AlgebraLAB

AlgebraLAB was started in 2003 with Mainland's first of two successive EETT (Enhancing Education Through Technology) grants. After recuiting the web's authors and programmers, time was spent outlining the major standards the group wanted to address as well as organizing the inter-relationships between the site's topics, skills, and standards databases. The group also decided on the first document types: lessons (written by Georgia Southern professors), practice pages, study aids (recipe pages for Algebra I and Algebra II), and hands-on activities to bring experimentation in to the math classrooms. Moreover, the technology infrastructure in Mainland's math classrooms had to be completely revamped and equipment (computers, ethernet, probeware, calculators, overhead cameras, and projectors) purchased and put in place. Through that summer Mainland's teachers attended three, week-long Think Tanks where they developed curriculum on "blank legal pads." They were not allowed to reference texts or any other forms of curricular content. Everything was developed based on teacher expertise and experience.

Concurrently that summer Mainland students assisted with transcribing the handwritten teacher pages onto XML templates and creating any necessary illustrations. The rooms in the Academy of Communications and Multimedia Design (ACMT) were buzzing with collaborative activity. Programmers were busy almost 18 hours a day designing layouts and coding the site.

With the start of the school year, more meetings were held with the professors from Georgia Southern, teachers, and students after school to keep with classroom needs. The curriculum exploded! With that first year's success, Mainland received a second EETT grant in 2004 to expand AlgebraLAB to include reading passages (based on the ISTF model of research), reading comprehension questions, an online mathematics dictionary, science graphs, solving word problems, and online quizzes. The summer of 2004 once again had three Think Tanks filling the halls of the ACMT with the original cadre plus the addition of reading teachers, biology teachers, chemistry teachers, and researchers. With the start of the next school year language arts, biology, and chemistry teachers were using AlgebraLAB in their classrooms.

Personnel pivotal to the development of AlgebraLAB are listed on the web's About Us page. Many of these phenomenal people have now changed schools, completed college, moved on to other professional positions, or retired. But everyone was at the right place at the right time to create this wonderful website and instructional tool.

Now in 2015, after 13 years of being online, AlgebraLAB has become an integral component in the curriculum of innumerable instructors at the elementary, secondary, and collegiate levels as well as parents, and students. In the state of Florida, AlgebraLAB's curriculum has been been reviewed and approved with links to specific pages (for example) meeting required mathematics standards and benchmarks. Nationally, resources in AlgebraLAB have also been linked in CCSS Math as examples for covering the Common Core Mathematics Standards. Moreover, AlgebraLAB has received recommendations from Educational Freeware, Drexel University's Math Forum, and The Physics Front.

It is our pleasure to provide continuing access to this site.