DURHAM -- U.S. Rep. David Price (D-4th) and the Shodor Education Foundation today announced a $450,000 grant to help teach computational science and technology to children with hearing impairments. With this National Science Foundation grant, Shodor will develop technical sign language, teaching materials, and activities that make computational science accessible to hearing-impaired students.

"The Shodor Foundation is a leader in our community in developing and implementing effective uses of technology in education at all levels," said Rep. Price, a lifelong educator. "They are using their expertise to make sure children with hearing impairments participate fully in the digital era. This NSF grant gives all children an opportunity to benefit from these technologies."

Project SUCCEED-HI (Stimulating Understanding of Computational science through Collaboration, Exploration, Experiment and Discovery for students with Hearing Impairments) builds on Shodor's SUCCEED program, which introduces middle- and high-school students to technologies, techniques, and tools of computational science in Durham. SUCCEED-HI will develop appropriate curriculum materials for hearing-impaired students and their teachers, including the development of signs for the very complex technical vocabulary found in the high-performance computing field (signs, for example, for terms like "supercomputing" and "scientific visualization").

Robert Gotwals, the director of SUCCEED-HI who has extensive experience teaching and developing materials for students with hearing-impairments, said, "There is a critical need for scientists who understand the importance of computing, and students with hearing-impairments need to have opportunities to become scientists. We want them to become scientists who know how to compute."

Shodor is working with many partners, including the School of Education at UNC-Greensboro, a local interpreter agency (Interpreters, Inc.), the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, NY, the Central North Carolina School for the Deaf in Greensboro, and other residential and public schools.

Shodor is a non-profit 501(c)(3) education and research corporation dedicated to the reform and improvement of mathematics and science education by the incorporation of appropriate computational and communication technologies. They offer workshops and internships to local students on general modeling, Internet Science, math explorations, medicine, forensic science, astrophysics, environmental science, scientific computing, and computational chemistry.

Contact: The Shodor Education Foundation, 923 Broad Street, Suite 100, Durham NC 27705, (919) 286-1911 (Voice/TDD), 286-7876 (Fax)