Draft White Paper Feb 21 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 which combines both science and computer science in an original mix we term Internetics to produce a new curriculum which spans K-12 through undergraduate education and outreach. The initiative will not only produce 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 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 and 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 curriculum will be designed so that as many Americans as possible can access it.

We will include outside collaborators through the NSF PACI (Partnerships in Advanced Computational Infrastructure) EOT (Education and Outreach) 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.

We have been successfully developing innovative web based education material in physics, computer science and engineering over the last two years. However although we will continue this as part of this project, that is 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 K-12 arena but 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 multi-disciplinary curriculum that could help fields like physics bring in new students and become more important by developing new base courses that all students 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. We finish with a list of participants and some of the proposals leveraged. Note much of the background detail can be found in the Web resource 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 recollection of their physics class 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 every one 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 in obtaining 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 law) 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 more general forms of information and this is increasingly the concern of the NSF centers, which previously focussed on numerical simulations. "Data intensive applications" such as bioinformatics and the analysis of scientific data from accelerators, telescopes, satellites are of growing importance. These have a broad set of enabling technologies -- no longer must one know how to solve differential equations but also key are compression algorithms and databases while the natural computer science research areas broadens 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 which 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 developed advanced web-based education and outreach but also at 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 fits together. Physics trains students to look at systems from a fundamental point of view and to analyze 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 as perhaps Java applets combined with numerical algorithms or physics experimental instrument connected to 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 a "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.

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 is "web-based" and that base Web Technology supports self paced asynchronous learning while a database (linked to web) 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 pro-active learning methodology when liken 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 not available 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 only need 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, which was fully universally accessible. 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 Partnerships in Advanced Computational Infrastructure (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 are 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, which are then mapped into different HTML displays for each client.

The second part of approach to universal access involves working with innovative new technologies developed by Lipson and Warner to aid users with severe muscular 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 a set of linked activities, which address transfer of both technology and instructional material from college to K-12 arena. We also intend synergistic projects which broaden appeal of science and engineering by developing courses and curriculum including new minors, which are attractive to a broad student base, independent of their major.

1. Evaluation using our national PACI EOT partners of principles that are needed to maximize universal access and to establish principles of 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 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 all curriculum. Further we will here develop the base XML templates that will ease development of quality material supporting universal access and a common look and feel. As well as extending existing physics initiatives, we will also perform 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 Courses (Fluid Mechanics, Aircraft and Spacecraft Dynamics, Statics and Dynamics, Mechanics of Materials, Thermodynamics, and Vibrations) material.
3. Deliver the produced material both locally and using TangoInteractive, remotely.
4. Design of Internetics minor to be offered for physics and engineering students and Science Communication minor to be offered to broad student body.
5. Produce and disseminate training material to enable other researchers and faculty to produce similar material
6. Set up an evaluation process that will enable us and others to critique our work and generalize the methodology.
7. Hold and attend workshops describing our and related work

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

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

Physics: Simon Catterall, Ed Lipson, Gianfranco Vidali developing web-based curricula

College of Engineering and Computer Science - Dept. 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, which 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). vBNS supplement 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 Defence High Performance Computing Modernization Program funds NPAC both in information technology (TangoInteractive) and training -- level around $1M per year