Contact: Maridith Geuder
A cooperative effort involving two Mississippi universities is bringing the world's oceans into classrooms around the United States.
This summer, the University of Southern Mississippi and Mississippi State University join with St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., to provide hands-on training in marine science and emerging technologies. The program involves 360 K-12 teachers and students over a two-year period.
While giving primary focus to marine sciences, the Consortium for Oceanographic Activities for Students and Teachers-COAST--has the broader goals of encouraging students to study science and to consider scientific career fields. Funded by the Office of Naval Research and nearly 20 other agencies, the $2.1 million partnership is expected to reach a total of five million students within five years.
"This is the largest educational project the Navy has ever funded," said R. Dan Brook of MSU's Center for Education and Training Technology, a principal COAST investigator.
Applications currently are being accepted, with tuition, room and board, and a stipend available to participating teachers. Academic credit also is available through the program.
Mississippi State launches its educational component in June. Known by the acronym STARBORD, it includes six computer technology workshops that involve the translation of ocean data into visual images. STARBORD stands for Stimulating Teachers About Resources for Broad Oceanographic Research Delivery.
"Everyone is affected by the world's oceans," said STARBORD researcher Charles Calvo. Drawing on supercomputing technology developed at MSU's Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation, STARBORD will enable the visualization of data in three dimensions, he added.
As a result, teachers should be able to gain a better understanding of ocean topography, temperatures, and marine life, said Calvo, director of MSU's Imaging Laboratory in the School of Architecture.
Teachers in the STARBORD workshops also will learn to use multimedia technology ranging from QuickTime video to World Wide Web authoring tools for their classes. For each summer of the next two years, as many as 30 teachers may apply for each session in the different geographic regions.
Each university has a distinct role in the project, said USM's Sharon H. Walker. She is principal investigator and administrator of the J.L. Scott Marine Education Center and Aquarium, a part of that university's Institute of Marine Science and the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
Under Walker's direction, Southern Mississippi's five-year-old Operation Pathfinder has expanded to become a national program that trains elementary and middle school teachers in marine science concepts. The Scott Center is among six training institutes around the U.S. (Others are at Cornell University, University of Delaware, University of Wisconsin, University of Washington, and the University of Hawaii.)
St. Norbert College will round out the COAST effort with a program called Ocean Voyagers, a middle school project designed to integrate oceanography into interdisciplinary topics such as math, physics and literature.
More information about the project can be found at www.coast-nopp.org.