My RET I research was done in the Electrical and Computer Engineering lab. I worked with Milan Masanovic on a project involving an optically tunable wavelength converter. This subject was really, really hard for me to understand, much less enjoy at first. I soon realized that what Milan had really designed was this little circuit that decoded and encoded messages from telephones and other telecommunication devices. There was this really steep learning curve and once I discovered a way to be interested in optically tunable wavelength converters the rest of the project was fun. I did research on my own on how information is encoded into 1?s and 0?s, looked up telecommunication systems history and put it all together in a PowerPoint presentation for my RET I group. I want my students to have fun learning. My independent research was exciting for me and helped me simplify the highly technical information I was hearing from my mentor. My idea for RET II is to develop curriculum that has an independent research and writing component that is tied to a laboratory exercise that we?ve done in class. I?ve chosen eleven labs that are directly correlated to the California standards for Chemistry and added a writing component to them. The idea behind this curriculum could be used in any lab class. For instance, in a physics class a teacher could take a lab they already use and assign a similar writing component. The end result of this project is a Quarterly Newsletter (it could even have a science geek title, i.e. MoleTimes) in which every student has something published.