HR: 09:30h
AN: ED51C-07    [Abstracts]
TI: S`COOL: Leveraging Information Technology Advances to Present K-12 Students with Specifically Relevant Satellite Data
AU: * Chambers, L H
EM: lin.h.chambers@nasa.gov
AF: NASA Langley Research Center, MS 420, Hampton, VA 23681-2199, United States
AU: Rogerson, T M
EM: tina.m.rogerson@nasa.gov
AF: Science Systems and Applications, Inc., 1 Enterprise Parkway, Suite 200, Hampton, VA 23666, United States
AU: Fischer, J D
EM: Joyce.d.fischer@nasa.gov
AF: Science Systems and Applications, Inc., 1 Enterprise Parkway, Suite 200, Hampton, VA 23666, United States
AU: Moore, S W
EM: Susan.w.moore@nasa.gov
AF: Science Systems and Applications, Inc., 1 Enterprise Parkway, Suite 200, Hampton, VA 23666, United States
AB: The Students` Cloud Observations On-Line (S`COOL) Project began in 1997 as a way to connect K-12 classrooms directly with ongoing NASA Earth Science research. Through the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) project, students as young as kindergarten have been involved for more than 10 years in providing ground truth observations of cloud cover and type. NASA scientists use these observations as part of the validation effort for understanding cloud effects on the Earth's energy budget. In addition, since the beginning, the project has also focused on students doing their own data analysis. However, not very many S`COOL participants actually performed much data analysis in the first years of the project. Over the last year and a half, the S`COOL team has worked to provide additional scaffolding for student data analysis, by leveraging emerging information technology developments to select and present specifically relevant satellite data to the students. In addition to the simple, standard visualization of the ground and satellite cloud information, we have provided a direct link to the specific 5-minute MODIS image, through the MODIS Rapid Response website. Over the summer, we added tutorials explaining how students can also bring in the atmospheric profiles from CALIPSO and/or CloudSat, when there is a near overhead pass of these satellites. In addition to the direct links to satellite imagery and data, we have also implemented a web-based classification and comment system. S`COOL participants can provide additional comments on the ground to satellite correspondence, after the satellite data are processed by FLASHFlux about a week after the student ground observation. Comments are emailed to the S`COOL team and enable additional interaction with the participants. Finally, new data analysis tools focusing on commonly-used spreadsheet software were developed over the summer by a team of college student interns. The addition of all these new resources and tools has resulted in a large increase in the level of interaction between S`COOL participants and the NASA team. With the posting of the new Excel tools, we anticipate a large increase in active data analysis by our K-12 teachers and students.
UR: http://asd- www.larc.nasa.gov/SCOOL/usedata.html
DE: 0321 Cloud/radiation interaction
DE: 0805 Elementary and secondary education
DE: 0815 Informal education
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting