The Blackout Syndrome: More Info About This Mystery

About The Blackout Syndrome

Someone notices something not quite right. A specialist is called in. After days of staring at disconnected facts and chasing red herrings into dead ends, suddenly two facts click together, then three, then four. A pattern emerges. What started as a hunch progresses to a dead certainty and eventually it's proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Sound like a detective story? It could be. But it also describes an archaeological discovery, a new math theorem, or the development of a promising new antivirus drug.

It is Access Excellence's belief that a well-written mystery, with its intriguing characters, puzzles of logic and leaps of intuition, is a natural way to teach science. We hope that this fictional online story will help biology students around the world to get inspired by the real mysteries awaiting them beyond the classroom.

Finding Your Way Around

Whenever you go to an info page, use the 'BACK' button on your Web browser to return to the story.
The website is divided into these sections:

The Blackout Syndrome: The Access Excellence science mystery. If you get lost, use this link to go to the main page.

More Info: This page; a guide to The Blackout Syndrome.

Contest and Winners. Access Excellence originally presented this science mystery as an on-line serial contest, with a new chapter released to the Web each week. Hundreds of schools across the nation competed to solve the mystery. You can find the winning answers listed at the end of each Episode.

Links: Includes links to websites of interest to participants in The Blackout Syndrome

About Access Excellence

Access Excellence is a national science education program that provides high school biology and life sciences teachers access to their colleagues, scientists, and critical sources of new scientific information via the World Wide Web.

About Genentech

Genentech, Inc. is a leading biotechnology company that discovers, develops, manufactures and markets human pharmaceuticals for significant unmet medical needs. The company has headquarters in South San Francisco, California, and is traded on the New York and Pacific Stock Exchanges under the symbol GNE.

About Newfront

Newfront Communications, based in San Francisco, is the developer and producer of MysteryNet (http://www.mysterynet.com), "The fun and challeng ing mystery website". Along with being the producer of MysteryNet, Newfront provides a range of services including the development and licensing of online mysteries. Newfront developed and produced The Blackout Syndrome for Access Excellence.

Newfront can be reached at: newfront@newfront.com

About The Project Team

Writer:
Ken Eklund, writerguy, has been writing scripts and stories for interactive media since 1988. He has contributed writing and direction to over a dozen published electronic works, including the CD-ROM games Eagle Eye Mysteries, its sequel Eagle Eye Mysteries In London, and Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Harbinger. His office is in San Jose, California.

Illustrator:
Candace Lourdes is an accomplished illustrator specializing in editorial and advertising projects. Her computer-generated art has appeared in Newsweek, Cottage Life, Globe & Mail, the Toronto Star, and increasingly on the Internet. Her office is located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Project Coordinator:
Kim Obbink works with Access Excellence on a variety of projects related to distance learning. She has developed numerous national distance learning programs delivered via the Internet. Kim is the Co-Director of www.scienceteacher.org, a National Teachers Enhancement Network project at Montana State University.

Questions? Email aeinfo@accessexcellence.org.

An Access Excellence Science Mystery sponsored by Genentech, Inc.

The Blackout Syndrome was written by Ken Eklund, illustrated by Candace Lourdes, and produced by Newfront Communications.