The National Museum of Natural History is producing 3-D and 2-D versions of a large format film on natural history. With a working title of Wonders of Life, the film will explore the diversity of life on Earth and how this diversity came to be. It will examine the biological, geological, and cultural entities that interact in myriad ways to generate, shape, and sustain the enormous biological and cultural diversity of our planet. The film will be supported by outreach material designed to support further exploration of the topic of diversity in both informal and formal settings. An inexpensive family activity guide to be available at venues that show the film will feature engaging and challenging activities for families with children ages ten through 15. A teacher resource guide, distributed free to teachers attending the film with groups of students, will be developed for use in grades 5 through 8. A classroom activity poster will be developed to serve grades 2 through 5. A Wonders of Life home page will support in-depth study of the film's topics. Larry O'Reilly, Director of The Discovery Center Project at the NMNH, will be PI and Executive Producer for the film. The Senior Scientific Advisory Board will be chaired by Dr. Robert S. Hoffman, Senior Scientist and former Assistant Secretary for Science at the Smithsonian Institution. The board also includes Sir David Attenborough, Dr. Sylvia Earle, Dr. Margaret Geller, Ivan Hattingh, and Dr. Thomas Lovejoy. Dr. Kay Behrensmeyer, Curator of Paleobiology and former Associate Director for Science at the NMNH, will lead a core team of scientists who will be directly involved in production. The film will be produced by Christopher Parsons and David Douglas will be Director of Photography.
The University of Texas at Austin requests $399,341 to expand the current Universo translations of StarDate into Spanish to more culturally relevant programs for a growing Hispanic audience. Plans include creation of longer programs with a different format for Hispanic Heritage Month for 1998-2000 and creation of complimentary collateral materials for distribution to 200 Spanish- language radio stations. Programs will also be distributed to 1,650 classrooms. A teacher's guide for using Universo in the classroom will be developed in English with activities available in both English and Spanish. A parent's guide to Universo/StarDate will also be produced to encourage parents to get involved in skywatching activities.
The Space Science Institute is developing a 5,000 s.f. hands-on traveling exhibitions called MarsQuest that will be the centerpiece of a wide-ranging planetary science education program. The exhibition will feature engaging, aesthetically designed, hands-on displays that offer experiences with science concepts relevant to Mars exploration, and will address the common misconceptions about Mars and its relationship to Earth. The most exciting aspect of the exhibition is its up-to-date connection to the progress and discoveries of 8-10 spacecraft that will be launched by NASA from 1996-2005. The exhibition will be supported by educational programs, including comprehensive teacher workshops, public programs on Mars themes, a 30-minute planetarium show emphasizing exploration and discovery, visits to schools and the dissemination of comprehensive field- tested educational materials developed by Arizona State University, the Planetary Society, NASA, the Pacific Science Center, and others. All educational materials will be aligned with the National Science Education Standards and will be available on the World Wide Web.
During this planning grant, the Film Arts Foundation will draft a script and develop prototype examples of animation for a one-hour television program that will provide viewers with insight into the large-scale organization of the Universe. These materials will be developed and tested in collaboration with advisors. The program will present, in a manner accessible to the lay public, the work that the PI, Brent Tully, and other astronomers have done on mapping the universe and will present current knowledge about the formation of this structure. The principals in the planning phase will be Brent Tully, scientific director; Thomas Lucas, producer/director; Jonathan Grupper, writer; and Edward Shaya, computer animator. They will work with a twelve-member advisory committee of astronomers working at research universities, informal educators from four major planetaria, and science educators.
The Earth & Sky radio series reaches over 2.8 million individuals in the United States each week. This grant, which will diminish each year over a four-year period, will enable the project to accomplish the following goals: * Continue production and distribution of the Earth & Sky radio series * Distribute a bi-annual booklet for teachers, Earth In the Classroom * Establish a partnership between the Earth & Sky Young Producers Contest and National Science and Technology Week. * Increase the visual content of Earth & Sky Online * Launch an * Earth & Sky Classroom Project to provide teachers and students with a guided "Internet Experience" simulated on a CD and, therefore, not requiring an Internet connection. * Produce and test a 156 segment "trial run" of a Kids' Earth & Sky radio series designed for the emerging Radio Disney network. Earth & Sky is produced and hosted by Deborah Byrd and Joel Block. They work with a team of producer/writers and interact on a regular basis with members of a team of over 90 science advisors.
WGBH Educational Foundation will explore new ways to accurately depict in a large format film the eruption of a volcano that occurred in 79 AD. One means is to use footage of Montserrat, a similar volcano that currently is erupting. In order to do this, however, they must film the volcano in the immediate future while it is still erupting and the block and ash flow is still clearly visible. Once this is completed, WGBH will conduct various testing to address such questions as the following: * Can original footage shot in large format film be used to dramatize events of the past? * Can original footage of the ash eruptions on Montserrat be used in a composite with live action footage of Vesuvius today? * Can original footage of the plumes be used in a composite with a miniature model of Vesuvius? * Can the original footage be enhanced with computer graphics, or will it need to be "degraded" to create an historical sense?
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific requests $1,317,701 over three years to implement its California pilot project to six sites around the country. Each site will establish local, self- sustaining coalitions linking science centers, astronomical institutions, school districts, and community groups. These coalitions will, with training and support from the national Project ASTRO staff, identify, link, and support the astronomer/teacher partners in their area to use the excitement of astronomy to improve the teaching and learning of science in elementary and middle school. A second strand of the project will use the Project ASTRO materials and techniques to train astronomers and teachers at national meetings outside the six sites to set up individual ASTRO partnerships on their own. Materials to be produced include a: Project ASTRO Coalition Manual; Training Manual; update to the Resource Notebook for the Teaching of Astronomy. Target audiences are students in grades 4-9.
"Atmospheric Explorations: Participatory, Computer-Based Simulations of the Weather" is a collaborative project of Augsburg College and the Science Museum of Minnesota. The purpose of the project is to enhance the interest and skills of museum visitors and students in science by providing a highly interactive exhibit environmental that allows the users considerable freedom in exploring topics in meteorology relevant to their everydays lives. The exhibits will be designed to accommodate a gender- and racially-diverse audience of national scope.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
William JaspersonDavid VenneJ. Newlin
The primary purpose of the proposed grant is to support the dissemination and institutionalization of a model of educational partnerships among academic medical centers, undergraduate colleges, and local school systems. This model was created under the umbrella of AAMC's Project 3000 by 2000 . With support from SEPA, during 1994-1997 we will consolidate and extend the accomplishments we achieved under our original SEPA, 1991-1994 (SEPA-I). In 1991, the AAMC began Project 3000 by 2000 . The activities included in this proposal support Project 3000 by 2000 , but are not designed to only recruit students for medical school. Minority underrepresentation in medical schools largely is due to the same fundamental problem that causes minority underrepresentation in health-related Ph.D. programs: an insufficient number of minority students receive adequate academic preparation-especially in the sciences-prior to college. The projects proposed here are designed to address this basic problem and hence promote greater racial and ethnic diversity in all of the health sciences. Eight programmatic activities are proposed, five of which were initiated during SEPA I: (1) The annual publication of the Secondary School Science Minority Achievement Registry (S 3 MAR) , a directory of educational programs for minority students interested in the health sciences and a registry of the students participating in them; (2) NNHeSPA News , the quarterly newsletter of the National Network for Health Science Partnerships ( NNHeSPA) ; (4) An update of the Project 3000 by 2000 Technical Assistance Manual (Volume II); (5) Presentations to a wide variety of groups and strategically targeted customized data analysis. New projects include: (6) NNHeSPA On Line!, a computer bulletin board accessible through the Internet to facilitate ongoing communication among precollege, college and graduate health science educators in NNHeSPA ; (7) S 3 MAR Grapevine , a quarterly newsletter for high school stuents listed in the S 3 MAR ; (8) Intensive regional campaigns to promote health science partnerships in California, Texas, and the South-three areas of the country with large minority populations and severe problems of underrepresentation.
We will develop two CD-ROM based interactive multimedia resources for middle school students, based on print modules from Stanford's Middle Grades Life Science Education Curriculum project, which is funded by the national Science Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York. One multimedia title will cover the cardio-respiratory systems, linking the biology of the heart and lung to disease risk and prevention. The other will focus on genetics, cellular, and developmental biology, with applications to human gene therapy and genetic engineering. These new multimedia science education resources will extend the work supported by the U.S. Public Health Service through Stanford's SEPA grant to develop an innovative and highly interactive multimedia resource on athe Nervous System and the Effects of Drugs and Alcohol. Faculty, staff, and science education graduate students in Stanford's Program in Human Biology and School of Education, along with local middle and high school science teacher consultants, will continue to work in partnership with Volotta Interactive Video, a multimedia design and production company in Larkspur, California. Many of the structural design elements created for the first multimedia resource will be used to develop the next titles. These design features will provide a consistency in the human biology multimedia titles, which will make it easier for students and for teachers to use, once they have gained experience with one resource. It also will help lower the development costs for the subsequent titles.
The Internet, specifically the World Wide Web (WWW), has the potential to deliver science education materials directly to classrooms, media centers, libraries and homes. The current application seeks to use this new technology through a collaborative effort of an active scientist and a group of middle school science teachers to develop, disseminate and evaluate educational materials related to neuroscience for use in middle school science classes. This project attempts to introduce new technologies into the science classroom, extend science education to include the information superhighway and increase parental involvement in their children's education. Materials will be integrated with the existing middle school science curriculum and will include l) on-line and off-line experiments and activities covering a range of topics in neuroscience, 2) a "virtal neuroscience laboratory", 3) an Internet neuroscience resource list and 4) a "Neuroscientist Network" consisting of active neuroscientists around the world who will serve as experts answering student questions. All activities will be designed will attention to being self-paced, hands-on, entertaining and to involve Cooperative learning. Both quantitative and qualitative methods will be used to evaluate the usage of the Intemet Neuroscience Resource. It is hoped that this project will serve as a model to other scientists and teachers and to encourage them to develop Internet resources in their own areas of expertise for use in the classroom.
BioRAP is a health science newsletter developed for 6th to 8th grade youngsters. It was developed by the Education Committee of Connecticut United for Research Excellence (CURE) Inc. The newsletter arose in response to increasing requests from school teachers to CURE-s speaker bureau for presentations on certain health related topics. The newsletter was envisioned as a way to efficiently deliver up-to-date health science information in an interesting fashion. BioRAP is meant to be a user friendly, intellectually honest vehicle to provide emerging information on health, science, the scientific method and health science careers to middle school youngsters. Issues are presented in a standard format on heavy duty recycled paper. The eight pages of each issue include standard columns (i.e., Today-s Research Laboratory, Career Rap), a full page cartoon presentation of information, word games (i.e., crossword puzzles, word hunts), activities for students to do and a column of questions from other readers.