Lunar Pioneer: NSF

Showing posts with label NSF. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Moon's geology learned through gameplay

Would young people learn science better
if it were packaged in a videogame?

That's the question at the heart of the Selene project, originally funded by NASA and carried through a four-year grant from the NSF. Selene studies video game learning and the ways researchers can assess how effectively that learning takes place.

The Center for Educational Technologies at Wheeling Jesuit University created Selene as an online game to discover how organizations could best use video games to introduce important science concepts.

Selene challenges players to learn the major geologic processes scientists believe formed the modern Moon. Players create their own moon and then pepper it with impact craters and flood it with lava. It's a great opportunity for students to learn about lunar geology while helping researchers study some key videogame design principles. In addition, playing Selene offers a way to take part in the International Year of Astronomy 2009, a global celebration of astronomy and its contributions to society and culture, highlighted by the 400th anniversary of the first use of an astronomical telescope by Galileo Galilei.

CET's research project CyGaMEs uses Selene to introduce players ages 13-18 the Moon's geology and researchers track players' game-play to study how Selene helps players to pick up on that subject matter. Developers currently have the project aligned to National Science Standards and the Texas State Science Standards. Other states standards are currently being developed.

CET presents numerous opportunities for educators to become involved, including working on game design, development, collaborative research and utilizing the project with students.

The Center for Educational Technologies produced Selene to conduct its research. If you're a student between the ages of 13-18, we'd love to have you play. The game takes about an hour to complete, but you can spend more time after checking out Selene's various resources about the Moon. To play, though, you have to be enrolled by an adult recruiter to ensure parent/guardian consent for your participation.

If you're an adult who'd like to help out, click on the Recruiter button at left and help us find players to take part in the study. Being a recruiter is simple and doesn't involve a lot of paperwork. The whole process involves getting oral consent from a parent or guardian, then forwarding Selene registration access to your recruited players. It's that simple.

Join in this exciting venture and be a part of cutting-edge research sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Georgia Tech Partnering to Create National Robotics Strategy

Academic Leaders in Robotics Research Announce Effort To Create National Strategy for Robotics Growth

Citing the critical importance of the continued growth of robotics to U.S. competitiveness, 11 universities are taking the lead in developing an integrated national strategy for robotics research. The United States is the only nation engaged in advanced robotics research that does not have such a research roadmap.

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), a program of the National Science Foundation, is providing support for developing the roadmap, which will be a unified research agenda for robotics across federal agencies, industry and the universities.

The effort began last year and includes representatives from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and the universities of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, California- Berkeley, Southern California, Utah and Illinois, as well as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Henrik I. Christensen, the KUKA Chair of Robotics at Georgia Tech and a principal investigator for the CCC, is leading the group effort to develop the roadmap with the involvement of industry.

This spring, a series of workshops are being organized and this fall a National Robotics Senior Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., will take place. The conference will review the preliminary results from the workshops and take steps toward an integrated national research agenda. The roadmap will then be reported to the year-old Congressional Robotics Caucus, headed by U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.).

“It is essential that the United States begins to solidly outline a leadership position in robotics,” said Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon. “Robotics already is having a transformative impact on the workplace, from the factory floor to hospital operating rooms. In the decades ahead, this impact can be extended to our homes and our highways to increase our ability to live independently and to save lives.”

“The planning process now getting under way is a historic opportunity to build upon broad-based collaboration among industry and academic leaders in the field of robotics,” said Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough. “We want to create a plan that will keep this nation competitive in a technology that is rapidly advancing.”

The failure of the robotics community to previously speak with one voice has resulted in inconsistent funding and missed opportunities, said Matthew T. Mason, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. “The technology is finding wider application, but its full potential is not fully appreciated by policy makers,” he explained. “We need to develop a common vision so that we can work effectively with the Congressional Robotics Caucus and with funding agencies.”

Christensen noted that all of the planning events are designed to focus on the research needs that are vital to the development of a growing robotics industry.

“Several key competencies are not available today,” Christensen said. “Through a community effort that includes end-users, industry and academia, the key challenges and opportunities will be identified. The workshops and conferences will allow us to develop a mature plan.”

“The key to the workshops will be the collaborative discussions between representatives from both academia and industry,” stated John Reid, Director, Product Technology and Innovation at John Deere’s Moline Technology Innovation Center. “We need to proceed in a market-driven fashion to envision key future robotics-enabled capabilities and then map these capabilities to the required robotics technologies that we need to be researching and developing today.”

Doyle and Wamp of the Congressional Robotics Caucus expressed enthusiasm for the effort.

“We applaud the researchers at some of our nation’s top universities for this effort to craft a national agenda for robotics research,” they said in a statement released by the caucus. “We especially want to commend the presidents of Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech for their initiative in organizing this conference. The Congressional Robotics Caucus looks forward to reviewing the results of this important work so that we can more fully understand the impact that robotics is likely to have on the future security and prosperity of our nation.”