Brooklyn College, working with NWF Eco-Schools USA, will create The Resilient Schools Consortium (RiSC) Program that increases environmental literacy while engaging high school and middle school students in climate resilience planning and practice in New York City (NYC). The City's long-term planning document, OneNYC, sets forth a vision for a resilient city without specifying a role for students or including specific plans for their schools. This project addresses this gap by developing resilience plans for NYC schools and including student voices in the process. Student RiSC teams at NYC public schools in Brooklyn impacted by Hurricane Sandy will utilize a new Climate RiSC Curriculum based on science from the National Climate Assessment and other NOAA resources to explore the vulnerability of their schools and neighborhoods to climate change, variability and extreme weather. The RiSC teams will follow a resilience assessment process modeled after the NOAA Community Resilience Index to develop resilience projects for their schools and neighborhoods. These Students will then present their resilience plans to NYC Department of Education officials and representatives from the NYC's Office of Resilience and Recovery at RiSC Summits coordinated with the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay. The RiSC Program and Climate RiSC Curriculum will be integrated into National Wildlife Federation's Eco-Schools USA program and disseminated nationally through the networks of the project partners.
The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk is located at the mouth of the Norwalk River where it flows into Long Island Sound. Its mission is to inspire people to appreciate and protect the Sound and the global environment. Over the past decade, a large percentage of the region’s 23 million people living within 50 miles of the Sound were directly affected by severe weather events, providing a timely opportunity to educate students, teachers and the public about community resilience. In a new three-year program, the Maritime Aquarium will deliver education related to environmental hazards, resilience, and the underlying science to schools from ten towns along or near Connecticut’s coast, including eight in the Natural Hazards Mitigation Plan Draft 2016-2021 for Southwestern Connecticut. In these towns as in many coastal regions, the most significant environmental threats are related to the nexus of land and water. To reflect that nexus, education will occur both in the classroom and on the water, aboard the Aquarium’s hybrid-electric research vessel, Spirit of the Sound. An exhibit featuring NOAA educational assets related to threats and resilience will also build environmental literacy as it engages Aquarium visitors. The project will be supported by an advisory board of local educators, planning and emergency management officials, representatives from Connecticut Sea Grant, the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation and the Western Connecticut Council of Governments.
The National Ocean Sciences Bowl (NOSB), managed by The Consortium for Ocean Leadership, provides enriched science education and learning through a nationally recognized and highly acclaimed academic competition that increases high school students’ knowledge of the marine sciences, including the science disciplines of biology, chemistry, physics, and geology. The NOSB addresses a national gap in environmental and Earth sciences in K-12 education by introducing high school students to and engaging them in ocean sciences, preparing them for careers in ocean science and other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Currently, there are 25 regions in the U.S. that compete in the NOSB, each with their own regional competitions. The regional competitions are coordinated by the Regional Coordinators, who are typically affiliated with a university in their region. Each year approximately 2,000 students from 300 schools across the nation compete for prizes and a trip to the national competition. The goal of this organization is to increase knowledge of the ocean among high school students and, ultimately, magnify the public understanding of ocean research. Students who participate are eligible to apply for the National Ocean Scholar Program.
The National Ocean Sciences Bowl (NOSB) is a nationally recognized high school academic competition. NOSB provides a forum for talented students to excel in science and math and introduces team members, their teachers, schools and communities to ocean sciences as an interdisciplinary field of study and a possible future career path. The program operates within a supportive ocean science learning community that involves the research community in pre-college education. Its focal point is a national competition that expands high school students' knowledge of the ocean and career pathways in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The program's goals are to: (1) cultivate environments which develop knowledgeable ocean stewards; (2) foster the use of the ocean as an interdisciplinary vehicle to teach science and mathematics; (3) reach out to and support the involvement of underrepresented and geographically diverse communities in the ocean sciences; and (4) provide students with interactive education and career opportunities that develop critical thinking and workforce development skills.
In the project entitled "The GLOBE Program 2010: Collaborative Environmental Research at Local to Global Scales," the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) will improve the functionality of the GLOBE Program by providing: (1) new methods, tools, and services to enhance GLOBE Partner and teacher abilities to facilitate inquiry-based learning and student research, (2) initial pilot testing and assessment of student and teacher learning activities and events related to Climate Science research, (3) improvements in GLOBE's technology infrastructure and data systems (e.g. database, social networking, information management) to support collaborations between students, scientists, and teachers, and (4) development of a robust evaluation plan. In addition, the UCAR will continue to provide support to the worldwide GLOBE community, as well as program management and timely communication with program sponsors.
The National Ocean Sciences Bowl (NOSB) is a nationally recognized high school academic competition that provides a forum for talented students to excel in science, mathematics and technology and introduces team members, their teacher/coaches, schools and communities to ocean sciences as an interdisciplinary field of study and a possible future career path. Established by the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education in 1998 (the Year of the Ocean), the program operates within a supportive learning community framework that involves the ocean research community in pre-college education and stimulates broad interest in and excitement about science and the oceans. The basic model for NOSB is that of a two-tiered timed competition in which pairs of four-student teams answer multiple-choice, short-answer and critical thinking questions within multiple categories related to the oceans. Each fall, over 400 participating high schools prepare their teams for 25 regional ocean sciences bowl competitions held across the United States in February and early March. Winners of these Regional Bowls advance to the national finals in late April. The current structure layers a rich array of year-round academic elements onto the basic competition framework and offers a range of program enhancements including summer internships and scholarships for NOSB alumni and opportunities for teacher professional development. Four regional bowls currently receive additional funding to expand recruitment efforts and provide mentoring and field trip experiences for students from racial, ethnic and economic groups underrepresented in the ocean sciences. CORE proposes to continue to administer and manage the National Ocean Sciences Bowl for the next five years (April 2007-March 2012). Funds are requested to add two new sites and expand the diversity initiative. To improve the credentials of the nation's teachers and informal educators, the proposal seeks funding for coach and regional coordinator professional development including a focus on the fundamental principles and concepts of ocean literacy recently developed by the ocean education community. An additional new element is a longitudinal study of educational and career paths that will assess the role that the program plays in encouraging talented students to enter the pipeline into ocean science careers and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) professions. By supporting and promoting the program's unique educational and experiential opportunities, all NOSB partners and sponsors contribute to helping our nation better prepare K-12 students in science and technology and identify and cultivate future scientists and technical experts.
The project team is developing a prototype of a mobile platform, Zaption, to support teachers in using video clips to enrich learning. The product’s user-interface will allow teachers to easily add annotations to videos, make short video clips that align to topics, and enhance videos with time-linked elements and assessments that appear at the top of each video. In Phase I pilot research, the team will examine whether the prototype functions as planned, if teachers are able to use the prototype for different purposes, and whether students are engaged by the prototype.
The project team is developing a prototype of Eco, a multi-player game to prepare high school students to be environmentally literate citizens with 21st century skills. To play the game, students will enter a shared online world featuring a simulated ecosystem of plants and animals. Students will co-create the civilization by measuring, modeling, and analyzing the underlying ecosystem. Students advocate proposed plans to classmates and make decisions as a group. Cooperation and science-based decision making activities are necessary for success in preventing the destruction of their environment. The prototype will include teacher resources to support the alignment of game play to learning goals, and implementation. In the Phase I pilot research, the project team will examine whether the game prototypes function as planned, if teachers are able to integrate it within the classroom environment, and whether students are engaged with the prototype.
Purpose: This project team will develop and test Zaption, a mobile and desktop platform designed to support educators in effectively and efficiently utilizing video (e.g., from YouTube, Vimeo, or their own desktop) as an interactive teaching and learning object. Personalized learning devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) populated with video content provide opportunities for students to access educationally-meaningful content anywhere and anytime. Yet, video has yet to realize its potential as a learning tool in or out of the classroom. One reason for this is that watching video can be a passive experience for students, whereas learning requires active engagement. A second reason is that even if students are actively engaged while watching a video, there is no easy way to elicit student responses to a video. And finally, there is no easy way to feed student responses to teachers as formative assessment data to guide subsequent instruction.
Project Activities: During Phase I, (completed in 2014), the team expanded a pre-existing prototype by building a mobile app to enable anytime use and increase its functionality for teachers. At the end of Phase I, pilot research with 150 students in 7 classrooms demonstrated that the prototype operated as intended, teachers were able to integrate the videos within instructional practice, and students found the mobile app helpful and engaging. In Phase II, the team will add additional components to the prototype and will develop content-specific modules for use in high school physics classes. After development is complete, the research team will conduct a larger pilot study to assess the feasibility and usability, fidelity of implementation, and the promise of the Zaption for supporting student's physics learning. The study will include 32 Grade 10 physics classrooms, half of whom will be randomly assigned to use Zaption and half of whom will follow business as usual procedures. Analyses will compare pre-and-post scores of student's physics learning.
Product: Zaption will be a mobile and web-based platform to support the use of any video (e.g., from YouTube, Vimeo, or their own desktop) as a teaching and learning tool. Zaption will include an authoring engine where users can find and select video clips and easily insert interactive elements such as questions, discussions, and annotations into the videos. Users will then publish videos directly on Zaption's website, or on any learning management system or classroom website. Students will be able to view videos as homework or in class, respond individually to the questions and prompts, and get feedback on their responses. Teachers will use Zaption Analytics to receive immediate and actionable data showing whether students actually watched and engaged with a video, and how students responded to the questions and prompts.
Purpose: This project will develop and test Happy Atoms, a physical modeling set and an interactive iPad app for use in high school chemistry classrooms. Happy Atoms is designed to facilitate student learning of atomic modeling, a difficult topic for chemistry high school students to master. Standard instructional practice in this area typically includes teachers using slides, static ball and stick models, or computer-simulation software to present diagrams on a whiteboard. However, these methods do not adequately depict atomic interactions effectively, thus obscuring complex knowledge and understanding of their formulas and characteristics.
Project Activities: During Phase I (completed in 2014), the team developed a prototype of a physical modeling set including a computerized ball and stick molecular models representing the first 17 elements on the periodic table and an iPad app that identifies and generates information about atoms. A pilot study at the end of Phase I tested the prototype with 187 high school students in 12 chemistry classes. Researchers found that the prototype functioned as intended. Results showed that 88% of students enjoyed using the prototype, and that 79% indicated that it helped learning. In Phase II, the team will develop additional models and will strengthen functionality for effective integration into instructional practice. After development is complete, a larger pilot study will assess the usability and feasibility, fidelity of implementation, and promise of Happy Atoms to improve learning. The study will include 30 grade 11 chemistry classrooms, with half randomly assigned to use Happy Atoms and half who will continue with business as usual procedures. Analyses will compare pre-and-post scores of student's chemistry learning, including atomic modeling.
Product: Happy Atoms will include a set of physical models paired with an iPad app to cover high school chemistry topics in atomic modeling. The modeling set will include individual plastic balls representing the elements of the periodic table. Students will use an iPad app to take a picture of models they create. Using computer-generated algorithms, the app will then identify the model and generate information about its physical and chemical properties and uses. The app will also inform students if a model that is created does not exist. Happy Atoms will replace or supplement lesson plans to enhance chemistry teaching. The app will include teacher resources suggesting how to incorporate games and activities to reinforce lesson plans and learning.
This project team will develop and test a prototype of LifeSim, intended to be a financial literacy game app for high school students to strengthen mathematical skills and practical life knowledge. In the game, high school students will manage hypothetical investment funds and be challenged to understand compounded interest and debt. The app will include materials for math teachers to integrate the game within instructional practice. At the end of Phase I in a pilot study with 50 students, the researchers will examine whether the prototype functions as planned and if students are engaged during gameplay.
This project team will develop and test a prototype of SuperChem VR, a game to support high school students' basic chemistry learning. The prototype will include a set of web-based laboratory modules which will be integrated within a virtual reality headset to allow for a 360-degree visual exploration of the environment. The prototype will also include teacher resources for classroom implementation. In the Phase I pilot research with 3 teachers and 54 students, the project team will examine whether the hardware and software prototype functions as planned, whether teachers are able to integrate it within the classroom environment, and whether students are engaged while using the prototype.