Application development for informal learning environments: Where IT education, community outreach, baseball and history intersect

A collaborative software development project that brings together elementary school children, college students and museum curators is described. Museum visitors discover the history of the Negro Leagues and gain an understanding of baseball's role in the struggle for social justice. The paper describes the development processes of the application's major components and discusses the benefits and challenges of inter-institutional collaboration and learning activities that occur outside of brick and mortar schools. We discuss how this collaboration model can be used to complement informal learning techniques. We describe how this project provides rich opportunities for presenting diverse student cohorts with novel ways of incorporating information technologies and multimedia design into a learning environment that extends the classroom into the community. Through the description of using a collaborative design model for the development of tools for use in informal learning environments, we suggest that the science of learning be considered a research area for Information Technology Education.