This award is for I2U2: Interactions in Understanding the Universe, an "educational virtual organization" (EDVO), which is designed to strengthen the education and outreach activities of scientific experiments at U.S. universities and laboratories by providing infrastructure support and a program framework for a portfolio of coherent, collaborative online science education laboratories. I2U2 maintains a growing online portfolio of educational laboratories for a diverse range of disciplines and provides tools and support services to assist developers in creating these educational resources. These laboratories break new ground by using the national Grid cyberinfrastructure for education in the same way that science increasingly uses the Grid. I2U2 collaboratories take two similar but distinct shapes. ?e-Labs,? delivered as Web-based portals accessible in the classroom and at home, are implemented with the ever-expanding capabilities of Web-based media. ?i-Labs,? are delivered as interactive interfaces typically located within science museums and similar public venues. I2U2 will deploy and maintain itself as a ?virtual organization? to provide support for participants across project boundaries and from many different home institutions who share a common interest in developing Grid-based education and outreach resources, and who seek to communicate, coordinate and reach their target audience through the Internet and the Grid. I2U2 will also extensively evaluate and assess the effectiveness and use of the portfolio of science education laboratories.
project studied a method to support and strengthen education and outreach activities of scientific experiments by providing a browser-based framework for three coherent, collaborative online education laboratories—QuarkNet’s Cosmic Ray Studies, the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment at CERN and seismic behavior at the LIGO Observatories. I2U2 has created and maintains an infrastructure and common fabric to develop hands-on laboratory course content and provide an interactive learning experience that brings tangible aspects, including experimental data, of each experiment into an accessible "virtual laboratory." Evaluation data show that when students engage in these scientific investigations, they develop a broader frame of reference for science. They understand, perhaps for the first time, how scientists make new discoveries and how they talk about their work. Further, data show that I2U2 teacher professional development workshops provide effective opportunities for teachers to guide student learning by means of the e-Labs by experiencing the e-Labs as their students would. The I2U2 collaboration of scientists, computer scientists and educators directly addresses the national priority to grow and sustain the scientific workforce by providing effective educational opportunities based on scientific and engineering practices. The framework has also been used to test the idea of using the framework to support a cosmic ray exhibit and learning experience at the Adler Planetarium. Broader Impacts I2U2 has supported the development of three e-Labs and one i-Lab and the evaluation effort to determine the effectiveness of these as instructional models, including the teacher professional development workshops, for formal and informal learning. Over the course of the project and as of August 28, 2013: 1,425 teachers have e-Lab accounts. 5,053 students in 4,367 research groups have e-Lab accounts. Users have created 16,844 plots and 1,560 posters. Students have uploaded 54,200 cosmic ray data files from QuarkNet classroom detectors. One file represents approximate one day of data. Through QuarkNet the I2U2 resources are perfectly poised to support the Next Generation Science Standards, particularly science practices and, depending on the topic, some or all crosscutting concepts and a number of core idea endpoints.
