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UC-WISE project historyThe UC-WISE project grew out of education-oriented work under the CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interests of Society) umbrella. In June 2001, a group of faculty, technical staff, graduate and undergraduate students met in a two-day retreat to brainstorm design and functionality issues. The group included educational researchers, computer science instructors, and technology specialists. From that meeting emerged a system plan that leveraged the strengths of information technology and current research in education, emphasizing project-based inquiry and hands-on programming experience over lecture, employing a variety of collaborative activities, and enabling instructors to interact with students in more of a tutorial style. In the subsequent year, supported by the CITRIS project, a small leadership team and a group of undergraduate student programmers, mostly volunteers working for course credit, designed and implemented a working system. The design included four major software components: a data base of annotated learning objects; the Course Builder, through which objects are entered into the data base; the Student Portal, which serves as a conventional learning management system; and the Curriculum Customizer, which enables remote instructors to adopt and adapt UC-WISE activities for their own courses. Simultaneously, a few experienced teachers assembled a curriculum for CS 3. The Course Builder, the Student Portal, and the curriculum were all ready for a pilot test of the lab-based CS 3 in summer 2002. This course was a big success (our experience is described here). Subsequent milestones included the following:
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