Through this project, a team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Massachusetts-Boston is organizing the January 2012 LNC, in close collaboration with MSP program staff and a national planning committee consisting of members of various projects representing the wide variety of projects in the MSP program.

The project has two primary outcomes. First, it is designing and organizing the LNC. During the seven months leading up to the conference, the project team is bringing together members of a national planning committee and facilitating the committee's development of the conference theme and strands, orchestrating the conference paper abstract submission and peer review process, and developing traditional and creative, interactive activities to occur during the conference to achieve the conference goals. Second, the project is providing technical assistance to a subset of the papers being presented at the LNC, with the goal of readying these for publication in national STEM journals. During a pre-conference session, the organizing committee is helping the authors organize their papers around common themes for submission to special issues of mathematics and science education journals; papers not fitting a common theme are being encouraged to pursue other STEM education journals or peer-reviewed conference venues for publication.