Simon Buckingham Shum, Senior Lecturer in Knowledge Media, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
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On Fri 25th Feb, 2005, I ran 3 hands-on, interactive sessions with 90 Year 5 pupils (9+10 yr olds) at Bushfield Middle School, Wolverton, Milton Keynes, introducing them to the joint work I've been doing with the Mobile Agents Project at NASA (as part of the e-Science CoAKTinG Project).
These resources are to help Bushfield staff and pupils, and anyone else interested(!), to view the slides, film clips and animations which bring alive the excitement of human exploration in space, and especially, the importance of computer-supported work in the future.
The Big Question you may be asking after the Mission to Mars! session is... How do I become an astronaut? Well, here are answers from NASA in the USA, and from ESA the European Space Agency). Here's a useful career page from Space.com which tells you what to do right now! And lots more info if you do a web search on this question...
Here are my slides. Get a teacher or techie person to help download this if you hit problems [Compact Acrobat version 2.6Mb] [Orig., customisable PowerPoint version with slide animations 15.7Mb] (requires Microsoft PowerPoint or the free PowerPoint Viewer)
In the slides there are jumping off points into QuizMaps. These were a kind of Dialogue Map created in the Compendium concept mapping tool being developed in KMi, and used in the NASA field trials (see next bullet point). This gave the pupils a taste of their questions and discussions being mapped in real time. To simulate Mars astronauts collecting and analysing science data, pupils took digital photos and movies of certain 'alien lifeforms' in the classroom, which were then imported into the Science Dialogue Maps for discussion (albeit very brief!). View the Dialogue Maps on the Web. A couple of screenshots are below...
To learn more about the field trial rehearsals for human exploration of Mars, see photos and reports written in the Utah desert in April 2004 on the Mars Desert Research Station Field Trial Reports website: here's the commander's introduction to Crew 29's Mission, my intro to the science collaboration tools we used (you've already seen Compendium and the Meeting Replay tool), and like a photo diary, here are the daily field reports written by the crew members (select Crew 29)
View movies of the historic Apollo Missions which landed on the Moon in 1969 - go to the the Apollo Archive website, and select Apollo Multimedia to view Apollo 11 and 12 MPEG videos.
View animations and videos about NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers which are roving on Mars right now! See the Gallery for lots of photos and artists' work, plus videos recorded by the Rovers, documentaries, and animated mission sequences.
Pro Material [advanced level!]:
Here is a 'Webcast' (a replayable seminar which was broadcast on the Web) of a talk given at the Open University by Maarten Sierhuis from NASA, called Human and Robot Exploration on Mars or Moon. If you want to see what a scientific publication reporting this work to other scientists looks like, see Automating CapCom Using Mobile Agents and Robotic Assistants by the project leader Bill Clancey and the team.
CoAKTinG Project funded by the UK e-Science Programme and the EPSRC AKT IRC
QuizMaps & Dialogue Maps
