How did The Shodor Education Foundation get its name? The website says it recalls the shodering process, a step in applying gold leaf that involves hammering the precious sheets to make them stretch as far as possible. The Foundation says its mission is similar – it wants to extend educational resources to everyone. Then why isn’t the site called “shoder?” Well, how about this: Dr. Robert Panoff, the founder, is fond of recalling the time when someone couldn’t remember the name of his new project, but did remember that “it’s run by that short dorky guy.” Sho-Dor. Hmmmm.

Shodor.org is 13 years old now, and it is one of the most successful digital education projects anywhere. Its Project Interactivate exercises in computational science have become standard classroom resources, and over 130,000 people visit the site each month to look around and to download free tools. It runs teacher education programs in a half-dozen states and overseas. Parts of the site were recently translated into Spanish. Its Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD) is one of NSDL’s most popular Pathways projects. Another effort shows teachers how to use the gestures of American Sign Language to express the concepts of computation. Teachers flock to Shodor because it is free, but also because its material is carefully focused on outcomes that go beyond math and computing. The site helps students develop a skill that Panoff calls “computational reasoning.”

Much of the project’s success is due to Panoff, now the executive director, who runs the place like a combination of educational organization and evangelical mission. Panoff took a huge personal risk to start Shodor, abandoning a career in theoretical physics, and he works like someone who is still worried about meeting the payroll. “He is always thinking about how to leverage CSERD and NSDL with different audiences,” says Eileen McIlvain of NSDL Core Integration. “He has an uncanny ability to take a seemingly simple opportunity and make it more than it appears at first glance.” He is also a first-rate speaker who knows how to use self-deprecating humor to get an audience on his side. But once he has you, he invariably hammers on you to join him in the urgent task of immediately teaching everyone, everywhere, the unlimited possibilities of using numbers to solve problems.

Shodor has acquired a long string of awards, and two that came along recently are particularly nice. This week the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences honored CSERD and Interactivate with Webby awards, the Internet’s version of an Oscar. And not long ago, the Education Program of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC-Education) began an annual Dr. Robert M. Panoff Student Award for Explorations in Science Through Computation. Three winners each year – a high school student, an undergraduate, and a graduate student — will be invited to present their research at the International Conference for High Performance Computing. They will also be offered paid summer internships at Shodor, where they will doubtless run into Bob Panoff and probably become converts when he says something like this: “The focus is not on the computer, but on what the computer can help one learn about the world.”