LEAD education initiatives

As collaborative partners in Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD), Millersville University and Howard University, along with several other education testbeds, are responsible for the evaluation and assessment of LEAD prototypes, and the development and dissemination of educational materials and services to the wider education community. Toward this effort, Millersville University is collaborating with other LEAD partner institutions, including local high schools in extending several existing tools such as Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) and NASA JPL's SWEET ontology for LEAD educational initiatives. Undergraduate students at Millersville have been involved in developing interactive modules and other learning materials around the IDV. Undergraduate students have developed an IDV beginner's tutorial that is specifically designed for pre-college teacher and student users. In addition, they have created IDV bundles that serve as a basis for the visualizations within the LEAD-To-Learn education modules. These modules allow students to interact with and visualize output from the NAM and WRF numerical models, and other data types, while learning through discovery related meteorological concepts. Undergraduate students have also been involved in a significant extension of the Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) ontology developed at NASA JPL to include quantities of relevance to mesoscale meteorology. Over 560 new quantities have been added, tripling the ontology vocabulary, and this number is likely to reach 1000. Another key enhancement of the Millersville effort is the addition of a glossary for the LEAD ontology. The SWEET-LEAD ontology will be wrapped as a Web Service at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, and will be accessible via the LEAD portal for query, info-mining, and resource cataloging, and is an essential component in the development of a dynamically adaptive learning environment for students and teachers. Finally, Millersville undergraduates have been working extensively with Howard University to develop educational supplemental materials for Howard's Weather Camp 2005. Undergraduate students at Millersville have developed specific IDV bundles that will be utilized to enhance the instructional material, but will also be used by Weather Camp 2005 students for research projects and further discovery. This paper will report on major education activities that are emerging from the LEAD project initiatives.