The FOSS mini-courses are designed to fit into any of these time and space settings. The 60 teachers and coordinators from the national trial sites began the trials with a meeting at the Lawrence Hall of Science in July 1997. Sites are currently located in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. The FOSS Middle School Program listserver and periodic meetings at the NSTA regional and national conventions provide opportunities for communication between the extended development team and the FOSS development staff. The trial teachers are able to share classroom experiences, ask questions of the FOSS developers, and receive ongoing updates and new resources.
Teachers compare models of the Earth in the Round Earth, Flat Earth activity.
Some of the more interesting outcomes of the trials have been the extent to which the materials have supported and encouraged interdisciplinary teams. In Activity 3, Day and Night, students first work with models of the Earth and sun to determine the mechanics of day and night on Earth. This leads to the human construct of time zones, to the calculation of local noon, and to the difference in actual sunrise and sunset at the two edges of a given time zone. When the students used models to explore shadows at different locations on the globe, it was an opportunity for the social studies teacher to also deal with the concepts of latitude and longitude, reinforcing the simulations in the science classroom. Organizing the shadow data on a two-coordinate graph provided another opportunity for math integration.