The project's concept, its design, development, and operation was made possible by grants received from the European Commission, the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, the Arthur Goldsmith Foundation, the Olivestone Trust, La Cité des Sciences et de I'industrie, Paris, and the Treilles Foundation. It was a co-operative development process, involving numerous institutional and individual contributors from the three nations, coordinated and managed by IPSO, Al-Quds University (AQU), and La Cité des Sciences et de I'industrie, Paris (CSI). Other participants include the French La Main à la Pâte (LAMAP), the Israeli Centre for Educational Technology (CET), The Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem (BSMJ), and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI).
A full fledged website will be the first of its kind between Palestinians and Israelis. Its pilot phase had the following three main goals:
(a) To continue through Israeli-Palestinian co-operation, the development of Palestinian capacities in science education in general and more specifically, in curriculum design and in the development of learning materials, in this case web-based materials.
(b) To extend the Israeli-Palestinian cooperation to include European partners (the French La Cité des Sciences et de I'industrie and the French La Main à la Pâte (LAMAP).
(c) To experimentally jointly develop internet Learning Units that could be implemented and serve the three educational systems: the Palestinian the Israeli and even the French.
All three goals have been successfully achieved and IPSO is presently hoping to obtain funding that will enable the expansion of the Pilot to become the Multilingual and Multicultural Website for Science Education and Peace.
