Tell her that I found her marbles," the clerk at the West Concord Five and Ten laughed over the telephone one afternoon.

It might have been the beginning of a crank call or a bad joke. But I understood about the marbles, and I needed plenty of them--enough to supply 600 teachers who would be doing a crater-making experiment from the book Craters! The Five and Ten not only sold us enough marbles to make any seven-year-old from the '50s dizzy, they repackaged the marbles for us into ziplock bags. On top of that, they gave us a price discount.

The generosity (and humor) of the West Concord Five and Ten is just one example of how local vendors, along with national corporations, provide supplies for our International Netcourse Teacher Enhancement Coalition (INTEC), funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

INTEC assembles materials from businesses as diverse as the Five and Ten and NASA in order to supply middle and high school math and science teachers with the materials they need to complete a two-semester graduate netcourse (a course provided online). All of the materials gathered--everything from marbles, hot cocoa, clay and cardboard to books, software and videos--the project provides to participants at no cost.

INTEC is all about bringing inquiry into the classroom--a learning process that uses student investigation and active questioning to build conceptual understanding beyond memorization.

We offer a unique hybrid model for a professional development netcourse. Much of the work is done online, through web pages and in discussion areas, but equally important are the local study group meetings. Here is where team members at a site, comprised of four or more teachers or administrators in the same school or building, meet on a regular basis to do a hands-on unit, like dropping marbles to simulate making surface craters.

We chose the National Science Teachers Association book Craters! (offered to us at a 25% discount) because it provides many inquiry experiences. Over the course of the year participants experience inquiry for themselves through the materials we assemble for their use.

Hot chocolate is another part of our project. We use it to simulate a planetary surface made of a white flour subsurface and a cocoa surface--a baker's dream, if not a viable habitat--and impacting it with marbles which act like falling bodies in our make-believe universe (see "Create a Crater" on page 13). When I explained the project to Crosby's Market in Concord they sold us 100 boxes of cocoa at a dollar a box. "Let's make the price an even number," I suggested. The manager agreed and threw in a 10% discount as a contribution.

NSF requires INTEC to partially support itself with in-kind contributions, so a discount on materials we use for the hands-on part of INTEC is welcome assistance. So is tracking down unusual materials.

Plasticene clay for an activity was supplied by a graphic arts company, Charrette, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Going from the unusual to the ordinary, a local printshop, Alphagraphics, gave us a significant price cut on cardboard, used in another activity involving modeling lunar craters.

INTEC introduces participants to inquiry instruction through an examination of their own classroom practice. What is inquiry? Is it important? If so, how important? Is it worth the classroom time? Can I use it all of the time, some of the time? These are just some of the questions we probe at the outset of the course and continue to examine through an introduction and five topics. Participants work through an introduction to the Web and use an online discussion area where they introduce themselves to their colleagues, who might be in the next classroom or the next country. (We have participants from the U.S. and Canada. Our first cohort had members from Australia.) Online participation is augmented by local study group meetings. Each step of the way, INTEC provides materials that are meant to help the participants experience and understand inquiry.

In the first topic, "Pedagogy in Support of Inquiry," participants gain a conceptual understanding of the importance of inquiry instruction. The Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Project offered us a 10% discount on the videotape "Private Universe" to use for the course. Participants watch teachers like themselves and their students in the film, which leads to a discussion of inquiry instruction. Teachers also use conceptual probes on the Web and ask their students to use them as well. Questions like "Where does the mass of this log come from?" examine conceptual understanding and misunderstanding.

The second topic, "Personal Experience of Inquiry," brings inquiry into teachers' hands and teachers themselves literally onto their knees as they measure the diameter of a crater formed by a marble dropped onto hot chocolate. Based on the cratering activities, inquiry discussion threads grow long as diverse expressions of inquiry instruction are interwoven throughout. In this topic, participants also view the videotape "Geometric Supposer" from Sunburst Communications, Inc. Sunburst gave us permission to make copies of the video, which American Video in Concord did for us at a whopping discount.

Participants then use a "Tool to Support Inquiry," one of 11 inquiry-based math and science tools. Some of the tools, such as GenScope, Hands On Physics, and Global Lab are themselves a product of other NSF-funded projects. Mars Exploration comes from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Environmental Decision Making was offered free of charge to INTEC participants from the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium. Many of the commercially available products are also sold at sizable discount to us. Using these tools, teachers are guided through inquiry activities.

In the "Content Support for Inquiry" unit, teachers design inquiry activities of their own and prepare to use the new tool with their students during the practicum.

So, if you've lost your marbles and you're a middle or high school math or science teacher registered for INTEC this fall, expect them in the mail, along with hot chocolate, cardboard, clay, books, videotapes, and more. Otherwise, you might check with the West Concord Five and Ten--they're quite good at locating marbles.

Cynthia McIntyre is the Project Coordinator for INTEC. Organizations large and small have made significant in-kind contributions to the project. If you are interested in making a contribution to INTEC or another project of The Concord Consortium, please contact us at info@concord.org.

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