Benefits of DREI '96

Brother Donald C. Dimitroff (dimitroff@LOYOLA.EDU)
Tue, 25 Mar 1997 11:56:39 -0500


The benefits of DREI '96 are enormous and I cannot even begin to state
the importance of this program to me. Below is a brief outline of the
effects of DREI '96. I hope to elaborate on this in more detail in the
future.

1) Aided to students to advance in the ThinkQuest Internet Contest.
They had to create an educational web page. I basically did not know
anything about creating web pages. So everything I learned last summer
was immediately used by my students. More than 3000 teams entered that
contest nationwide, and about 300 teams made the "semi-finals". I am
very proud of what my students did. Their work can be seen at the
following url:
http://tqd.advanced.org/2861

2) I was responsible for building the schedule at my school. I went to
my principal and asked her if I could try something special during the
school year. Since we are a private Catholic school, changing the
school and trying new things is very easy to do. Sister John Francis is
very good at delegating authority -- she will let the teachers
experiment, but we also have to produce results. Anyway, every
Thursday, two sections of pre-calculus and one section of calculus meet
in the same room (40 students, 3 teachers) for "Discrete Mathematics"
classes. I have used many of the ideas developed this past summer
(Voronoi diagrams, Art Gallery, etc.) and created lessons for the
students. This has been a very successful program from my point of
view. I will provide documentation in the future which confirms this.

Bro. Don Dimitroff