Stardust Educational Partner:
Parents And Children as Co-Travelers in a World
of Ideas project (PACCT), has recently been selected by the SBC Foundation
and PARTNERS IN EDUCATION as the Grand Prize winner of the first SBC National
Telecommunications Partnership Awards.
PACCT lets families tackle hands-on
scientific problems and even create their own. By targeting state and
national education goals in the areas of math, science, and
technology skills, workplace readiness, and communication skills
PACCT has been become an over night success.
The primary goal of the program is to engage parents as active
partners in their children's education. After its pilot year in 1998
at the Buehler Challenger Center and Science Center in Paramus, New
Jersey, the program has since been adopted by 13 more Challenger
Centers nationwide. As PACCT enters its third year of dissemination,
an on-going stream of parent, student, and teacher feedback is
painting a vibrant picture of the educational impact of this project.
So what is the PACCT program really about? Here is one family's story
about the effect that it has had on their lives. Turned on during a
Stardust Discovery Mission, their sixth grade student created a
binder in which he and his mom are now tracking NASA's first cometary
sample return mission progress all the way to its landing in 2006.
The students mother shared in a letter to PACCT officials, "I had
forgotten how much science interests me personally...I asked (my son)
to imagine the adventure and the deep space secrets only he and a few
other people in the whole world will know about when he's in college."
PACCT is a Challenger Center Program developed and managed by
Ednovations, LLC. For further information, please contact
(973) 285-3444 or at http://www.challenger.org/pacct/index2.html.
