HR: 14:40h
AN: ED33C-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Earth's Earliest Ecosystems in the Classroom: The Use of Microbial Mats to Illustrate and Demonstrate General Principles of Scientific Inquiry and Microbial Ecology
AU: * Bebout, B M
EM: Brad.M.Bebout@nasa.gov
AF: NASA Ames Research Center, Exobiology Branch Mail Stop 239-4, Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000 United States
AU: Bucaria, R
AF: Dartmouth Middle School, 5575 Dartmouth Drive, San Jose, CA 95118 United States
AB: Microbial mats are living examples of the most ancient biological communities on Earth. As Earth's earliest ecosystems, they are centrally important to understanding the history of life on our planet and are useful models for the search for life elsewhere. As relatively small (but complete) ecosystems, microbial mats are also extremely useful for educational activities. Mats may be used to demonstrate a wide variety of concepts in general and microbial ecology, including the biogeochemical cycling of elements, photosynthesis and respiration, and the and the origin of the Earth's present oxygen containing atmosphere. Microbial mats can be found in a number of common environments accessible to teachers, and laboratory microbial mats can even be constructed using materials purchased from biological supply houses. With funding from NASA's Exobiology program, provided as a supplement to our research funding, we are developing curriculum and web-based activities centered on the use of microbial mats as tools for demonstrating general principles in ecology, and the scientific process. A web site with useful background information and links is now on-line. The curriculum, now in the pilot phase, is an integrated module having Science, Math and Language Art threads. A "Web Lab", featuring living mats maintained in a mini-aquarium, and complete with remotely-operable instrumentation not commonly available in classrooms, will be available to classrooms over the Internet. Using that system, the responses of the mat community to changes in environmental parameters, (e.g., light, pH, flow, and temperature) can be monitored using microsensors. Students will be able to develop hypotheses and propose experiments in the Web Lab to test them. Data from these experiments will be posted in real time and students will be able to collect the data, analyze it, and post results and conclusions back to the web page in a true implementation of the scientific inquiry process. The web site will soon feature a four to five minute animated feature of an imaginary voyage into a microbial mat using a computer generated microscopic submarine set against videomicroscopy of real mats. The miniature explorers will point out features of interest as they measure some of the same parameters measured by researchers in our lab. Readouts on board the miniature submersible will be used to teach data graphing and analysis concepts. Some of this animation, and other materials generated by this project, are also being incorporated into the traveling museum exhibit "Alien Earths".
UR: http://exobiology.arc.nasa.gov/ssx/microecobiogeo/
DE: 1045 Low-temperature geochemistry
DE: 0400 Biogeosciences
DE: 0805 Elementary and secondary education
DE: 0845 Instructional tools
DE: 0994 Instruments and techniques
SC: Education and Human Resourcese [ED]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting