The ITS Center promotes the concept of a team experience. Teams feature
researchers, educators, master teachers and students from a vast array of
disciplines collaborating
on the use of information technology to transfer current science research
into the classroom.
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(Administrative Team) |
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Participants in this project team investigate recent developments in landscape ecology, spatial statistics, geographic information systems (GIS) modeling, remote video imaging, and web-based virtual ecological inquiry that have provided new paradigms and powerful tools for addressing ecological issues over heterogeneous landscapes at multiple scales and enhancing ecological education. They will develop scientific inquiry projects to address spatial questions in their own disciplines of science using these IT-based quantitative approaches for incorporation into secondary or undergraduate curricula, and assess their influence on student learning. |
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Using the environment as a contextual setting for chemistry, this group will explore connections between current research in chemistry and geology and the topics covered in the high school chemistry curriculum with two goals:
The goal of the first summer is to answer the question, "How can information technology help high school students to better understand the core principle _________?" Participants in the program will have to identify a single core principle for elaboration into a classroom research project with scientific guidance from one of the Cohort leaders (Grossman, Miller, North or Simanek) and with educational guidance from the afternoon team.
The goal of the second summer is to provide information to complement the previously chosen core principle module to make the module more useful, more accurate, and rigorous enough to facilitate educational research, as well as to promote dissemination the modules among participants.
While the level of IT incorporated into each unit of this session varies, the primary goal of the Cohort leaders is to supplement basic understanding of fundamental chemical principles ordinarily taught in courses in chemistry, physics, and/or earth and environmental science classes and to highlight the importance of these basic concepts in current environmental science research. |
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The goal of this project is to engage teachers and students in the process of scientific discovery in the areas of plant biology and genomics. The scientific questions that are to be addressed are:
• How can 3D and 4D visualization be used to better understand plant growth and development?
• Using phenotypic time-lapse analysis, can we discover functions of sequenced genes in model plants such as Arabidopsis?
• Can we compare the growth and movement in Arabidopsis to the treasure of plant resources found in rainforest environments?
• If we discover new functions for genes in plants, can we use the genetic resources of diverse rainforest plants to improve crops and human uses of plants, while maintaining genetic diversity and sound ecological approaches?
To address the first two questions, students will be given seed from Arabidopsis insertion mutagenesis lines and wild type seed. They will then do time-lapse imaging of the plant and determine quantitative morphological characters that will describe its phenotype. To address the second two questions, we will partner with the researchers in science and science education at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden and do time-lapse imaging of fascinating plant movements in rainforest species. The two approaches will come together when we find genes that control Arabidopsis movements that can also be seen in rainforest plants. |
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Matter frequently exhibits dramatic changes in behavior when it contains particles or structural elements with sizes on the order of a nanometer (10-9, or one billionth, of a meter). As a simple everyday example, consider a pebble. If you drop the pebble, it will quickly fall to the ground under the force of gravity. If you smash the pebble before dropping it, some of the finer dust particles (on the order of 10-6, or one millionth, of a meter in size) may drift for miles in the wind before touching the ground. Other dramatic changes in behavior occur as the particle sizes become yet smaller, for different physical reasons. This fact is the basis for the current nanotechnology revolution, which is fundamentally changing the way that materials (including medicines) are engineered and even the way that experimental measurements are done.
This team will focus on the novel properties of matter at the nanoscale. Much of the research will be from the fields of colloid science and fluid mechanics, which have their roots in physics and mathematics. The following research topics will be considered. How can we get particles 1-100 nm in size to “self-assemble” on a surface, to make a novel optical device? How does the flow of a fluid change when the dimensions of a channel become very small, e.g. in the space between the reader head and the hard disk platter in your computer? How do interactions between atoms and molecules at the nanoscale lead to the properties that we observe at our scale?
Along the way, we will explore the following issues that are central to nanoscale science and technology:
• Concept of scale (length, time, mass)
• Types of forces and their importance at different scales
o Qualitative and quantitative descriptions
o Measurements
• Dimensional analysis
Images of nanoparticle systems, captured from microscopes with digital cameras, will provide the basic experimental data. Real-time digital movies of the particle systems will help develop the qualitative and quantitative understanding of forces at the nanoscale. Computer simulations of the physical behavior, based on mathematical models of the appropriate forces, will also be employed at both the fluid-particulate and molecular scales. Visualizations of corresponding experiments and simulations will be directly compared to evaluate the accuracy of the models. |
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The goal of the Water Environment project is to provide participants an opportunity to explore the relationship between human activity in the environment and the quantity and quality of water.
The project team will examine hydrology and water quality processes relevant to Texas water issues. Project participants will learn about watersheds, investigate how human activities alter hydrologic characteristics, and conduct in-depth study of hydrologic processes that drive the availability of water in Texas.
In addition, participants will learn about pollutants that negatively impact the quality of Texas waters and investigate transport and behavior mechanisms that drive the movement of these pollutants.
Working in an active and collaborative learning environment, project participants will conduct student-led research into fundamental hydrologic and water quality processes using information technologies such as Geographic Information Systems; web-hosted data describing watershed characteristics including topography, soils, and land use; large web-hosted databases on meteorology, water flow, and water quality; computer simulation of processes important to hydrology and water quality including runoff prediction and soil erosion; web-hosted literature and reports related to Texas water resources; and object-oriented/visual programming of hydrologic and water quality processes. |
