This paper describes a strategy that was developed to help elementary school students to become more interested, involved, and accepted in school. The strategy involved a pen pal project in which students wrote to other students at an elementary school who were in other classes and at different grade levels. The idea was presented as a fun…

The general nature of collaborative work among peers in classrooms is discussed. This framework is applied to the interpretation of a 2-year study which examined how pairs of children in two classrooms (8- and 9-year-olds; 11- and 12-year-olds) worked together to solve computer programming problems in the LOGO language. It was found that students…