HR: 1340h
AN: ED23B-1285    [Abstracts]
TI: IT Tools for Teachers and Scientists, Created by Undergraduate Researchers
AU: * Millar, A Z
EM: amillar@hamilton.edu
AF: Hamilton College, #1166 198 College Hill Rd. Clinton, Ny 13323, Clinton, NY 13323, United States
AU: Perry, S
EM: perry@usc.edu
AF: Southern California Earthquake Center, University of Southern California, 3651 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089, United States
AB: Interns in the Southern California Earthquake Center/Undergraduate Studies in Earthquake Information Technology (SCEC/UseIT) program conduct computer science research for the benefit of earthquake scientists and have created products in growing use within the SCEC education and research communities. SCEC/UseIT comprises some twenty undergraduates who combine their varied talents and academic backgrounds to achieve a Grand Challenge that is formulated around needs of SCEC scientists and educators and that reflects the value SCEC places on the integration of computer science and the geosciences. In meeting the challenge, students learn to work on multidisciplinary teams and to tackle complex problems with no guaranteed solutions. Meantime, their efforts bring fresh perspectives and insight to the professionals with whom they collaborate, and consistently produces innovative, useful tools for research and education. The 2007 Grand Challenge was to design and prototype serious games to communicate important earthquake science concepts. Interns broke themselves into four game teams, the Educational Game, the Training Game, the Mitigation Game and the Decision-Making Game, and created four diverse games with topics from elementary plate tectonics to earthquake risk mitigation, with intended players ranging from elementary students to city planners. The games were designed to be versatile, to accommodate variation in the knowledge base of the player; and extensible, to accommodate future additions. The games are played on a web browser or from within SCEC-VDO (Virtual Display of Objects). SCEC-VDO, also engineered by UseIT interns, is a 4D, interactive, visualization software that enables integration and exploration of datasets and models such as faults, earthquake hypocenters and ruptures, digital elevation models, satellite imagery, global isochrons, and earthquake prediction schemes. SCEC-VDO enables the user to create animated movies during a session, and is now part of a multi-media, general education curriculum at University of Southern California. Throughout this meeting, at the SCEC booth, UseIT interns will be demonstrating both the serious games and SCEC-VDO. SCEC/UseIT is a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates site.
DE: 0815 Informal education
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting