Abstracts
STScI Education
Evaluation
2001 IDEAS Statistics & Abstracts
| This year, the IDEAS Grant Program drew 53 proposal submissions from 25 states and 1 U.S. territory. Thirteen proposals were accepted for funding. The total requested funding was approximately $1.9 million. The total amount of awarded funding is $426,103. The ratio of proposals awarded funding was 1:4. |
Proposal Breakdown by State
|
Rev.
|
Fund
|
State
|
Rev.
|
Fund
|
State
|
Rev.
|
Fund
|
State
|
|
1
|
1
|
AK - Alaska |
0
|
0
|
LA- Louisiana |
0
|
0
|
OK- Oklahoma |
|
2
|
0
|
AL - Alabama |
0
|
0
|
MA- Massachusetts |
1
|
0
|
OR- Oregon |
|
0
|
0
|
AR - Arkansas |
4
|
2
|
MD- Maryland |
4
|
1
|
PA- Pennsylvania |
|
1
|
0
|
AZ - Arizona |
0
|
0
|
ME- Maine |
1
|
0
|
PR-Puerto Rico |
|
9
|
2 |
CA - California |
0
|
0
|
MI- Michigan |
0
|
0
|
RI- Rhode Island |
|
1
|
0
|
CO - Colorado |
2
|
0
|
MN- Minnesota |
1
|
0
|
SC- South Carolina |
|
0
|
0
|
CT - Connecticut |
0
|
0
|
MO- Missouri |
1
|
0
|
SD- South Dakota |
|
0
|
0
|
DC - District of Columbia |
0
|
0
|
MS- Mississippi |
4
|
0
|
TN- Tennessee |
|
0
|
0
|
DE - Delaware |
1
|
1
|
MT- Montana |
2
|
1
|
TX- Texas |
|
0
|
0
|
FL - Florida |
0
|
0
|
NE- Nebraska |
0
|
0
|
UT- Utah |
|
1
|
0
|
GA - Georgia |
1
|
0
|
NC- North Carolina |
0
|
0
|
VT- Vermont |
|
0
|
0
|
HI - Hawaii |
0
|
0
|
ND- North Dakota |
2
|
0
|
VA- Virginia |
|
0
|
0
|
IA - Iowa |
1
|
0
|
NH- New Hampshire |
0
|
0
|
WA- Washington |
|
0
|
0
|
ID - Idaho |
0
|
0
|
NJ- New Jersey |
1
|
1
|
WI- Wisconsin |
|
6
|
0
|
IL - Illinois |
1
|
0
|
NM- New Mexico |
0
|
0
|
WV- West Virginia |
|
1
|
1
|
IN - Indiana |
0
|
0
|
NV- Nevada |
0
|
0
|
WY- Wyoming |
|
1
|
0
|
KS- Kansas |
2
|
1
|
NY- New York | |||
|
1
|
0
|
KY- Kentucky |
0
|
0
|
OH- Ohio |
|
K-12 EDUCATION Outreach
Curriculum Development
Research Opportunity
Internet Development
INFORMAL SCIENCE EDUCATION Outreach
Curriculum Development
Abstracts Cosmic Dance: Public Outreach and Student
Training For the Understanding of Cosmic Rays The proposed project supports a partnership between the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology, and the Indiana University Physics Department, with the aim of increasing public awareness and understanding of cosmic rays and related aspects of space science. IU physics and astronomy undergraduates, with the supervision of faculty members, will design, fabricate, test and install an innovative exhibit on cosmic ray physics which will be featured in the front lobby of the new museum. It is projected that at least 60,000 people will visit the museum each year, of which at least 18,000 will be school children on field trips. The exhibit will appear as a pathway of translucent panels on which the visitors walk. Whenever a cosmic ray strikes a panel of the pathway, lights below the panel will briefly flash indicating the occurrence of the event. These lights are controlled by scintillation detectors and electronics that are recessed in the floor, below the panels. The proposed project extends the commitment of WonderLab and IU to enhancing and expanding the space science curriculum in Indiana high schools. Since every visitor to the museum will encounter the exhibit, a significant number of people will learn about cosmic rays and related space science. At present, IU also participates in the QuarkNet program which enables Indiana high schools to use detector telescopes to investigate cosmic rays. Integration of this existing effort with the proposed exhibit will effectively broaden the impact of QuarkNet to a wider audience.
The opening of a new visitor center in early 2002 at McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas, offers opportunities for interactions with K-12 students and their teachers. A Student Field Experience Program is designed to engage the students during their visits with "hands-on, minds-on" activities, tours, and viewing opportunities. To enrich this program for both teachers and students, we propose to prepare pre-visit and post-visit materials in English and Spanish. The materials will be aligned with state and national science standards. The materials will form linkages between school science and informal science. The pre-visit materials help students frame questions about astronomy and the observatory before their visit, and prepare teachers to play an active facilitator role during Student Field Experience activities. In addition to the astronomical concepts, the students examine a variety of careers and the community of employees at the observatory. Post-visit materials offer students a time to reflect on their experiences and gain conceptual understanding. Members of an Education Advisory Board play a key role on the development team in helping plan the material's development and in reviewing the products. The education PI has extensive experience in working with K-12 teachers and writing activities. The science PI is an active researcher with the HST and has served as the lead scientific consultant for the "Decoding Starlight" exhibit within the new center. An extensive evaluation is proposed. Dissemination will occur at professional meetings and through southwest US and international consortia of observatories.
Students from Baltimore City College High School will research NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Heritage Project images, meet with PI's, Maryland Science Center staff and Space Telescope Science Institute program mangers to discuss and gain an understanding of the images. Each student will choose a Hubble Heritage image and convey their thoughts about it in a poem, to be visualized in two Davis Planetarium productions at the Maryland Science Center. Guided by team members, students will discover the variety of Hubble Heritage images, learn the basics of HST operations and its unique abilities, and use the Maryland Science Center telescope to understand differences between Earth based and space based observatories. Space Telescope Science Institute will customize a lesson incorporating students' selected images and provide information on the science depicted. Working with Planetarium staff, the students will identify ways to visually portray the Heritage images and their poetry on the Planetarium dome. Two different programs are requested in this proposal: a live presentation
by the students and an automated feature presentation. The live
presentation will include the students reading their poetry in coordination
with images projected on the Planetarium dome. The subsequent feature
production will be professionally narrated and scheduled as a program
offering to Davis Planetarium school and public audiences for eight
months. This feature presentation will present Hubble Heritage awareness
and information to an estimated 55,000 Planetarium visitors.
During the Late Devonian nearly 365 million years ago, 70% of terrestrial species and 90% of the marine species vanished from Earth. Why? Today, Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, in cooperation with scientists at University of Queensland, is on the hunt for the evidence that an asteroid could be responsible for this mass extinction. Their field work and subsequent laboratory work is the subject of this IDEAS proposal. "Impacts and Extinctions" is a one-year education and outreach (E/PO) project that will engage teachers and students in a internet-based, virtual field trip with geologists exploring the Woodleigh Impact Structure in the Carnarvon Basin, Western Australia, a multi-ring impact crater. Although there are several impact structures in the United States, none are of a size that could be associated with extinctions, so the virtual field trip needs to go to the site where the science is being conducted. This proposal supports participation of US teachers and science center staff, outreach workshops and a summer institute for teachers, development/adaptation of classroom activities (grades 5-8), web management during the virtual field trip, and travel and telecommunications expenses (only) for one US educator as a member of the field research team at the Woodleigh Impact Site. At the end of the project, the classroom lessons and the diaries of the virtual field trip will be sustained as an on-line teacher resource on the SETI Institute web site for future classroom use. Process and impact evaluation are included.
The goal of Integrating the Universe Into K-12 Teaching is to promote enrichment of science, mathematics and technology education through NASA's mission-based astronomy and space science research. This goal will be accomplished by developing teacher academy and cascading dissemination models aimed at helping teachers identify NASA space science resources that will enhance their teaching, given their teaching preferences and the configuration of their classrooms. Nationally, 40% of fourth grade teachers and 35% of eighth grade teachers report that they do not receive all or most of the resources they need to teach science (O'Sullivan, Weiss, & Askew, 1998). The Internet has been recognized by Science, Math, Engineering and Technology (SMET) researchers as a substantial provider of both, current, relevant, and easy-to-access SMET resources. This resource is often perceived as an overwhelming wilderness that intimidates even the stout hearted Internet explorer. Thus, thousands of NASA websites are underused because teachers are unaware of their existence, do not know how to translate NASA content into various grade levels, or do not know how to incorporate these resources into their curriculum. Integrating the Universe into K-12 Teaching addresses these issues by introducing topics in astronomy and space sciences, providing opportunities to explore a multitude of NASA space sciences web resources, and training teachers in the use of Web-Enhanced Learning Environment Strategies (WELES). WELES gives teachers 'strategies' to locate NASA resources they need to advance classroom learning and stimulate the interest of their students, colleagues and the greater school community.
This informal science education project will bring together special collaboration between the Montana Space Grant Consortium, Montana State University faculty, four of Montana's tribal colleges, and the Southwest Montana Astronomical Society to develop, produce, and present a series of interactive presentations and real sky experiences to tribal communities around the state of Montana. Over the course of 12 months, scientists, science educators, school teachers and even museum specialists will work together to create a set of public outreach presentations supported by the latest research and science education standards for grade K-12 students, introductory undergraduate students, and the general public. The program theme will focus on sky observing techniques and telescopes as a model for scientific exploration, with connections made to a number of research areas in NASA's Office of Space Science, such as the Sun-Earth Connection, Solar System Exploration, space observatories, and current sky events as they arise. All institutions involved in this proposal are members of the Montana Space Grant Consortium, providing an already existing structure for ongoing evolution of the project beyond the period of the initial IDEAS funding. Additional connections will be established with science teacher training/curriculum development personnel, Upward Bound programs, and the amateur astronomy community across the state. The investigators involved in this project have extensive experience in astronomy education and outreach and direct access to other NASA education resources.
This project will establish a team of students and teachers who will be participating in two activities. The group will develop a traveling program to accompany the school district's Star Lab; this program will augment existing Star Lab by providing information that is relevant to Alaska Native cultures (none exists at the present time). The other focus of the project will be assist scientists at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in a project that will measure and study the currents, directions and forces of the winds created by the Aurora Borealis. To do this, the students will learn about the Aurora and about basic principles of rocketry as well as nighttime photography. It is anticipated that the photographs provided by the students will provide invaluable information to the study team.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the largest sky survey in history, will map 25% of the night sky to 23rd magnitude, cataloging over 100 million objects. All data from the SDSS will be available to the astronomy community over the Internet. We are designing SkyServer (http://skyserver.sdss.org), a web site that will make all SDSS data freely available to students and the general public. These data have tremendous power for astronomy or general science education - students can study all data that professional astronomers study. We are designing a set of educational projects that allow students to learn concepts from astronomy by analyzing data from SDSS. For example, students make a Hubble diagram showing the expansion of the universe or calculate stellar temperatures from observed colors. All projects include teachers' guides with solutions and tips on how to use the projects with a class. Within the next two years, we will develop 10-15 projects for the site. We will also advertise the site to students and teachers through direct advertising, presentations at teachers' conferences, teacher training programs, and partnerships with local museums. By the end of the first year, we will have 10 test classes signed up to work with SkyServer. These test classes will help us evaluate the site's effectiveness and will provide feedback for updates to the site. By the end of the second year, we will triple the number of students using SkyServer for class projects, and double the number of page hits we receive.
The Space Links project will institute a unique partnership between Temple University and its affiliated Professional Development Schools (PDS). Participation in Space Links will establish active linkages among local teachers, pre-service teachers, and Temple faculty that will integrate current space science and mathematics. In an age when these subjects are expanding rapidly and knowledge of advances in these fields is critical to future success, students in the School District of Philadelphia are in great need of developing this knowledge. The schools participating in the project serve student populations from ethnic backgrounds underrepresented in the fields of science and mathematics, making the need for the intervention offered by Space Links all the more crucial. The goals of this two-year project are twofold. The primary goal is to influence minority participation in space science at two levels undergraduate and middle school by exposing these students to innovative space science curriculum. A second but important goal is to empower pre-service minority and female teachers with the skills to implement inquiry-based space science and mathematics curriculum at the middle school level in both in school and out-of-school programs. The Space Links project will provide teachers with a framework for investigating innovative space science curriculum and infusing it with current science news and events. The success of Space Links is assured by the involvement of highly motivated teachers in partnership with enthusiastic mentors in an endeavor that shares the process and excitement of science with middle school students (grades 5-8).
We propose to educate and stimulate the interest of middle school teachers and students in the fields of space science and astronomy through a summer, residential program of study at South Carolina State University (SCSU). The teachers will participate in a three-day workshop which introduces them to inquiry-based, hands-on activities which are based in the subject area of astronomy. After attending their workshop, the teachers will conduct a two-week academy in space science for students in grades 7-9 at the same time the students are in residence in the dormitories at SCSU. The teachers and students in the program will be African-American, a traditionally underrepresented group in space science. This program will create awareness and stimulate an interest by middle school students in the career opportunities that exist in astronomy, space science and related technical fields. Additionally, it will provide both in-service and pre-service teachers with the content needed to address the science standards appropriate to the grade level they teach.
The project will focus on developing curriculum that will achieve our goal of augmenting students' exposure to math and science and the integration of computer technology and career awareness. The goal is to develop curriculum with a specific focus on science and technology skill development for a population who is underrepresented in science and technology based disciplines and careers and even less represented in astronomy and space science. Our objectives for achieving this goal of providing curriculum that can be used for NYSP at Chabot and after pilot testing, for use by other NYSP programs. The initial phase of the project will involve the collaboration of the project team, a NASA scientist, a Physics and Astronomy faculty member from Chabot, and the NYSP Math/Science coordinator, who will develop the curriculum that will be offered to NYSP participants on a pilot basis. The result will be a curriculum that has been tested on the target population and that will be disseminated to NYSP staff across the country at the annual national meeting. We propose to develop an integrated an interdisciplinary curriculum that incorporates: · The use of national science standards;
As state and national education standards are being adopted, schol districts are examining their course offerings and content in space science to identify deficiencies. One of the most difficult challenges that educators face is the lack of a current up-to-date set of curricula that mirror what space scientists do and meet the standards. This is a proposal for a two year, effort that aims to help the school districts and teachers in implementing new courses or revise existing ones to meet or exceed the space science standards being adopted or have been adopted.. The propsoed effort includes providing training to teachers to use the robotic observatory developed very recently by the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) that is equipped with a digital camera to enable the students to obtain hands-on Astronomy experience. The telescope has been minimally used so far due to lack of adequate teacher training and the school district is anxious to provide training and content background support to the teachers through this proposed effort.
"Un puente a los cielos" is a collaboration between a
research astronomer, the observatory education and public outreach
coordinator and a public school teacher designed to build a bridge
from the observatory to the local Hispanic community by using the
skills of native bilingual students to make the observatory more
responsive to the national and international Spanish speaking world
through public web pages and the visitors center at the Very Large
Array. |