| Powers of Inquiry, Phase II |
|
|
|
The goal of this Phase II Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) application is to create a series of educational materials for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) entitled Powers of Inquiry: Using Image Analysis to Explore Environmental Health Science. The ten lessons to be published by the project will employ four advanced technology tools—NASA Image2000 (NI2K), ArcExplorer Java Edition for Education (AEJEE), ImageJ, and WebImage—to lead middle and high school students through inquiry-based explorations of ten case studies related to the mission of NIEHS. Three of these powerful image processing and analysis (IPA) and geographic information systems (GIS) software programs—NI2K, AEJEE,and WebImage—were specifically designed for use in education.The other software program—ImageJ—is a professional IPA tool that is already used by innovative educators. These programs will put substantial computing power in the hands of teachers and students, allowing them to develop their own research questions, conduct investigations, and come to their own conclusions about the data contained within digital images and map layers.In Powers of Inquiry, students will use NI2K, AEJEE, ImageJ, and WebImage to display and enhance digital images from research being conducted by NIEHS-supported and other scientists; display and animate archived and near-real-time imaging data relayed to Earth from orbiting satellites; capture and display images for microscopic and macroscopic explorations; apply centimeter, millimeter, nanometer, micrometer, mile,kilometer, and other spatial scales to images and maps, and make meaningful measurements of lengths,perimeters, and areas; calibrate images that contain temperature, chemical concentration, topographic, and other kinds of data and use the calibrated images to measure intensities and rates of biological and chemical processes; animate stacks of images and measure changes occurring with the passage of time, including events that occur in milliseconds or those that take days, weeks, and years; perform algebraic calculations on individual images and among sets of images to explore such topics as the electromagnetic spectrum and multispectral imaging; display point, line, and polygon data on maps; make comparisons among different map “layers” of a GIS project; enter their own field observations and combine them with data from governmental and private sources to create new maps; produce charts and graphs from mapped data; and represent map and image data in three-dimensional models..With these tools and the support provided by the Powers of Inquiry materials, students will strengthen their science and technology skills, become better consumers of scientific data, and develop an appreciation for the role that NIEHS plays in protecting the health of the nation. A“powers of ten” format will organize the lessons in Powers of Inquiry. Each lesson in the series will zoom in on environmental health issues, starting at the planetary level and moving through lessons about the stratosphere, coastal regions, communities, neighborhoods, homes, human organs, microscopic organisms,and human tissue cells to arrive at a lesson on the benefits and risks of molecule-sized nanotechnologies. The educational goal of the Powers of Inquiry materials will be to introduce environmental health science to middle and high school students with an engaging visual medium that involves them in inquiry-based activities supporting accomplishment of state and national standards for science, mathematics, technology, and reading education. Accomplishing the following Phase II project milestones will further these goals:
|