Vents spout hot water from the ocean floor and support unique organisms and ecosystems.
Students can get a full tutorial about deep-sea vents and related ecological issues, or they can pick out specific information and use it as a reference for their science projects. Science teachers from the San Diego area spent three weeks of their summers at SDSC acquiring computational knowledge that they have shared with students and fellow teachers. This year, the program covered World Wide Web topics such as frames, tables, clickable forms, computer modeling, and updates to HTML 3.2 and JavaScript programming languages. Now, the same people are managing networks at their schools, making Web browser based teaching lessons, and conducting workshops for other teachers. The STEP teachers have been active and enthusiastic, many spending lecture breaks at computers in SDSC's training room to test their newly learned techniques on their school home pages and other Web sites.