I have recommended the Assignment Calculator to many students, and am pleased that now I know about the Research Project Calculator. The main feature that both thrills and startles students is the timeline. "I should have done what? By when? But it's due tomorrow!"
And that's the unfortunate truth, that in the public libraries, we usually see people who have an assignment due the next day. It's exciting when someone comes in far in advance of their due date, because then we can lay all of our wonderful resources before them!
One nice feature of the Assignment Calculator for college students is the emphasis on asking and answering thesis questions. Though it's not a major shift, I ran into it for the first time in grad school and floundered a bit.
Most students do their online research at home -- or at least without ever consulting me or anyone I've sat next to! So if we want to offer handouts, it should be on the Teen Space page, the Homework page -- something online they can fill out online or print at the time they need it.
Two things I would like to see in the Research Project Calculator:
1. An acknowledgment and a way to handle and document that you might go through the first steps of the assignment many times, as you try out and discard topics, run into dead ends or just find you're bored, find out what you thought was a controversy isn't one anymore, or find some tantalizing new angle to pursue.
2. Also, some form of graphic organizer for search terms. Maybe this is more appropriate for the college level, but when you are searching through databases, some key words yield more info than others. Another key word might be useful in a different database.
It would be useful to make a page for each database, a place to note what search terms you used, the articles you found using that search term/combination, and the bibliographical data, including date.
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