Friday, July 11, 2003

WRITER: Michael Childs, 706/542-5889, mchilds@coe.uga.edu
CONTACT: Ken Hay, 706/542-3157, khay@coe.uga.edu

UGA EDUCATION RESEARCHERS BRING VIRTUAL SOLAR SYSTEM PROGRAM
TO GWINNETT TEACHERS, MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS JULY 14-18

ATHENS, Ga. – Space. The Final Frontier.

At least it will be for some lucky Gwinnett County youngsters who will soon find themselves going where no man has gone before. But these young explorers will never actually leave the ground. The solar system has been squeezed into a new computer program called Astronomicon and will be the focus for a group of middle school-age kids attending a Virtual Solar System Summer Camp July 14-18 at the Gwinnett University Center.

More than a dozen youngsters from the Boys and Girls Clubs of Lawrenceville will get a rare opportunity to experience first-hand the creation of a virtual solar system through this computer camp run by UGA education researchers.

In addition, students will have the treat of hearing from Dennis Chamberland, a NASA spaceflight Programs Bioengineer. Chamberland, an active aquanaut involved as an advanced life support engineer for systems being considered for moon and Mars bases, will speak on Friday, July 18.

The VSS program is part of a research project called "Apprenticeship in Cyberspace," which is funded by a $1.07 million National Science Foundation grant. Ken Hay, a research scientist in the Learning and Performance Support Lab (LPSL) of UGA’s College of Education, is directing the project, along with Lynn Bryan and Norm Thomson, both associate professors in science education at UGA. The Astronomicon software, developed collaboratively by UGA researchers and by Cybernet Inc. specifically for the Apprenticeship in Cyberspace project will allow the fifth through seventh grade students to create and explore their own solar system as they learn about planetary motion and light, said Hay.

The Astronomicon software allows learners to collect information, create dynamic 3-D models of the solar system on the computer and then explore such relationships as phases of the moon, eclipses and seasons. Using this inquiry-based approach helps learners develop a deeper understanding of astronomy – one that goes far beyond a traditional descriptive or observational level.

Learners enter their solar system and explore phases in new ways: What does the Earth look like from the moon when the moon is in a crescent phase? Does the Earth have phases? The project combines the use of modeling tools to transform the textbook nature of astronomy education into new education where learners are developing 3-D models.

"The models are runnable, so learners can see if their ideas really work and if they don’t – what their limitations might be and explore how they might change them," said Hay.

As part of the larger project, Gwinnett-area middle school science teachers are participating in the program by attending a one-week interactive professional development course prior to the campers’ arrival to learn how to use the Virtual Solar System program and other advanced learning technologies developed at the LPSL. The teachers will then serve as mentors to the campers.

During the camp, participating teachers apprentice with the UGA researchers by working with two to three students on the VSS. This will give the teachers invaluable practice with the how real students interact and learn with new educational technologies. Armed with these experiences, teachers can modify and customize the new approaches developed at UGA so they can meet their own classroom needs.

"We no longer develop new learning technologies and ‘throw them over the school fence.’ Our approach is to introduce teachers to the science, pedagogy and technology, then give them an apprenticeship experience in how we envision it working in a classroom context. Then we support them as they take the core ideas and customize them to meet local needs and curriculum," said Hay.

The current project is a spin-off of a VSS project on campus in collaboration with J. Scott Shaw, a professor of physics and astronomy at UGA. But this project is different than most virtual reality educational projects.

"Instead of going into the virtual space to learn from someone else’s model, learners will go into the virtual space to create and test their own models. The construction and testing of their models is where we believe the greatest learning is possible," said Hay.

Hay’s career has included research and development in a diverse range of advanced applications of technology to learning. His earlier work included robotics for severely physically disabled students to enable them to conduct science experiments, real-time weather map and movie Internet service BlueSkies and student composition of multimedia documents.

For more information, visit the Virtual Solar System Web site at http://lpsl.coe.uga.edu/live/vss/.

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