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Room 307. There's an audible hum in Malcolm Thompson's classroom, known at Dalton as the ``AstroCave.'' Seven computers are in use, each surrounded by a clutch of students murmuring in continual discussion of their work. The place is littered with 13 1/2-in. square Palomar plates -- grayish films, sprinkled with dark points of light representing stars and nebulae that were recorded by the 48-in. telescope at California's Palomar Observatory. Each student has chosen three stars and has been asked to calculate their brightness and temperature based on what the pupils see on the plates and can glean from a computer program called Voyager. Unlike Archaeotype, Voyager is an off-the- shelf program, but it is a tool of awesome power, simulating a view of the heavens from any point on earth, at any time, past or present. Thompson's course has always been popular, but in recent years it has achieved an almost cultlike status at the school. Though a vivid lecturer and the co-author of what was for years the country's top-selling astronomy textbook, Thompson has traded the chalk-and-talk approach for a task-oriented mode of teaching, using Voyager. His students do not ``study'' astronomy; they become astronomers. From September through June, they complete a series of tasks, using computer-based tools like the ones astronomers use. Each task builds on the ones before it, so calculations made in October may provide an essential tool for November's assignment. Thompson's students admit they often begin hopelessly lost until, by dint of their own collaborative labors and their teacher's counsel, they find their way. ``It's the biggest satisfaction,'' says Simon Heffner, a senior. ``You don't realize you understand it and then it hits you!'' In the end, adds Thompson, ``they have knowledge that they can deploy, as opposed to just passing a test.'' It is no coincidence that Dalton began its plunge into technology with the Archaeotype program. Excavation is an apt metaphor for the kind of ``constructivist learning'' promoted at the school: students must actively dig up information, then construct their own understanding from raw, observable facts. What the technology does is extend experience so that many more observations are possible. ``It shifts education from adults giving answers to students seeking answers,'' says headmaster Gardner Dunnan. The underlying premise: we all understand and remember what we have discovered for ourselves far better than what we have merely been told. Still, the guiding hand of the teacher is a vital element in the process. ``You can't just give kids powerful computers and powerful information and set them loose. The teacher must create a compelling set of educational questions,'' says associate headmaster Frank Moretti, who heads Dalton's technology group, the New Laboratory for Teaching and Learning. The effectiveness of Dalton's program has been closely observed by outside experts. The school hired John Black of Columbia's Teachers College to conduct a study comparing the analytic skills of Archaeotype students with sixth-graders at a similarly elite private school. ``Kids at Dalton were twice as good at devising an explanation of data and defending it,'' says Black. ``I've never seen such a big difference in an educational study.'' On the other hand, the new teaching methods mean sacrificing some breadth for depth. Sixth-grade history, for instance, no longer covers the Middle Ages or Rome, since so