| Project | Digital Weather Station |
| Contact | Ken Hay University of Georgia |
| khay@coe.uga.edu | |
| URL | lpsl.coe.uga.edu/LIVE/ |
| 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 built on 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. 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 knowledge construction about visualization processes and atmospheric phenomena through a series of studies where the DWS is used within a macrocontext. 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 strategy. |