Maryland Instructional Television, in conjunction with the National Science Teachers Association, will use the expertise of scientists and educators and the medium of television to create an exciting science video series for children ages four through seven. The activities of the project include the identification of content, design of instructional video and ancillary print materials, and formative evaluation. Fifteen video programs will be developed, each containing two or three separate sub-programs. These will be supplemented by teacher and parent guides which will suggest activities designed to expand upon the material covered in the program. The series content and materials will explore everyday events in the lives of young children and will integrate science and mathematics concepts, skills and application into a variety of curricular areas. The companion activities will make use of objects already in the child's world or easily accessible in the home. This project is funded jointly with the Instructional Materials Development Program.
The Science Museum of Minnesota will produce a 38- minute IMAX/OMNIMAX film on the topic of tropical rainforests. The objectives of the film include: To illustrate the key scientific concepts relating to rainforest ecology including biological diversity, biological change and human impact; To expose a wider audience to ecological thinking than might normally be exposed through traditional means of science education or science media; To communicate the complexity of conservation issues related to the rainforests. In addition, the film will portray science as an attractive career, particularly for minorities and women. The museum will create an integrated program of science enrichment materials that will accompany the film and will be used for both school groups and general audiences. Linking an education program to an IMAX/OMNIMAX film is a first for the industry and will extend the learning potential of the project. Tropical Rainforest will be distributed to IMAX/OMNIMAX theaters located in museums and science technology centers; it has the potential to be seen by more than 14 million people in its first four years of distribution.
This 1 1/2 hour documentary film portrays the famous anthropologist's life history, her work, and her audience against the background of 20th century American history. The proposed work, a blend of never-before-seen archival footage and stills, on-location footage, live interviews, and three newly created impressionistic vignettes, is intended for general and scholarly audiences. It is based completely upon original historical research.
COSMIC VOYAGE will be the first film in IMAX to survey the whole universe. Its main objective is to convey to a broad museum audience the enormous range of space and time scales spanned by the universe, and to locate our familiar human place in this context. The film's centerpiece will be a continuous "cosmic zoom" extending from the largest observable structure of the universe down to the subnuclear realm, a guided tour across some 42 orders of magnitude. This will be followed by a similar excursion through the dimension of time, from the first instant of the Big Bang to the present day some 15 billion years later. The film will take special care to explain the utility and importance of "orders of magnitude". It will indicate the observational basis underlying our description of the physical world. The narrative will emphasize the continuity as well as the open- ended nature of the scientific enterprise over a wide range of disciplines (cosmology, high-energy physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry and biology), and it will integrate the whole into a coherent picture of the universe. COSMIC VOYAGE will communicate this material in ways that are scientifically accurate and instructive, as well as visually absorbing and entertaining. The overall aim is to produce an unparalleled film about the universe that is both beautiful and powerful.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Bayley SilleckJeffrey MarvinSteven SoterEric ChalssonMartin Harwit