Education's brave new world: it all started with a simple idea: having students train teachers in technology would benefit both groups. (Cover Story).(Generation YES program)

Emily, a seventh-grader at Abilene Middle School in Kansas, created a slide show about Middle Town, a fictitious town where children act like `real-world' adults paying bills and buying food. She then tested those children to see what they learned.

Jenny, a high school student in Jacksonville, Ala., created a slide show of facts and clip art describing the origins and effects of "Computer Viruses: The Enemy Within."

Another student at Sunapee Middle High School in New Hampshire used digital photographs and a PowerPoint slide presentation to document a physics lab on Boyle's Law, which proves that an increase in gas pressure decreases the volume, and vice versa.

These three projects are only a taste of Generation YES, (Youth and Educators Succeeding), a program created by Dennis Harper, a former educator of 35 years who believed a decade ago that school reform was needed. His idea was that having students train teachers in technology would benefit both groups.

The philosophy was based in part on the idea that many hours of professional development for teachers often go unused because there is too little time to integrate everything during class time, Harper says. And Harper adds "schools won't reform unless children are involved."

"The way we use technology and infuse technology in the curriculum has to be improved," says Harper, who has brought computers to schools in 34 nations worldwide. "The promise of technology to improve student learning has never been fully realized."

So Harper, who returned to the U.S. in 1992, set out to create a program to change all that.

"It's a program that trains students to train teachers," says Harper, director of the Generation www.Y model. "Instead of training teachers in technology skills, we train kids with technology skills ... And we train kids how to work with teachers."

Generation Y delivers professional development to teachers while it provides fourth- through 12th-graders, who can take the program as an elective or extra-curricular activity, with opportunities to lead their schools and communities by creating updated, technology-enriched lesson plans.

The pilot project began in 1994 in Olympia, Wash., where Harper was the technology coordinator. Last year, Generation Y received an Exemplary Program award from the U.S. Department of Education, one of two programs so recognized by the Educational Technology Expert Panel on Exemplary and Promising Educational Technology Programs. And Generation Y graduates receive memberships to the International Society for Technology in Education.

In 1996, the program was funded with a five-year U.S. Dept. of Education Technology…