BSA Announces PlantingScience Program Chosen for Finals in National Digital Learning Competition

Feb. 22, 2012 - PRLog -- Botanical Society of America (BSA), the non-profit organization promoting botany and plant science through research, publications, educational support and outreach, and conferences, today announced that PlantingScience, the online science education program fostering student research through scientific inquiry and online mentorship, was chosen to participate in the final phase of the $2 million Digital Media and Learning Competition. The national competition is funded by the The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), and Mozilla.

“Our online PlantingScience program was launched just six years ago, and now, in collaboration with our 14 scientific society partnerships, we’ve reached over 11,000 middle and high school science students and their teachers,” comments Dr. Claire Hemingway, Education Director of the Botanical Society of America. “We are truly honored to be chosen to compete in the finals. On behalf of all of our PlantingScience partners, we look forward to developing an meaningful badge system that rewards students’ engagement in scientific practices and demonstrates their achievements in science learning.”

The fourth Digital Media and Learning Competition is an open, national competition for organizations with leading STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education programs, learning and assessment specialists, designers, and technologists. The competition is part of MacArthur's digital media and learning initiative designed to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.

Leading organizations exploring the potential of badges for their own work and programs include NASA, the U.S. Departments of Education, Labor, Energy, and Veterans Affairs, Intel, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Association of Manufacturers, Microsoft, and many others. Winning badge systems will be selected from those presented at the Finals to an expert panel of judges and will be announced on March 1, 2012, at the Digital Media and Learning Conference.

About PlantingScience
PlantingScience is a partnership of 14 Scientific Societies and led by the Botanical Society of America. The Science magazine award-winning program was developed to help improve science literacy by supporting inquiry-based STEM education. PlantingScience actively supports teachers to engage their students in the scientific process by connecting practicing scientist mentors with small teams of students for student-led and student-developed research projects spanning a 3-10+ week period. The program is run at no cost for teachers/schools. PlantingScience has served thousands students and their teachers, and has over 900 scientist mentors volunteering in the program.

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Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, the Botanical Society of America (BSA) is the
501(c)(3) non-profit organization that publishes the renowned American Journal of Botany,named one of the Top 10 most influential journals over the last 100 years in the field of biology & medicine. The BSA is one of the world's largest scientific societies devoted to the study of botany with over 3400 members from 80 countries committed to the study of plants and allied organisms. The BSA functions as the umbrella organization covering all specialties; plant biology, including development, physiology, reproductive biology, evolution, phycology, genetics, mycology, ecology, systematics, molecular biology, and paleobotany.