Project
description | The Digital Weather Station (DWS) is an exhibit at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis. The goals of the DWS are to develop students' understanding of the weather as a three-dimensional system and their skills in the scientific process of visualization. The DWS runs on three high-end SGI Workstations and utilizes an interface that we designed to enable young children to manipulate sophisticated, expert level scientific visualization tools (VIS5D). The tool supports learner's immediate creation of 3D interactive, dynamic visualization of standard weather parameters. These tools are not scaled down tools visualizing fictitious data, rather they are the same tools and data that hundreds of scientists use everyday. We have designed and developed a learner's interface that almost eliminates the technical and domain learning curve these tools create for novices. This tool provides an unprecedented opportunity for inquiry-based and problem-based learning activities where the technology can visualize a 3D phenomenon. Starting January, we will be conducting experiments with this tool to explore how learners appropriate this new lens on the world of meteorology. The DWS represents a major commitment in terms of programming time by IU Center for Innovative Computer Applications. The research program will explore the abilities of the learner using this tool in a variety of contexts. We have three major goals for this research program. First is the establishment of a research base on dynamic 3D visualization by learners of a broad age range. This project is the first known by the authors to make dynamic 3D visualization tools publicly available to learners as young as 8 years old and will give us unprecedented opportunities to develop this research base. Second we will explore small group construction of knowledge about visualization and atmospheric phenomena through a series of studies where the DWS is used in a variety of situations adopting various pedagogical strategies. These strategies will include open exploration, challenge questions, guided discovery, and anchored instruction. Third, we are interested in tool design issues for learners. We would like to develop and test LCD features that are empirically derived, refined, and then generalized within the aforementioned instruction strategies. |
Theoretical
background | First, is the recognition of the central role tools have in the community of scientific practice and the powerful role they have in the enculturation process. Based on the theories of situated cognition, this project centers around a notion developed by Lave and Wenger called "technologies of practice." Lave and Wenger make the case that tools embody a community's practice in an unique way and give learners an immediate and powerful method of connecting to a community. Visualization tools are a vital part of current scientific practice and can have a significant role in learning science. The DWS creates a powerful authentic learning opportunity where a set of computational tools from a community of practice of atmospheric scientists can become a powerful enculturation inducement for "newcomers" into the community of practice. Second, this project builds on the work to develop a Learner Centered Design (LCD) paradigm to design computational learning tools. LCD was developed at University of Michigan's HICE lab by Soloway, Guzdial, and Hay. The notion is that increased computing power has created a opportunity to make tools easier to use. Additional computing power should now attend to issues of learning. Visualization and atmospheric science are challenging for the learner in terms of both knowledge and skills. We have designed a learner interface that supports the process of visualization; a tool that supports learners to explore the concepts of visualization in a powerful and relevant way. Third, we will incorporate the actor-network theory to trace the evolution and diffusion of student's understandings as they emerge and diffuse while using the tool (Latour, 1987; Roth, 1996). The visualization tool simply presents 3D representations of the complex phenomena, students will then have to hypothesize beyond the information given (Perkins, 1991) to develop explanations regarding the phenomena underlying the on-screen representations. By examining dyadic interactions, our research team intends to capture a rich picture of the learning that is occurring. Also, by tracing the evolution of these understandings we expect to show how student understandings are "constructed" out of and "contextualized" in the concrete particulars of the situation in which they are being developed and used; potentially, providing more empirical support for theories regarding the situated nature of knowing and providing insights to the design of robust learning environments. Fourth, weather is an domain where a three-dimensional and systems perspective is vital for deep understanding. In general, the research has shown that learners have many misconceptions about such complex phenomena. |
| Partnership | Intra-project Research Partnerships - Partnerships that directly relate to the DWS. Instructional Contexts: We are interested in developing partnerships with larger curricular projects and contexts. We have a promising tool that can be used in a large number of contexts, we would like to test the tool in these contexts. Underlying Visualization Tools: We would like to form relationships with the developers of the underlying visualization tools that are apart of this project. (Are you out there Bill?) Bill Hibbard has been an extraordinary resource for this project. We would like to form a more formal relationship where mutual influence could make the connection between a scientist's tool and a learner's tool much easier. Inter-project Research Partnerships - Partnerships with parallel interests Meta-Studies: We are interested in being apart of a meta-study that would bring a number of similar projects together and ask similar questions, using similar methods, about these types of environments. The Children's Museum of Indianapolis: We are interested in identifying projects that would be appropriate for The Children's Museum (TCM) of Indianapolis. TCM is the world's largest children's museum with over 1 million visitors annually. They are the pride of Indianapolis and are eager for innovative exhibits in this area. We have a strong relationship with TCM and see it as an opportunity for partnerships to form around a number of research projects. |