White Paper March 6, 1999

3154432163 gcf@npac.syr.edu

All Web resources further documenting this white paper are available at http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/physicsedinit/index.html

We propose an initiative that combines both science and computer science in an original mix we term Internetics to produce a new curriculum spanning K-12 through undergraduate education and outreach. The initiative will produce not only new science and engineering modules, but also infrastructure that will enhance their delivery and uptake as well as a documented methodology and training for others to apply our techniques. The approach taken in our proposal is aimed at invigorating traditional majors; integrating them into interdisciplinary education; and improving broad-based science understanding. The college applications of our curriculum include both science majors and the broad base of non-science majors. The needed information technology includes many leading-edge research areas including distributed objects, networking, and collaborative systems. The project will have strong links to research and education in computer science. Particular attention will be given to the issues of universal access and the curriculum will be designed so that as many Americans as possible can access it.

We will include outside collaborators through the NSF-funded Education, Outreach, and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (EOT-PACI) team

to ensure that our activities integrate with the national agenda and, in particular, support the systemic initiative at the K-12 level. At Syracuse, our team includes computer scientists for the infrastructure as well as physics and engineering researchers and teachers to design and develop new curriculum materials.

Over the last two years, we have been successfully developing innovative Web-based education material in physics, computer science, and engineering. However, although we will continue this as part of this project, it just "buys us a place at the table". Rather, the special innovation and value of our proposal rests on its integrative linkage between physics, engineering, and computer science. We will not only extend our innovative Java and dynamic HTML curriculum to the K-12 arena, but also do it in a way that allows broad systemic dissemination through distance education and universal access. We are not just building nice courses for Syracuse students but doing it an innovative multidisciplinary curriculum that could help fields like physics bring in new students and become more important by developing new base courses that all students will want to take.

In the following, we discuss the importance of information technology in teaching science and then discuss three special building blocks of our project: Internetics, TangoInteractive, and universal access. Then we discuss the proposed activities where the major curriculum module is listed right at the end of the document. Finally, we give a list of participants and some of the proposals leveraged. Note that much of the background detail can be found in the Web resource link given at the start of this document.

The teaching of science presents special challenges. At the K-12 level, inadequate preparation of teachers in the sciences, especially in physics, is one of the reasons students often have negative recollections of their physics classes in pre-college years. At the college level, different challenges are present. For the teaching of science to non-science majors, it is required to have a course that, besides interesting and motivating students, gives them some basic foundation in scientific literacy, and increases in students’ mind the appreciation of the sciences. If we recognize that students taking general science courses come with very different backgrounds, then it is clear that reaching everyone in an effective way is no simple task. For students majoring in a technical field (physics, engineering, etc.), it is desirable to give them a deeper comprehension of technical subjects by making use of manipulatives and computer simulations. The physics and engineering faculty at Syracuse have pioneered the use of server- and client-based simulations to improve the learning environment. Here we need to broaden the range from college to K-12 science courses and to systematically link the simulations to TangoInteractive and the principles of universal access to enable broad dissemination through distance education.

Web-based information technology, especially if it supports both synchronous and asynchronous learning, could help us achieve the following goals:

1) Help high-school teachers obtain a firm grasp of difficult concepts in physics and give them the tools to present material in the most compelling way. For example, Java-type tools can give them the ability to "dissect" an experiment or physical demonstration (such as gravitational or Coulomb’s laws) and to answer "what if" questions(for example, related to some peculiar consequences of the fact that these are inverse-square laws);

2) Provide a synchronous learning environment in large enrollment general science courses through the use of Web-based active learning tools (Java applets) and collaboration technology (such as TangoInteractive). For example, in a collaborative environment, students would be able to provide answers to "what if" questions in real time, and the consequences of erroneous assumptions could be investigated.

3) Provide a set of tools to science majors to allow them to explore difficult and sometimes not very intuitive concepts. The use of Java applets and/or computer simulations, linked with live demonstrations of physical phenomena, could provide an excellent active-learning environment.

Web-based technology, up to now mostly in the form of electronic books and of tools for searches of archives of other sources, has shown the power of a distributed information environment. Now, however, we have to do more and better by going beyond the static (and passive?) learning environment phase to a dynamic (either directed or self-paced) one.

Computational Science is well known and typically defined as the interdisciplinary field in between computer science and "large scale scientific and engineering simulation-based" applications. Although computational science has been successful, the advent of the World Wide Web has highlighted the importance of general forms of information and this is increasingly the concern of the NSF centers, which previously focused on numerical simulations. "Data intensive applications" such as bioinformatics and the analysis of scientific data from accelerators, telescopes, and satellites are of growing importance. This new emphasis broadens the base of enabling technologies. Besides knowing how to solve differential equations, one must also be proficient with compression algorithms and databases; moreover, the natural computer science research areas have broadened from parallel computing to distributed systems and Web technologies. This has motivated us to propose consideration of Internetics as the interdisciplinary field between computer science and both simulation- and information-based applications. We have established computer-science courses that we term the "information-track" of our computational science program and, from 1995 to 1998, enrollment in Internetics has risen from 6 to over 100 per year, while that in the classic simulation track has dropped from 50 to 10. Our proposed base Internetics curriculum starts with NPAC’s successful High School Java Academy (offered this spring using TangoInteractive to Syracuse, Boston, Houston, and Starkville); and has undergraduate and graduate programs, through the four-course continuing-education certificate.

In this proposal, we use Internetics technologies to develop advanced Web-based education and outreach but also feature new physics education initiatives linking to Internetics. As an example, we are offering this fall, a new course Internetics and Communicating Science, which explores the new opportunities presented by the Internet for communicating science and quantitative ideas to laymen as well as to technically trained people. The course is designed for students with interests bridging science and communications: prospective science, journalism, and education majors. Note that a typical physics education is, in many ways, a better educational background than computer science to today’s major computer science challenge — designing and building distributed systems. We can quite easily train people to program in Java, but it is not so easy to design what should be programmed and how it all fits together. Physics trains students to look at systems from a fundamental point of view and to analyze things quantitatively (See Feynman’s role in Challenger disaster). A combination of Physics and a minor in Internetics is an interesting background for many areas such as a systems engineer designing global information systems or an experimental physicist designing new data analysis systems or a K-12 science teacher. Further the World Wide Web, suggests that different modes of communication will become important perhaps as Java applets combined with numerical algorithms, or physics experimental instruments connected to the Web may sometimes be more effective in communicating ideas than traditional multimedia or basic prose.

These ideas suggest that physics and engineering will become more attractive if combined with an "Internetics" minor including base information technology. Further, an optional elective in "science communication" could be of interest to students in many majors and become an attractive offering for physics departments.

The new academic curriculum suggest the use of distance education, as it will allow a few experts to deliver instruction to more students and this addresses both the shortage of trained faculty and the cost of developing new curriculum, which requires many students to amortize cost. NPAC has pioneered these ideas with TangoInteractive and WebWisdom (Web-linked multimedia database). This approach assumes that the future of all education and training will be "Web-based" and that base Web technology will support self-paced asynchronous learning while a database (linked to Web) will allow management and assessment. Then systems such as TangoInteractive enable so-called synchronous (interactive) and project-based learning with students, teachers, and graders interacting in real-time.

The synchronous approach enables an interesting proactive learning methodology when, like unto soapboxes of yore, one actively broadcasts the material with a "real teacher" available for questions. This is roughly the approach taken this semester to teaching Java at the K-12 level. In each of our examples, we are using distance education to offer courses or outreach material that is unavailable through traditional learning opportunities.

On the basis of the initial collaboration between physics and NPAC, we have shown the feasibility of sharing Java applets for advanced modules built with these as components. We have also improved TangoInteractive’s support of this with shared dynamic objects, which need only to be placed in a Web page to enable the collaborative mode.

There is increasing realization of the importance of making information (including education) available to all Americans, independent as far as possible of physical disabilities and of the quality of access. This goal is important but has many technical and infrastructure challenges to be overcome. It would be unrealistic for our project to deliver material in a fully universally accessible form. However, we can make contributions to overcoming the technical difficulties and ensure that our material is designed as well as possible to work with available technology. Through our partnership with the NSF PACI-EOT team, we will work with Wisconsin’s Trace Center, which has pioneered the design principles for universal access. The simplest basic idea is to produce material where each document component has clear function and supports alternative views to enhance accessibility. We are studying the value of TangoInteractive’s ability to share documents at both page level and in smaller grain size W3C Document Object Model component level and hope to separately start a significant collaboration with the Trace Center in this area. This exploits the shared event model of TangoInteractive, which allows each client to choose different displays of a given shared object. As a general principle, educational material should not be built in conventional HTML (where the function of a document object component depends on both its innate properties and obscure details of the HTML layout). Instead one should use XML to define base educational objects of clear structural significance that are then mapped into different HTML displays for each client.

The second part of our approach to universal access involves working with innovative technologies developed by Lipson and Warner to aid users with severe physical disabilities. These will represent a good test case for our general principles and enable us to improve access for an important segment of the disabled community.

We intend to develop a set of linked activities addressing the transfer of both technology and instructional material from college to K-12 arena. We also intend to form synergistic projects to broaden the appeal of science and engineering by developing courses and curriculum including new minors that will be attractive to a broad student base, independent of their majors. Our proposed activities include:

1. Evaluation, using our national PACI-EOT partners, of principles that are needed to maximize universal access and design shared simulation and interactive modules that are valuable in K-12 arena and contribute to systemic initiatives.
2. Modify and develop modules for courses like Science for 21st Century and Science and Computers where TangoInteractive and NeatTools (visual programming environment for human-computer interfacing) are fully integrated to support interactive applets, quizzes and glossaries. In particular TangoInteractive delivery and universal access should be assumed in basic design and implementation of the entire curriculum. Further, we will develop here the base XML templates that will ease development of quality material supporting universal access and a common look and feel.
3. We intend to unify our activities across physics and engineering using cross-cutting themes. Initially we intend an advanced module on Space Exploration described at the end of this white paper. Besides extending existing physics initiatives, this unified module implies curriculum development and outreach work in two further areas given below. Of course these other areas will also use the methodology established in steps a and b.

• Design and implementation of High Energy Experimental Physics modules (incl. linked instruments)
• Develop new mechanics-based engineering course (fluid mechanics; aircraft and spacecraft dynamics; statics and dynamics; mechanics of materials; thermodynamics; and vibrations) material.

1. Deliver the produced material both locally and using TangoInteractive, remotely.
2. Design of Internetics minor to be offered for physics and engineering students, and Science Communication minor to be offered to broad student body.
3. Produce and disseminate training material to enable other researchers and faculty to produce similar material.
4. Set up an evaluation process that will enable us and others to critique our work and generalize the methodology.
5. Hold and attend workshops describing our activities and related work.

This project is both content and technology driven. Our philosophy is to command the best resources towards the presentation and teaching of educational material on a given topic. There are a great number of sites on the Web dedicated to astronomy or to the teaching of physical phenomena. Most of them are "static", where the information is provided with no effort to pace and test the learning acquired by the user. Even the best, such as the ones linked from the Web site Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, or the Physics 2000 Project have a more restricted scope than our project, as explained below.
Here are some examples on how specific technologies can be used to reach specific teaching goals in the proposed learning unit "Space exploration":
1. The physical laws dealing with concepts as basic as force and inertia are often difficult to teach. "What if" scenarios are particularly effective in overcoming misconceptions. Java applets, as used in our "SETI" and "Mind and Machine" modules, are particularly appropriate for such a task, since they allow the user to recreate a "thought" experiment. When these are used in a synchronous learning environment supported by collaborative technology, students can be guided through the learning experience of being shown why and how their misconceptions yield to erroneous results. So far, educators have made sparse use of such Web tools, in part because the Java applets that have been written so far were too unsophisticated to be of use in most learning environments. These feature a potentially heterogeneous audience and complex concepts requiring more than simple visualization techniques employed in the early Java applets. Now, improved technology and increased expertise make it possible to write applets not to achieve striking effects, but rather with the goal of providing an effective, multi-step learning environment. Furthermore, thoughtful integration of Java applets and collaborative technology would provide an environment where the teacher governs the pace of exploration.
2. Visualization of phenomena that are otherwise impossible to capture because they occur too fast, too slow, or at a scale that cannot be easily shown. Examples are wind flow past wings, astronomical events, or the structural response of materials or structures used in aerospace; these can, in fact, be effectively presented using graphics tools that are easily delivered through the Web. This is exemplified in Higuchi’s work described on the site for MRA grant activities (http://www.simscience.org).

3.Remote operation and visualization of experiments that are otherwise difficult, unsafe or expensive to reproduce at other locations can be achieved using Web technology. For example, the subject of potentially harmful radiation, can be explored at different levels. K-12 graders can learn about measuring radiation and its effects by controlling remotely a set-up provided by the high-energy experimental group. College students can take advantage of state-of-the-art instrumentation to obtain quantitative data for a project on designing materials or part of instrumentation for a spacecraft.
Physics Concepts of this module include:

1. Scientific goals of space exploration. Background about the physics of space travel, the cosmos, scientific discoveries related to space exploration, etc. Examination through simulations of aberrant behavior of objects /systems when physical laws are suspended or modified. Science in science fiction (Especially appropriate for younger audiences).
2. Web-based module to be developed by the High Energy Group to measure radiation damage of materials using remote sensing and supporting remote "on-demand" control of actual experiments; it includes other aspects of radiation as is relevant for space exploration (for example, detector of antimatter).
3. Response of the human body to space flight and remote sensing of bioresponse to interstellar travel conditions. This can include aspects of the telemedicine work that Warner and Lipson are involved in.

Engineering Concepts addressed in the Space Exploration module include:

1. Issues in the construction of spacecraft, such as elastic properties of materials used in shells of spacecraft and simulations of dynamic instability of materials ("snaps through buckling").
2. Simulation of response of materials to situations encountered in space.
3. Simulations of navigation in space and aerodynamics of flight in near-Earth orbits.

NPAC: A computational science/Internetics research and development organization: Geoffrey Fox (NPAC director, Professor of Physics and Computer Science), Edward Lipson (Universal Access), Marek Podgorny (Education Technology)

Experimental High Energy Physics: Marina Artuso, Tomasz Skwarnicki, Sheldon Stone — transferring research to education

Physics: Simon Catterall, Edward Lipson, Gianfranco Vidali — developing Web-based curriculum

College of Engineering and Computer Science - Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAME): Hiroshi Higuchi, Alan Levy, Jacques Lewalle — developing Web enhanced courses and faculty training

Syracuse University naturally funds curriculum development.

Physics and Engineering parts of NSF fund the research that will be basis of educational modules, produced in this project.

NSF CISE Directorate: Two MRA (add-on to old supercomputer centers) grants (NPAC and Rice University; Cornell, SU Physics/MAME and NPAC). A vBNS supplement has been added to SU MRA.

NSF CISE: NCSA PACI funds NPAC for both EOT (Education Outreach and Training) and collaboration technology. Fox leads EOT Learning Technologies and Graduate activities. Note EOT activity is jointly organized between the two PACI sites — NCSA at Illinois and NPACI at San Diego.

NSF EHR: CCD Curriculum Development

DARPA and NEC Foundation fund NeatTools and our work in universal access

Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program funds NPAC both in information technology (TangoInteractive) and training — level around $1M per year.