This cooperative agreement will support the Tech Museum of Innovation (The Tech) in San Jose, California in acquiring SOS-related hardware and software, as well as providing the technical support to facilitate the installation of SOS in The Tech's Exploration Gallery in 2005-2006. Science On a Sphere will be the focal point of The Tech Museum's newly renovated Explorations gallery. The dramatic sphere will draw visitors to the center of the 8,000 square-foot space. Hands-on experiences around the sphere will engage visitors in meaningful explorations of NOAA data. The Tech Museum will apply its exhibit and program development expertise to make SOS accessible to people of all ages, backgrounds, and educational levels. All panel text, audio, and captions will be presented in both English and Spanish to allow greater accessibility for local audiences. The Tech's SOS system will focus on three topics of great interest to Californians: Earthquakes, Ocean, Space. NOAA data will enable us to showcase the technology that is used to measure, monitor, and track environmental changes in our world. We hope to further address the potential of data modeling to aid in predicting the future state of the environment based on our actions. The Tech is also opening a new environment exhibition, Green By Design (GBD) in 2006. This exhibit focuses on how sustainable design and technological innovation offer potential solutions to many of our global environmental challenges. SOS will provide a compelling centerpiece to support the educational purpose of this gallery as it effectively illustrates how data collected with remote sensing technologies are helping us understand and make predictions about our dynamic environment and the future of our planet. SOS will illustrate how these data collecting technologies assist us in developing our knowledge about our planet and its solar system.
Science On a Sphere (SOS) at Fiske Planetarium will raise awareness and understanding of Earth system science for over 30,000 visitors per year, using student docents and newly-developed, tested pedagogy. SOS will enhance Fiske's ability to engage 3,000 university students and 30,000 K-12 students and members of the public. A student docent program will transform the traditionally passive experience of a planetarium visit into an interactive learning opportunity. The docents will be drawn from two sources: undergraduates who will be future science teachers, who we take from a selective CU program called "STEM-TP", and Hispanic university and high school students taught by Fiske's planetarium manager Francisco Salas. Docents will talk with visitors and help them understand key science issues that affect the earth, leading to more informed decision-making. Fiske will develop bilingual pedagogical material and new data sets, and share them with NOAA and SOS sites. To support the docents, and visiting students and teachers, Fiske Education Manager Traub-Metlay will lead development of explanatory materials that challenge visitors and provide context for what they are seeing. These will be translated into Spanish by Fiske Manager Salas. New data sets, contributed by faculty members, will expand the range of SOS, into space, adding solar interior models, the celestial sphere, and the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang, along with new terrestrial data such as the worldwide distribution of forest fires. SOS will become a focal point in Fiske's longstanding tradition of teacher workshops, which are often done in cooperation with the University of Colorado and NOAA scientists and highlight NOAA s role monitoring the earth and sun. It also will be integrated with a small suite of hands-on exhibits we are installing that explain how observations can be made in infrared, ultraviolet, and X-rays in addition to visible light. These would complement SOS, which features multi-wavelength data. Fiske and its Boulder Colorado-area partners have raised $75,000 to cover the full cost of SOS hardware, and have formal institutional commitments to long-term program development. This award from NOAA will go into materials development, evaluation, and student pay. Colorado communities are aware of NOAA s important work and the nearby David SkaggsCenter , but security measures make it difficult to visit there. Fiske is much more accessible. Fiske will improve the usefulness of all SOS sites by conducting formative evaluation to assess what kinds of SOS presentations work best with public and school audiences, giving feedback to NOAA and all SOS users.
The Bishop Museum is installing new Science On a Sphere (SOS) projectors and computers in advance of the 2010 Association of Science Technology Centers (ASTC) conference in Honolulu, HI. The state of the art hardware will allow the Bishop Museum and Lawrence Hall of Science to showcase NOAA-funded programming for the museum community during the conference. The project also seeks to build network capacity by creating and maintaining a database on SOS sites' hardware within the existing NOAA yahoo usergroup forum and through conference participation. Project evaluation efforts will focus on the aesthetics of SOS imagery pre and post installation and whether or not it significantly impacts the visitor experience.
This project works to: (1) Continue to develop software that allows a docent to easily control Science on a Sphere from a small touchpad computer while interacting with visitors. (2) Continue to develop software that allows easy "drag and drop" construction of playlists. (3) Put kiosk control of the sphere, already developed as a student project, into a real kiosk. (4) Assess the use of wireless response devices or "clickers" to enhance audience interaction, learning, and enjoyment, and gather information from visitor responses and share all these improvements with the network. (5) Improve the resolution of the 4 projectors of our SOS installation, in anticipation of new data on the moon and Mars coming to our university, which has been selected to lead NASA moon and Mars missions, and add flat screen TVs for the presentation of auxiliary data.
"Black Sun" is a full-length documentary film focusing on the life and research of two African American solar astrophysicists: Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi of the Florida Institute of Technology and Dr. Alphonse Sterling of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. Black Sun depicts underrepresented minority scientists in ways that challenge common preconceptions, and will inspire young people (particularly minorities) to consider STEM fields as a viable and exciting career option. In particular, the film shows the lives of the scientists, the scientists taking scientific observations and doing analysis, and discussing their results. Black Sun is centered on the two solar eclipses this year (2012): The May 20 annular eclipse and the November 13-14 total eclipse. This NSF RAPID grant funds the filming of the total solar eclipse in Cairns, Australia, where Drs. Sterling and Oluseyi and their team of students will conduct measurements focused on studying the extended solar atmospheric plasma.
The primary broader impacts goal is to increase minority participation in STEM fields. Black Sun will be "advancing discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training and learning," by showing both the science and the personal aspects of minority astrophysicists. Dissemination will be done via screenings in academic settings (particularly minority-serving institutes), entry into film festivals, and promotion to science TV programs. We have already partnered with several HBCUs to screen "Black Sun".
Informal learning opportunities are increasingly being recognized as important for youth participation in authentic experiences at the intersection of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) (Dorsen, Carlson, and Goodyear 2006). These experiences may involve specialized equipment and dedicated time for learners to gain familiarity with the relevant scientific and engineering practices (i.e., designing experiments on their own, struggling to make sense of data, learning from their own mistakes and the results of peers), which often go beyond the classroom. However, the educators who
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kathryn WilliamsonSue Ann HeatherlyVivian HoetteEva Erdosne TothDavid Beer
This award supports the production of a longitudinal video documentary of the evolution of Advanced LIGO and will chronicle the most critical and exciting period in the history of gravitational wave science in the past 100 years. LIGO resumed the search for gravitational waves in 2015 with a newly upgraded detector and on September 14, 2015 detected gravitational waves for the first time, astounding not only the scientific community but the entire world. Using footage captured at critical periods between August 2015 and March 2016 during the discovery phase as well as new filming taking place over the next two years, the team will produce films which will impact at least hundreds of thousands of people and possibly many more than that. The goal is to educate, inspire, and motivate. Students at the high school and undergraduate levels may be more inspired to pursue STEM careers after watching scientific vignettes focusing on the exciting science and technology of Advanced LIGO. Scientific historians and sociologists will have the opportunity to use the hundreds of hours of available film clips as a video database to investigate in detail the discovery of gravitational waves as a case study of large scale collaborations ("Big Science"). Videos highlighting the cutting edge technological advances brought about by Advanced LIGO and their impacts on other fields of science and technology may prove effective for educating officials and policy makers on the benefits of fundamental science.
During the course of the project, a series of professionally made video shorts will be produced for the LIGO Laboratory and LSC for education and public outreach purposes through distribution on LIGO Laboratory, LSC web sites, and the LIGO YouTube Channel. Through an extensive series of film shoots, XPLR Productions will work with the LIGO Laboratory and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) to capture key moments as LIGO scientists work to achieve Advanced LIGO's design sensitivity and carry out a series of observing runs over the next two years. The team will produce a series of video shorts explaining the important scientific and technological concepts and issues of Advanced LIGO by the scientific experts who create them. In the longer term, footage will used to produce either a feature length documentary film or a twelve-part series on television entitled 'LIGO' chronicling the discovery of gravitational waves and the exploration of exotic high-energy astrophysical phenomena such as colliding black holes. Intended for broad distribution through cinema or television, 'LIGO' will bring science to life for a wide audience.
The discovery of a class of galaxies called Green Peas provides an example of scientific work done by volunteers. This unique situation arose out of a science crowdsourcing website called Galaxy Zoo. It gave the ability to investigate the research process used by the volunteers. The volunteers’ process was analyzed in terms of three models of scientific research and an iterative work model to show the path to this discovery. As has been illustrated in these models of science, the path was iterative, not predetermined, and driven by empirical data. This paper gives a narrative of the 11-month
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Scientists and researchers from fields as diverse as oceanography and ecology, astronomy and classical studies face a common challenge. As computer power and technology improve, the sizes of data sets available to us increase rapidly. The goal of this project is to develop a new methodology for using citizen science to unlock the knowledge discovery potential of modern, large data sets. For example, in a previous project Galaxy Zoo, citizen scientists have already made major contributions, lending their eyes, their pattern recognition skills and their brains to address research questions that need human input, and in so doing, have become part of the computing process. The current Galaxy Zoo project has recruited more than 200,000 participants who have provided more than 100 million classifications of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project builds upon early successes to develop a mode of citizen science participation which involves not only simple "clickwork" tasks, but also involves participants in more advanced modes of scientific thought. As part of the project, a symbiotic relationship with machine learning tools and algorithms will be developed, so that results from citizen scientists provide a rich training set for improving algorithms that in turn inform citizen science modes of participation. The first phase of the project will be to develop a portfolio of pilot projects from astrophysics, planetary science, zoology, and classical studies. The second phase of the project will be to develop a framework - called the Zooniverse - to facilitate citizen scientists. In particular, research and machine-learning communities will be engaged to identify suitable projects and data sets to integrate into Zooniverse.
The ultimate goal with the Zooniverse is to create a sustainable future for large-scale, internet-based citizen science as part of every researcher?s toolkit, exemplifying a new paradigm in computational thinking, tapping the mental resources of a community of lay people in an innovative and complex manner that promises a profound impact on our ability to generate new knowledge. The project will engage thousands of citizens in authentic science tasks leading to a better public understanding of science and also, by the engagement of students, leading to interest in scientific careers.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Geza GyukPamela GayChristopher LintottMichael RaddickLucy FortsonJohn Wallin
Pacific Science Center (Science Center) has been a pillar of science education programming in Seattle, Washington since 1962. Through interactive exhibits, planetarium shows, IMAX movies and outreach, the Science Center works to inspire a lifelong interest in science, math and technology. In 2010, the Science Center joined forces with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through NASA Now: Using Current Data, Planetarium Technology and Youth Career Development to Connect People to the Universe. NASA Now was designed to increase the awareness, knowledge and understanding of
NASA has decided to cut by 50% the next two-year budget for the Astrobiology Institute (NAI), and for all of the studies on life in outer space. This reduction follows an announcement made by Dr Michael Griffin, the Administrator of the space agency of the United States Government when, in addressing the Mars Society last summer, he clearly stated that xenobiology studies are marginal to the mission of NASA.