JAIMS Coordinates StarFestival Pilot Test in Hawaii

HONOLULU—More than 40 teachers from public and private schools throughout Hawaii participated in a two-day workshop at JAIMS on a multimedia curriculum being developed under Shigeru Miyagawa, a linguistics and Japanese professor at MIT.

Patterned after Miyagawa's own search for identity in Japan, StarFestival is a K-12 multimedia social studies curriculum with two overarching themes: cultural/racial identity and modern Japan. The heart of the curriculum is the award-winning CD-ROM, StarFestival...a Return to Japan, which tells the story of a young Japanese boy who comes to the U.S. when he is 10, then returns 30 years later to his homeland to find his roots.

While the CD-ROM is already available, the StarFestival curriculum is still undergoing testing as an MIT research project. K-12 teachers who teach social studies, language arts, history and related subjects are currently pilot testing the curriculum. JAIMS is serving as the host facility for the training and is helping Miyagawa with the coordination of the the pilot test in Hawaii.

Hawaii teachers at the workshop on January 21-22 were given an overview of the project and a hands-on session in lesson planning working in teams. They also had an opportunity to meet with two teachers from Boston—Deborah Washington, senior program director of social studies at Boston Public Schools, and Maria D'Itria, fifth-grade teacher at Harvard Kent School, who has taught with StarFestival for the past three years.

The StarFestival CD-ROM was awarded "Best of Show" at the 1997 MacWorld Exposition. An extensive StarFestival Curriculum based on the Learning Standards of the National Council of Social Studies is being developed for MIT by The Children's Museum of Boston.

For further information, including system requirements for the CD-ROM, please go to: www.starfestival.com. This website also contains Tanabata, an online guide for the study of the completely natural and spontaneous language in the CD-ROM.

Shigeru Miyagawa
StarFestival's executive producer, Dr. Miyagawa, who is facilitating the workshop, is also a guest lecturer for the Japan-focused MBA program. At MIT he currently holds the Chair, Kochi-Prefecture John Manjiro Professor of Japanese, which is intended to support application of technology to education. In 1995 he was awarded the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education. Miyagawa is also the executive director of JP NET, an online service for Japanese language and culture specialists (web.mit.edu/jpnet).

Miyagawa's research on educational technology has been supported by the National Endowment for Humanities, U.S. Department of Education, Nippon Foundation, and Canon, among others. One of the Japanese culture courses that he teaches, "Japan in Real Time," is designed around the StarFestival CD-ROM. His book on linguistics, Structure and Case Marking in Japanese, is a standard textbook for graduate courses in Japanese linguistics worldwide.