About this Project

The Kids' Corner project was created by the Houghton Forestry Sciences Laboratory, a Research Work Unit of the USDA Forest Service's Northern Research Station.

Primary content development was done collaboratively by Christian Giardina and Jennifer Sheppard with assistance from Erik Lilleskov, Alex Friend, Wendy Loya, Kurt Pregitzer, Ruth Gleckler, and Bob Wareham.

Site design, which has gone through numerous iterations, was done by Jennifer Sheppard. Many thanks go Joan Schumaker Chadde, Education Program Coordinator at the Western Upper Peninsula Center for Science, Mathematics & Environmental Education, Deb Lane at Houghton Middle School, Mike Hainault, and Jean Dunstan at E.B. Holman School and all of their students who enthusiastically tested and offered feedback on earlier versions of the site. Thanks too to Nancy Grimm, Diana George, and Bob Johnson for their guidance and many insightful suggestions.

In addition to working with the Forest Service and those individuals mentioned above, this project also received important help from the Michigan Technological University Department of Humanities and the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science who is hosting this site.

Finally, this project is also the subject of my PhD dissertation, Composing in Multiple Dimensions: Understanding New Media Development Processes, in Rhetoric and Technical Communication. In it, I examine the practices necessary to communicate technical, scientific knowledge to a young, lay audience using multimedia. If you have questions about this dissertation or the web project, you can contact me at jasheppa@mtu.edu