CILT99 Presentations

Visualization and Modeling

Growing CyberPlants for Fun and Learning

Marie Bienkowski
http://www.viz.ctl.sri.com/cyberplants

In the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History, a rain forest has been grown from artificial leaves that were hand-crafted by thousands of students. Now, imagine a rain forest built by students in cyberspace where they craft their leaves and vines and trees using plant generation algorithms that run on video game machines, thereby creating a massively shared virtual reality. This is the vision our seed grant is helping to realize.

The technical foundation of this vision is already laid through the invention and continuing development of techniques for plant generation and rendering (Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, 1990). Furthermore, next-generation game machines will have Internet connectivity and sufficient computational speed to render millions of polygons per second. Thus, the provocative possibility is that the next big breakthrough in educational technology will be through high-speed visualizations and game machines.

In our CILT seed grant we have been mapping out the components needed to realize this breakthrough. This involves experimenting with the algorithmic plant software used for rendering, identifying potential partners, and characterizing the tasks that students will find both entertaining and educational. One possible game has students setting up an environment and then designing plants to fit it. This involves students in "growing" plants, designing collaborative landscapes, and studying how a plants' distinctive morphology adapts it to certain climates.

We are using the xfrog (www.greenworks.de) plant generation system to create wireframe models of plants. These models are then rendered and made accessible as VRML models. Important issues are how to adapt the interfaces of algorithmic plant tools for students and how to provide case libraries that will eliminate the difficulties of starting from scratch but will still preserve the challenge and excitement of creating plants algorithmically.

Integrating Modeling and Visualization within Teacher Education

Lisa Bievenue

Part of the EOT-PACI (Education, Outreach and Training for the Partnerships for an Advanced Computing Infrastructure) mission is to provide teacher training on computer-based modeling and scientific visualization. The EOT-PACI intends to, through.collaborations with LIS partners and schools of education, and by leveraging the power of their alliance, including regional PACS (Partners for Advanced Computational Services), target critical points at which to support the use of computer-based modeling and scientific visualization. One such critical point is teacher education. Thus the EOT-PACI group plans to host a national workshop to understand how EOT-PACI partners, in collaboration with their parent organizations, National Computational Science Alliance and the National Partnership for an Advanced Computational Infrastructure, can work with colleges of education to incorporate computer-based modeling and scientific visualization in their science education courses.

Specifically, the EOT-PACI partnership proposes to contribute to teacher education in two ways: 1. Technology transfer of visualization and modeling tools, learning environments, and knowledge mining tools. This would include adapting technology for educational settings that have known barriers, such as low bandwidth or low-end computers. 2. Bridge scientific and education communities by developing and supporting an infrastructure to support relationships among scientists and educators. This infrastructure might include 1-to-1 mentoring relationships, but would more likely build on teleapprenticeship relationships. These relationships might consist of teachers, undergraduates and graduate students participating in special programs and internships with scientists. These teachers, undergraduates and graduate students then become intermediate links between scientists and educators. In addition, EOT-PACI partners will often assist in mediating communication among communities. This infrastructure would not just aid teacher educators in learning to use modeling and visualization, but also in why to use it.

Founding SciCentr: a Multiuser, Interactive 3D Virtual Science Center

Margaret Corbit
http://www.tc.cornell.edu/Exhibits/Worlds

Just three years ago, virtual reality on the desktop was a dim fantasy. Today, anyone on the Internet can download a free 3D browser. The appeal of 3D mulituser environments is well known in gaming and entertainment. The teenaged and young adult audiences for this technology is growing exponentially. The Cornell Theory Center's exploration of this new medium is natural to the evolution of CTC's use of the Internet for research communication, training, and informal science education.

CTC is in the early stages of developing a virtual science center, SciCentr, built by and for young adults and the young at heart. SciCentr will encompass hands-on exhibits, lab spaces, science fairs, and communication spaces. These will include interactive interfaces to simulations and visualizations created to communicate key concepts in science and technology to a general audience, for example a space based on Mars topographic data from the Soujourner rover (Cornell/NASA/USGS collaboration). Using Active Worlds technology, we hope to incorporate simulations with visualized results in a multiuser context. Imagine, for example, a singing fountain that responds to notes played by many users, sends them back a chord of the composite sounds and simultaneously provides a visualization of the waveform in a Web window. Cornell programmers are working with artists at Art Center College for Design in Pasadena, CA, to create this as a focal feature for an area centered on wave science..Exhibit content will be created by teams of students and professionals from a wide range of disciplines. At Cornell, SciCentr initially will involve students and faculty from the departments of Fine Arts, Communications, Electrical Eng., Computer Science, Plant Sciences, Astronomy, Geology, and Molecular Biology. These teams are directly involved in national and international collaborations with other institutions through our involvement with the Contact Consortium and Questacon, Australia's national science center.

Learning Science through Multisensory Immersion via Virtual Reality

Chris Dede
http://www.virtual.gmu.edu

Imagine launching and catching balls in an environment with neither gravity nor friction. Imagine creating and altering electrostatic fields, releasing charged particles to be propelled through those fields. Imagine manipulating atoms and observing the forces created when molecules bond. Then, as a giant step further, imagine being able to directly experience these phenomena by becoming a part of them "inside" a virtual world: being a ball as it bounces, riding on a test charge as it moves through an electrostatic field, becoming an atom as it bonds. These are the kinds of learning activities enabled in the virtual worlds of ScienceSpace. Our NSF-funded research suggests that such immersive, multisensory experiences enhance students' abilities to conceptualize and integrate complex, abstract scientific ideas.

Many groups are developing sophisticated instructional designs with well-understood, conventional technologies, such as today's personal computing and telecommunications devices. In contrast, our work explores the strengths and limits for learning of a very powerful emerging technology, virtual reality (VR). However, Project ScienceSpace does not focus solely on developing educational worlds using an interface that enables multisensory immersion. In addition, our studies are exploring new ideas about the nature of learning based on the unique capabilities for research that virtual reality provides. ScienceSpace worlds enable extraordinary educational experiences that help learners challenge their intuitions and construct new understandings of science. Our evaluations are designed to examine various aspects of this learning experience, process, and outcomes. Sophisticated experimentation along these dimensions is critical to determining the educational potential of three-dimensional, sensorily immersive virtual environments, a medium that the entertainment industry will place "under the Christmas tree" within the next decade.

Interactive Mathematical Biology's Role in Curricular Reform: BioQUEST Simulations and Mathematics for Problem-Solving

John R. Jungck
http://bioquest.org

Mathematics has played exceptionally important roles throughout the history of biology. More biology students take Calculus than any other single constituency. Too frequently, textbook authors have unappreciated mathematics in biology curricula because they assume that biology students have an inadequate mathematical preparation. This practice: (1) deskills many biology students, (2) is inconsistent with our requirements, (3) misrepresents contemporary biological research, and, (4) underprepares students to read many articles or to contribute to many areas of biology. However, the recent calculus and biology reform movements have empowered students to actively investigate the behavior of many famous mathematical models in biology. While numerous recent publications are replete with numerous models, there is a need to identify a succinct list of achievements that represent the power of mathematics in biology. Hence, ten equations that changed biology and a brief description of their historical importance are presented here with BioQUEST software instantiations in order to draw attention to a variety of mathematical models that have been intrinsic to significant discoveries in biology and to illustrate that the tools are currently available for engaging students in active investigation of biological phenomena and the development of systematic strategies for biological problem solving.

Intellectual Effects of Model Building

Clayton Lewis

The intellectual effects of model building Model building by adult scientists is richly rewarding intellectually. Can the intellectual benefits be reaped by young children who build animated computer models as part of their science study? Experience in the Science Theater/Teatro de Ciencias project, in which children used novel rule-based programming systems, provides some indications of how model building works and fails to work intellectually.

Introducing Social Cues in Multimedia Learning Environments: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on the Role of Pedagogic Agents

Roxana Moreno

The hypothesis that animated pedagogical agents can promote constructivist learning in a discovery-based learning environment was tested. Discovery-based environments offer the greatest potential for fostering learning, but based on the learner's freedom to explore, it threatens to be overwhelming. One way to combat this problem, is to provide students with individualized scaffolding. Especially relevant to multimedia learning is the emerging technology of animated pedagogical agents--lifelike on-screen characters who provide contextualized advice and feedback throughout a learning episode. Can animated pedagogic agents help students' understanding of a computer lesson? In order to help answer this question, the following set of experiments was conducted. In Experiment 1, students who learned about environmental science in a microworld with an agent outperformed students who learned the material in a hypertext environment, on transfer and motivation tests but not on retention tests. Experiment 2 showed two findings. First, students who learned with words spoken by a synthetic pedagogical agent outperformed students who received identical verbal material as on-screen text on transfer and retention tests but not on motivation tests. Second, students who learned with the image of the synthetic animated agent on the computer screen did not differ in their performance or motivation from those who learned without the image. In Experiment 3 the synthetic agent was replaced by a real-life agent video. The results replicated the pattern found in Experiment 2. Finally, in Experiment 4, the performance and motivation of students who learned with an agent through a bi-directional or dialogue-style language was compared.to the performance and motivation of those who learned with an agent that provided uni-directional or monologue-style language. Students in the dialogue group outperformed and were more motivated than those in the monologue group.

Welcome to SimPlayer: Web-Based, Interactive Data Visualization

Henry Olds

SimPlayer provides direct access to any web-based data. It reads that data and restructures it in a format that can be interpreted by a large set of visualization and manipulation components. It shows the data in a wide range of graphical representations. Any graphical representation can be animated so that the user is able to see the flow of the data over time. Multiple representations can be seen at the same time. For example, the path of a hurricane can be seen on a map. Simultaneously, a graph can show the varying wind speed of the hurricane over time compared with its changing pressure. All representations of the data are connected to the data itself, which can be viewed in connection with its representations. The user can see what data is being represented and how it is being represented. On the same web page, the user can choose multiple examples of a phenomenon to explore and compare (e.g. the paths of several hurricanes from different years can be animated and displayed on the same map). The user can interact with the data. When a pattern or trend is discovered, the user can make predictions, observe a visualization of the predictions, and then compare predictions with real data. In summary, SimPlayer turns common web pages into powerful, compelling applications that can convert incomprehensible, raw data into dynamic visualizations that enable individuals to make crucial insights, solve problems, and gain real knowledge. SimPlayer makes the common use of dynamic visualizations regularly "thinkable".

The WISE Malaria curriculum: Connecting students to an international scientific controversy through Internet-based activities.

Jim Slotta, Doris Jorde, Alex Stromme, and Marcia Linn UC Berkeley, School of Education
http://wise.berkeley.edu.

The Web-based Integrated Science Environment (WISE) provides a powerful new form of on-line curriculum activities. Each curriculum project consists of a series of activities that involve diverse materials from the Internet, as well as from classroom discussions and even hands-on experiments. Students typically work in pairs or small groups and perform a wide range of on-line activities, including the use of unique new visualizations. All student work is managed by our central server, and incorporated into assessments that are integral to the curriculum design. The design of WISE software and curriculum follows our theoretical framework of Scaffolded Knowledge Integration (Linn, 1995). Successful authoring of WISE curriculum requires a partnership of natural scientists, teachers, and educational researchers. The WISE Malaria partnership was formed to create a curriculum project that helped students build connections to one of the World's major health issues. Malaria was chosen as a topic because it involves ongoing controversy among scientists concerning how to control the spread of the disease. Previous research in the KIE and WISE Projects has explored the use of such controversies from science in the making as an effective source of science curriculum. While the disease of Malaria affects populations mainly in the central latitudes of our planet, it is truly a global issue. The WISE Cycles of Malaria project helps students understand the controversial choice (e.g., in allocation of funding) between pursuing vaccine and drug treatment research, pesticide development, or social programs for controlling Malaria's spread. The conceptual content of this project provides a wealth of opportunity for students to develop rich and multidisciplinary understanding of this controversy. Two international members of the Malaria partnership are translating the project into Norwegian for implementation in their own country.

Exploring Scaffolded Integrated Tool Environments for Learners

Chris Quintana

Computer technology is becoming more pervasive in everyday work activities. Consider, for example, the work of scientists. Scientists perform a wide range of activities when they investigate problems: they do research, collect and visualize data, build models, etc., all in a self-coordinated, dynamic manner. As such, there is now an array of computational tools and search engines, databases, graphing, animation, and modeling tools to support experts in scientific inquiry.

Aside from expert scientists, though, it is also important for students to engage in and understand the science inquiry process. However, the science inquiry process is not so straightforward for students. Science problems have characteristics of so-called "wicked" problems. Thus the science inquiry process can be considered to be complex, chaotic, and opportunistic. Novice learners trying to negotiate the complex inquiry process encounter several difficulties: (1) determining: the set of possible process activities and their rationales, (2) seeing how to perform the different process activities, and (3) planning and tracking activities and artifacts.

With Symphony, we are addressing these difficulties to make complex processes like the science inquiry process accessible to learners. While our recent work has involved developing individual learner-centered tools, we are now moving to the next level in learner-centered support. We are putting the tools together in a single environment: a.scaffolded integrated tool environment (or SITE) that offers tools plus process scaffolding. Thus for example, Symphony incorporates graphical process and activity maps, structured activity workspaces, and task and artifact management tools to help visualize and structure the science inquiry.

The aim of Symphony, then, is not so much to lead a student through an artificial step-by-step path through the investigative process, but to provide enough guidance and information so that students can negotiate the inquiry process, exploring different investigative possibilities for arriving at solutions to meaningful, complex problems.