Our approach offers the following benefits:
Within the framework of extant tools (Mosaic) and the Internet we have defined the following set of objectives:
The above activities will be objective-based and will foster both individual and team involvement. In some cases, the "research teams" will include students in classrooms that are located in different buildings. An online record of the StarChild investigation will be maintained which will allow teachers and the students to review and analyze their performance. The students will also be provided with a copy of this record to keep as part of their portfolio.
The development of a team-designed electronically based curriculum with access by students at any level through Internet has a number of benefits, both to students specifically and to the National Information Infrastructure in general:
Specifically, we will establish partnerships with several local schools in building and developing the initial products. We have established a partnership with Greenbelt Elementary School and are seeking to extend this to the rest of the Greenbelt school complex (Greenbelt Middle School and Eleanor Roosevelt High School). These schools are all within minutes of Goddard Space Flight Center, so that training and workshops can be held conveniently at minimal cost, and so that hardware-specific problems which arise in testing may be solved more rapidly. Eleanor Roosevelt also includes a Science and Technology Magnet program which could make unusually heavy use of some of the more advanced features of our program, providing a very thorough testbed. After the first year, we anticipate expanding to a broader base of Washington area schools.
We will also be working with the Springfield School District in Oregon, as well as with college level classes at the University of Oregon, to explore our ideas beyond the initial K-12 thrust being developed here at Goddard. The Oregon K-12 schools already have T1 connections to the Internet.
StarChild also includes many of the features which have made cousin programs like Kids Network, Spacelink, and LabNet successful. Specifically, these are the forum for data sharing and communications between (possibly) widely separated students, teachers, and experts. Thus we believe that previous work in Education strongly validates our approach.
All of the above features/services that the Internet provides can now be integrated into the HTTP protocol on the World-Wide Web. Through the use of hypertext in HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the single Internet user can now retrieve text, graphics, sound, images, audio and video from thousands of sites around the world. The search is done using a browser (Mosaic) in which links are established from one document to another. These Hyperlinks contain all information necessary to retrieve the hyperlinked document, e.g. access protocol, hostnames, port numbers, remote file names, etc. Currently WWW browsers support several access protocols: http, ftp, wais, gopher, telnet, and nntp. WWW browsers can thus also be used to browse Gopher, WAIS, and Usenet newsgroups. These are powerful tools which now need to be activated in the K-12 environment.
Our team has a wealth of experience in the areas covered by this proposal. We have built an astronomical information tool, called StarTrax, which is based on WWW and Mosaic. StarTrax is used by many in the astrophysics community to access and understand the data archived at the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archival Research Center (HEASARC). We also work with the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) to provide tools to enhance the use of the space science data stored by our groups. We support the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), another tool for browsing distributed data sets. We also support our own data base browsing tool which is especially constructed for use with astrophysics data sets. We provide on-line mechanisms for obtaining expert help concerning questions about our data holdings. One member of our team has taught several college level physics classes entirely by electronic means, replacing the blackboard with a computer. He is currently working with a team of K-12 science teachers to develop materials for classroom use through Mosaic.
At the HEASARC we have worked extensively with WWW and Mosaic to produce a professional scientific research tool for astronomers. While the actual data would be at a level which is too high for lower grades, the interface is not. Many of the astronomers using the service are "computer uncomfortable" so an interface has been built which is easy to learn and use. These same charactistics will be needed for K-12 students. In addition, the Physics Department at the University of Oregon has substantial astronomical resources on their Web server.
The textbook is flexible. With it, students can adjust their studies to their own capabilities. Those struggling with one idea can spend more time on it, while speeding over concepts that they find easier. This also means that the same computer resources can be used for classes in which there exists a wide range of student abilities. Given the current trend towards heteorogenous ability levels in classes, this is a feature which will be attractive to students and teachers.
The textbook is also a platform to reach the wider network. No matter how dynamic and fascinating our textbook will be, some students will find there is specialized knowledge that is beyond the scope of the book. Through the use of suggested further resources, motivated students can use the textbook as a starting point to search for further information contained in the Web. A suggested reading list might include such things as pointers to GIF directories at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, Earthquake Data, U.S.G.S. land use maps, GOES total ozone images, etc.
Use of Mosaic as an electronic textbook will depend on several other systems as well. One will be the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) which provides a means to run external programs, or gateways, through the use of an information server. Modifying the server software in this way is another cornerstone of our approach. It is here that we can supplement the static hypermedia textbook with dynamic interactivity.
An important aspect of our hypermedia textbook will be its dynamic interactivity and immediate feedback. Through the use of forms (text-entry areas, menus, checkboxes, etc.) we can provide educational activities such as quizzes, assessments, database queries, control of remote equipment such as telescopes, and real-time communications with domain experts elsewhere on the Internet. Period reviews and assessment tools might be used by the teacher, but may be more useful as comprehension guideposts for the students. A sophisticated reviewing tool would suggest resources in the text to go back and explore in further detail.
Our interface will not be for passive reading alone. We will extend our prior work in this area (StarTrax) so that the student will be able to search astronomical and space science catalogs in a similar way that the professionals do. The student could search for well-known objects, or request sky maps at various wavelengths. These simple scenarios are only the beginning of the rich universe of possibilities opened up by utilizing the programming capabilities supported by WWW servers. The student can now reach out and grasp NASA's wealth of data.
Our proposed program works best in a fully networked school in which that school's LAN has a high speed connection to the Internet. For schools without a LAN, but with an Internet connection, it will be necessary to develop a caching server that serves as a local resource that stores documents. For those rare cases where the document is not locally available, we will make dialup access (through PPP) available to a server located at GSFC.
The Internet also provides a logical means of sharing lessons. The easy interface even makes it feasible for a student aide or to actually operate the overhead, freeing the teacher from having to be in the front of the room. Educational research and teacher experience agree that this freedom allows teachers to address students more equitably (not just the front row and the middle of the room) and improves classroom management. Placing notes on the Internet also allows students with modem access elsewhere, such as at home or at a computer resource center, to review material, provide feedback, pick up notes and schedules from absent days, and might even be a resource for at-home teaching.
Another possibility is to use the net and our interface to answer student questions. A very knowledgeable teacher might be able to draw on network resources during the course of the class to answer an individual's or group's question which was not part of the planned lesson.
Our blackboard model supplements but does not replace our hypertextbook. The electronic blackboard approach incorporates most of the features of the electronic textbook previously outlined since Mosaic again will be the interface to the NII. The only difference is that each student wiil not have his or her own networked computer but instead have access to a few X-terminals connected to remote hosts. Hence, the students will have to develop their materials in teams. This makes it well suited to cooperative learning exercises; a wide base of education research strongly suggests that cooperative strategies promote not only greater equity in classes, but improve student understanding.
In addition, this approach greatly reduces the cost, making this an attractive alternative to more financially constrained schools which already have T1 connections. It also serves as the starting point for moving toward the more sophisticated textbook approach. We emphasize that this approach is possible to implement within the context of existing K-12 network infrastructure in some schools (e.g. The Springfield School District in Oregon).
As Principal Investigator, Paul Butterworth will be responsible for the planning, execution and reporting of all activities under the project. Gregory Bothun will be responsible for the detailed planning and execution of all activities initiated from the University of Oregon. In the first year, the main Oregon-led initiative will be teacher training in the effective use of the electronic blackboard concept described above. Alan Richmond will lead the effort to develop the suite of WWW-based tools. He will supervise the half-time programmer required by the project to develop interactive applications. Bruce O'Neel will be responsible for the implementation of the caching server concept and will develop tools to support schools with limited (e-mail only) access to the Internet. Paul Jacobs will participate in all software development tasks, particularly those which will provide user-interactivity. Nancy Laubenthal and Nick White will provide liaison with the NASA archives, from which most of our data will come.
Three project documents will be continuously maintained. A project implementation plan will be written within a month of start-up, which will project all anticipated activities out to the end of the project. A more detailed 6-month plan will also be written. Because we wish to be as responsive as possible to student and teacher feedback, both these documents will be updated each month. A monthly report will be distributed to all project personnel, documenting the previous month's progress and setting objectives for the following month. Each developer active on the project will be required to submit a weekly activities and status report, which the PI will use for monthly reports and to generate the monthly plan and updates to the six-month and project implementation plans.
Critical to our whole approach is the involvement of teachers in all our activities and at every stage. We plan to hold many training sessions and workshops. We will have a small number of teachers work with us over extended periods to develop new tools and to learn how to continue doing that beyond the lifetime of the project. To enable teachers to participate, they must be paid appropriate consulting fees.
The first year's activities are:
During the third year the construction of the interface will be completed and the system made available to whoever requests it. New technologies arising during the proposal period will be considered and added to the interface design as required.
We will provide real science (space, earth, environmental) data to students via Mosaic and the WWW. Initially we will concentrate on providing access to space science data -- images from the ROSAT, Einstein, IUE, HST and other space science missions; exciting pictures from the planets; views of our solar system and galaxy; views back to the beginning of time, taken by the finest astronomical telescope ever built. Earth science and environmental data sets will be added as time permits and as interest dictates.
A 1-m telescope operated by the University of Oregon will also be used to build up an extensive CCD archive of astronomical objects.
For the educational tools that we develop we will include textual, image, sound, and video data. We also hope to demonstrate, through our custom-built Mosaic screens and through access to the data and data analysis tools, how the real scientific process progresses.
Through our collaborative arrangement with Dr. Nicholas White, Head of the Office of Guest Investigator Programs at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, our team will have access to public astrophysics space science data in the HEASARC, Compton Observatory Science Support Center (COSSC) and the NSSDC, all here at Goddard Space Flight Center. These archives hold exciting space science data from recent missions such as the Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT), the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA), the Gamma Ray Observatory (GRO), and older missions such as Einstein, Exosat, Voyager.
Additionally, our technical team has experience and familiarity with much of the data in these archives. We will, at least initially, make heavy use of the space science information available in those archives.
We are also aware of other exciting space science data and files, as well as earth science and environmental data sets, that are publically available from various astronomical sites throughout the Internet. We will search out and use that data as time permits and as interest dictates.
We will use existing Internet facilities. In the case of Oregon, this means T1 Connectivity. For the case of Maryland, the project requires a PC class server running Unix with 3 dataphone lines for incoming PPP/SLIP connections. The development team will use Macs and Windows PCs, consistent with typical school environments. Each school we support as an applications testbed (3 in the first year, 6 in the second, and 9 in the third year) will be supplied with a data-caching server. This server will receive our overnight system updates and give ethernet speed access to our products to the school during the day. This will save the Maryland schools from the expense of a T1 connection to the Internet. The school server will be a PC class machine running Unix which will require a modem and a data phone line. It will connect to the local school's network backbone. All of the proposed hardware is available over-the-counter and/or via mail order in the United States.
We will require access to public-domain data held in Government archives. Because we will be re-distributing the data through our own system using single copies of data sets maintained at our own central facilities, the incremental burden on Government archives will be very slight. Our two NASA Co-Investigators will ensure that our interactions with the archives will follow Government regulations and policies and will be as efficient as possible.
Paul S. Butterworth was educated at University College London (B.Sc., First Class Honours, Astronomy, 1971-1974; Ph.D., Planetary Astronomy, 1974-1977; Dr. Butterworth is a planetary scientist, with fourteen years research experience. His research has included studies of planetary geology (Earth, Mars), atmospheric chemistry (Jupiter, Uranus, Io, Titan) and the physics and chemistry of small bodies (comets and asteroids). From February 1986 to March 1992 he was the principal planetary specialist at the US National Space Science Data Center, responsible for the acquisition of planetary data. Since April 1992 he has been working at NASA/GSFC, in the Laboratory for High Energy Asrophysics, developing data analysis software.
Nick White is currently the Director of the HEASARC. He also serves as the Deputy Project Scientist for ASCA, with the specific responsibility of directing the ASCA Science Center effort. Between 1986 and 1990 he was the EXOSAT Project Scientist and was responsible for the EXOSAT Observatory activities. This function included creating the EXOSAT archival data products and catalogs, and the EXOSAT database system. The EXOSAT database system now is called the HEASARC Browse facility, and is in use for accessing all the HEASARC archival data. Dr. White has over 100 publications in refereed journals. He obtained his Ph.D. in Astrophysics at University College London in 1977 using Copernicus (OSO-3) and Ariel V X-ray data. Upon receving his doctorate, he worked at GSFC from 1978-1982 working on HEAO 1, HEAO 2 and OSO 8.
Nancy Laubenthal is the Head of the Data Management and Programming Office within the Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics (LHEA) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She received a Bachelors of Science degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis, MO in 1977. She is responsible for the technical project management of various LHEA software projects, such as Gamma Ray Observatory (GRO) Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET), GRO Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE), Transient Gamma Ray Spectrometer (TGRS), KONUS, HEASARC, Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA). Her group is also responsible for providing the local computing environment within the LHEA.
Alan Richmond is a Principal Systems Engineer with Hughes STX at the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has pioneered the use of the WWW for the presentation of astrophysics satellite data, through the StarTrax interface. He has built software for several international scientific research projects, e.g. the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF); the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST); and the Joint European Torus (JET). He has over 16 years of software development experience, and has been a member of several major computer societies and has published several papers on software development. He has degrees in physics and mathematics from King's College, London, and the Open University (UK), and a Eur.Ing (Paris) and CEng (UK).
Paul Jacobs has worked for the last three years on the HEASARC project, providing computer and systems engineering support. His areas of involvement include graphical user interfaces, client/server applications, and astronomical data analysis packages.
Bruce O'Neel has 8 years of C and FORTRAN scientific and database programming along with extensive system administration and networking experience.
Gregory D. Bothun was educated at the University of Washington --- B.S. in Astronomy, June 1976; --- Ph.D. in Astronomy, August 1981. From September 1981 - September 1983 he held a Center Fellowship, Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics. From September 1983 - 1986 he held a Bantrell Prize Fellowship, California Institute of Technology. From September 1986 - September 1989 he was an Assistant Professor, Astronomy Department, University of Michigan. From September 1989 - September 1990 he was an Associate Professor, Astronomy Department, University of Michigan. Since September 1990 he has been an Associate Professor, Physics Department, University of Oregon,
Carolyn Goff is the Principal of Greenbelt Elementary, a Department of Education Blue Ribbon School in Maryland. Prior to becoming principal, she was a classroom teacher for 15 years. She served as a consultant to the National Geographic Society for their interactive laser disc geography programs.
Leslie Conery is a Staff Development Specialist in Springfield Public Schools, Oregon. Dr. Conery's specialty areas include Staff Development and Technology in Education. She worked on an NSF grant to investigate strategies for the effective integration of computers into instruction, and has worked as a consultant and trainer for school districts across the United States and in Japan.
Jesse Allen is not a Co-Investigator on this proposal, but he has contributed so much to it that we adopt him as an honorary Co-Investigator. Thanks Jesse!
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