The mockup you'll soon see shows the new Science Buddies online environment called the Command Center. It contains an actual team dialog from last year's pilot program. The entire discussion for this team included 130 individual messages. This edited transcript contains 37 of those messages. These individuals participate in the discussion:

• Matt Nielsen (name changed) = Middle School Science Fair Participant
• Dave Button (name changed) = High School Mentor
• Alissa Fitzgerald = Adult Advisor
• Gina Han = Science Buddies Staff Member

Please take a moment to actually read through the transcript. It really gives you a good sense of how the program works on a personal level. You can see how our mentors provide guidance and encouragement to the middle school students and the positive effect of their support. Over the length of the transcript, you can see how relationships develop between the team members, you can see Matt's growing enthusiasm, his blossoming self-confidence, and the pride of his accomplishment as he interacts with his own personal mentors.

You will see that the current assignment, project schedule (look in the Assignment Folder), "how-to" information for each assignment, past assignments that have already been turned in, and the entire mentoring dialog are all at the team's fingertips.

There are several other things to note:

• The actual online environment is password protected.
• For ease of reading, the dialog sorts from top to bottom, the opposite of normal. The actual system puts the most recent message on top, and it would only show about 10 messages at a time.
• Generally, the links all work (please try them). But you can't enter and save information into any of the fields.

Click here to view the mockup: Science Buddies Command Center

The Command Center can and does display slightly different information to the various participants on each team. For example, when the middle school student completes an assignment, the Mentor is prompted to provide specific feedback for that step of the project. This is an example of the form the Mentor uses to evaluate an assignment: Mentor Evaluation Form for Variables & Hypothesis.