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e-Science Usability
Friday, 15 June 2007

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  Project Leaders
Rosemary Luckin
(LKL)
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Geraldine Fitzpatrick
(University of Sussex)

Steve Benford
(Nottingham University)

Project Members
Kevin Walker
Joshua Underwood(LKL)

Hilary Smith, Judith Good
(Sussex)

Peta Wyeth
(University of Queensland)

Project duration
2 years from April 2007
 
Project Web Site

Keywords
e-science, sensors, mobile technologies, grid computing

 

What is e-Science?

E-science is about global collaboration in science and the technology that supports this; data sharing tools, remote access to telescopes, environmental sensors, mobile devices used to collect and analyze data in the field. Technology is changing the way science is undertaken. It can also change the way teachers and learners participate in science, collaborating with experts and other schools, sharing data and resources.  But this brings challenges in usability, training, and organisation and curriculum management.

escience01

Project Aims

  • To develop e-science communities involving science teachers and their pupils, and to explore the barriers and usability issues that arise in learning contexts.
  • To expose young people - who will necessarily include future scientists - to the possibilities of e-science.

Status

We have run exploratory events with learners and parents and workshop sessions with teachers.  These are revealing usability issues both at the technical interface level and at the organisational level. Through these experiences we are building a community and moving towards the participatory design of tools to support teachers, learners and scientists engaging together around e-science learning activities.

group2M3 Sessions
M3 challenged learners to solve SMS clues in a treasure hunt that took them around Nottingham’s eco-campus using mobile phones and video cameras to collect evidence in an online gallery and record their experience. This led to our use of photo-stories as a tool for reflection. We are now working on an interactive tool to facilitate the integration of multiple data sources in collaboratively authored photo-stories.

DIY Energy Science Festival Events
We challenged participants to build and test the best wind turbine. Mobile phones captured video evidence of experiments and photos of designs, which were shared live through YouTube and Flickr and linked to online reports. Participants also consulted with an expert using Skype. Data from all experiments on a Google Docs spreadsheet identified the best turbines.

At workshops we used this activity to illustrate e-science learning. Then teachers produced their own designs for e-science learning activities using a preliminary set of guidelines.  Both the guidelines and the activities are being developed further collaboratively online and will lead to trials within schools and in other science learning contexts.

 
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