics, each from a different scientific field and based on the research conducted in a
different laboratory at the Weizmann Institute. The in-depth topics are spread over the school-year and once the
activities are uploaded, they can be accessed online anytime, at home or at school. The activities are based on
simple experiments that can be performed at home, which lead even young participants to a much better
understanding of complicated ideas and, equally important, to the process of scientific research and scientific
thought. As in “MBM”, in addition to the in- depth topics, participants receive a weekly newsletter with
additional experiments, riddles and challenges. The newsletter challenges and experiments are discussed and
results compared in the weekly chat with the Science by Mail team, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of
Science. The chat is a unique opportunity for participants to have a conversation, share their ideas and get
feedback directly from researchers of science.
Another program we implemented in Moodle platform is “Beaver”. The program is engaged in solving
challenging problems of interesting and intriguing in a variety of topics in computers. The purpose of the
program is to create a foundation of basic understanding of computer science, development of personal abilities,
better ability in solving problems and strategies selection. The program encourages computational thinking and
creative and intelligent use of information technology. In the Beaver program a team of computer science
teachers from middle and high school write the questions for the competitions. The participation in this program
can be also as an independent participant or as a member of a class.
The “Beaver” program is part of an international contest of informatics and computer fluency established by
Prof. Valentina Dagiene (http://www.bebras.org/en/welcome). The first Bebras contest was organized in
Lithuania in 2004. Today there are students from 17 countries participating and another 6 countries, within them
Israel, that are planning to participate. Last year we had two internal competitions with 800 participants all done
in Moodle platform (see Figure 7). The first competition was a week long and was held in different schools. The
second stage of the competition was at the Davidson Institute of Science Education. Next year we intent to
encourage the participants in this program by adding a competition between schools and by adding practicing
lessons within school classes supervised by computer –science teachers.
Figure 7: Beaver program
MOT-TEC
MOT-TEC includes an array of activities that combine higher-order skills with content in science and
technology to middle school, emphasizing learning and thinking skills such as asking questions and exploration.
The MOT-TEC environment has been developed together with teachers as an enhancement of face-to-face
teaching. The content of the units were chosen by a team of science teachers (content wh ich was difficult to
teach) and various activities were built in collaboration with them. The uniqueness of these environments is the
freedom of teachers who teach with them to add, change or use them as is, according to their needs.
Additionally, we developed and fitted tools according to the teachers' needs for use in MOT -TEC based on
Moodle. MOT-TEC consists of the following components:
Visuals that combine short films, simulations, animations, and educational games related to the selected
science topics.
Interactive learning activities that support attaining high -order thinking and learning skills combined with
scientific content.
Feedback facilities that enable automated response regarding closed questions as well as teacher's reactions
to open-ended tasks.
Learning management system options that facilitate assessment of learning through questionnaires,
statistics, and reports.
Flexibility for teachers: they can adapt the activities to their needs or the needs of their students and
according to class technological conditions.