The Connect to Science Collaborative is designed to allow our student participants to have firsthand access to real scientists, researchers, doctors, and engineers. Students can directly ask questions of our practitioner participants through this collaboration. And from time to time, as their busy schedules permit, these real world scientists, researchers, doctors, and engineers will log in and answer our students' questions. They may even post about their day-to-day, life-in-their-field-of-expertise challenges, routines, accomplishments, or issues.
Student participants, and anyone else in the world who wishes to follow the collaborative, will want to subscribe to this project's RSS feed. (For more information, click on the link, "Subscribe to this project's feed" at the bottom of the sidebar on the right.) In this way students can monitor the project without having to visit it every day. When new questions or answers to questions are posted, the RSS will notify the student. More information on setting up an RSS Aggregator are available at this link.
So How Does This Work for Mabry Student Participants?
Students who wish to participate must contact one of the teacher's sponsoring the project and give the teacher the Parent Permission to Participate form. General participation guidelines are available at this link. The teacher sponsors are listed below. Once approved, the teacher assigns approved student authors a UserID and a Password and gives them the URL to be used for logging in. Students may then submit their carefully thought-out and well-written questions by logging in to the collaborative using the information provided to them.
All questions submitted by approved student authors are reviewed by the teachers supervising the project. If a given question is considered appropriate, well-crafted, and significant, the question is then posted to the collaborative by the teachers. From time to time the participating scientists, researchers, doctors, and engineers will log in and answer the questions.
All questions and answers may also receive comments from anyone in the world. Only comments that fall within the purpose of the project will be considered for publication by the teachers working with the project.
So How Does This Work for Non-Mabry Student Participants?
Students who do not attend Mabry Middle School are also welcomed to participate until the project is closed for participation. Students who attend other schools must have a certified educator from their school agree to help sponsor the project. The guidelines for non-Mabry student participation are available at this link. General participation guidelines are available at this link.
Teacher Sponsors for the Connect2Science Collaborative
This project is presently sponsored by two of our 7th grade Life Sciences teachers: Mrs. Kulkarni, and Ms. Larkin. To contact either collaborative sponsor, just click on their name.
We have some excellent writers at Mabry Middle School. The purpose of The Shift Key is to provide an international distribution system for some of our most skilled fictional work. My hope is that one of tomorrow's great authors will first be published here! The contact for publication in The Shift Key is 
This extraordinary project, which began in 2004, is an ongoing collaboration among the 7th grade Life Sciences teachers, the Mabry Science Club, the Rivers Alive Watershed Clean-up and Educational group, the Cobb County Adopt-a-Stream program, the Cobb County Parks and Recreation Service, and the Keep Cobb Beautiful organization. The project received an $11,000 grant in 2004. Their work has been recognized with the first place award in the Youth Environmental Symposium, sponsored by the Georgia Conservancy.
