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Space Weather for Kids

2008; American Geophysical Union; Volume: 6; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1029/2008sw000437

1542-7390

M. S. N. Kumar,

Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies

This school year, students in Cheryl Williams's class of fourth through sixth graders may be able to look into the night sky and observe something that few American children have seen: the brightly lit, swirling colors of aurorae. “Some of my students can look from their porches at night and see the colors dance,” said Williams, who teaches at the Youth Education and Support Service (YESS) elementary school in Fairbanks, Alaska. “They come in the next morning, and they ask questions. Knowing that, I've planned activities to try and get them answers while still meeting our educational standards.” Farther south, Tom Traeger also wrestles with how to engage students while meeting grade requirements. Traeger teaches Earth science and geology at La Cañada High School in La Cañada Flintridge, Calif. “Education standards in the state of California require that high school students know about nuclear fusion within the Sun, about the magnetic field of planets,” Traeger explained. “I use those standards to weave in topics related to space weather.” Williams and Traeger are two of relatively few teachers in the United States who introduce concepts related to space weather into their classrooms, discussing with their students not just how solar storms are created but also general concepts about how such storms can disrupt satellite streams, zap spacecraft circuitry, and damage power grids. Williams's students visit NASA Web sites and download photographs to keep sunspot journals. With their art teacher, they use pastels to create their own pictures of auroral streamers. “Our school focuses on special needs kids. Some are bipolar, some have Attention Deficit Disorder, many are foster kids,” Williams explained. “I have to inexpensively engage them with activities that grab their attention.” Traeger's students use their classroom's magnetometer and solar telescope to delve into space weather subjects. “We discuss the 11-year sunspot cycle, how moving electrons induce a magnetic field and how magnetic fields are generated from the Earth's core,” he said. “And of course, we surf the Web a lot.” Williams's and Traeger's experiences highlight two important challenges to educating elementary, junior, and high school students about space weather. First, because there are no national mandatory education standards in the United States, curricula are up to the discretion of states, school districts, and individual teachers. Second, to ensure that most teachers can benefit from an activity, the space weather lesson plans must be easily understood, actively engaging, and inexpensive to implement. Over the years, several innovative approaches have developed to meet these challenges. These programs share a common thread: They link space weather science to standards in an interactive way. Although no mandatory national standards exist, in 1996 the U.S. National Academies published National Science Education Standards (NSES), meant to serve as guidelines for states and school districts as they develop their science education requirements. These standards suggest that students be taught that the Sun is a star and that the Sun is the source of the light and heat that warm the Earth and produce our climate. Because space weather is not explicitly addressed in NSES, curriculum developers have to get creative. “The light piece gives teachers a window into space weather, to X rays and science missions associated with solar flares,” said Roberta Johnson, executive director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association (NESTA) and a space weather scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research's High Altitude Observatory. But perhaps a more definitive link comes through electricity and magnetism within the physical science standards, she explained: “Magnets, magnetism, the planets and Sun as magnetic bodies—focusing on magnetism, primarily phenomenologically, is very effective because kids love it. It's invisible forces—it's like magic.” Johnson coordinates an online portal for information about the Earth and space sciences. Called “Windows to the Universe,” the portal contains primers and video clips on the Earth and space sciences, with a focus on science in action. Created in 1995, the Web site (http://www.windows.ucar.edu) contains more than 8000 pages written at three levels of content (upper elementary, middle, and high school), with specific notes to teachers about how information relates to NSES standards. Space weather content on Windows to the Universe is funded by the Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling (CISM), a U.S. National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center at Boston University. Through this content, students and teachers can read up on the ionosphere and aurorae, search for magnetic north with an interactive compass, solve space weather–themed word searches, and construct flip books to show the evolution of a solar flare. “Our pages related to space weather research and spacecraft get about 2 to 3 million hits every year,” Johnson said. Paralleling this example, several other Web sites seek to match teachers to NSES standards through interactive lesson plans about space weather. For example, on the Web site of the Space Weather Prediction Center, a branch of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), teachers can download lesson plans referenced to standards that instruct students on how to build a spectroscope, measure the solar constant, and even simulate the effect of the solar wind on the geomagnetic field (see http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/Education/index.html). Stanford University's Solar Online Activity Resources (SOLAR) Center provides NSES-referenced classroom projects that show students how to measure the angular velocity and rotational period of the Sun, design a solar cooker, and detect the Sun's effect on communications systems using AM radio reception (see http://solar-center.stanford.edu/). Students can also listen to helioseismological hums, read up on solar folklore and ancient observatories, and take Web-based quizzes about the Sun. “We want to show that the Sun, besides making our lives possible, has provided inspiration for arts and culture,” said John Beck, SOLAR Center's education and public outreach scientist. With such resources, teachers are encouraged make ties to other important standards set forth in NSES. “Space weather is well suited to educational connections dealing with the impacts of natural events on society,” explained Johnson. “There are also standards relating to technology, the history of science, science as a process. Hooks are there—we just have to use them.” A question that plagues curricula developers who focus on space weather is how to give form to intangible concepts, such as the radiation belts and the solar wind. A few years ago, education specialists at NASA's Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum (SECEF) realized that the answer lay inside computers, within the vast streams of data that NASA receives from its satellites and spacecraft. “The imagery from NASA missions is simply phenomenal,” said Troy Cline, an educational technology expert at SECEF. “Combine that with newly available technologies and the speed of communication, and we've got a way to put information instantly at our fingertips.” Cline and his colleague Elaine Lewis, a science curriculum coordinator at SECEF, work on developing content for NASA's Space Weather Action Center (SWAC; http://SunEarthday.nasa.gov/swac/). Launched in 2006, the program allows students to easily track solar storms online from their inception to their impacts at Earth (see Figure 1). “When students go to our Web site, they see a huge resource, a tool with about 36 different data sets from various satellites and ground-based observatories,” explained Lewis. “Through this and our simple setup guide, students can use remote sensing to collect results in near real time, with a lag of only about 2 hours.” The program works through a series of simple steps. First, students monitor for sunspots to see whether they are growing or changing. They then see if sunspot activity is generating storm signals. “Students can actually listen to radio waves from the Sun to hear if that sunspot is really active. So if they hear a storm, they can start monitoring the Earth's magnetic field for aurorae,” Cline said. After answering a few simple questions every day or every week, the students are ready for the last step of the program: developing their own space weather report. “Using really simple and inexpensive software, a webcam, and a piece of cloth to make a bluescreen, teachers can quickly set up a little TV studio,” said Cline. “Soon kids can start generating CNN-style news reports on space weather.” The opportunity for students to act like they are on television is what captivates children the most. “I've seen terribly shy kids lining up in droves to try this when we visit schools for demonstrations,” Lewis explained. SWAC is part of a broader effort by the SECEF to get students immersed in space weather. Their main focus is Sun-Earth Day, an event that happens each year on or near the vernal equinox. Sun- Earth Day started in 2000 as a 1-day event—webcasts, broadcasts, scientific interviews—focused on the theme “Have a Solar Blast!” Other themes throughout the years have included 2003's “Live From the Aurora,” where students in the San Francisco, Baltimore, and Anchorage areas packed into their local science centers overnight to watch live video streams of aurorae in action. In 2005, the theme “Ancient Observatories, Timeless Knowledge” featured video and webcast programming of solar alignments with structures that mark equinoxes and solstices. Sites visited included Chaco Canyon (New Mexico) and Chichen Itza (Mexico). “The first year we had more than 80,000 people downloading and viewing. Now we're into the millions,” explained Cline. “People started using our materials whenever they could, even during summer. So now the program is year-round.” SECEF has just wrapped up Sun-Earth Day 2008, “Space Weather Around the World,” which included live coverage of the solar eclipse seen over China in the days preceding the Olympic games. In support of the upcoming International Year of Astronomy, the Sun-Earth Day theme for 2009 is “Our Sun, Yours to Discover.” “We're going to focus on missions such as Ulysses and Voyager, as well as on space weather on other planets,” explained Cline. “The goal is not only to highlight important concepts in solar physics but also to suggest that there are many stars like our Sun in the universe.” The power of SECEF activities is that students are viewing real data, in near real time. “Students know they are seeing the same data that scientists look at,” said Lewis. “They won't ever feel like teachers are creating something at a lower level just for them to understand,” Cline added. Moreover, students can interact with the data in ways that appeal to several different learning styles. “If students can read it, write about it, touch it, listen to it, be involved with it, and express themselves through it, then a teacher is making content approachable to all the kids in the classroom,” Lewis said. “That's our goal.” Not all efforts to introduce students to space weather involve high-tech, hands-on activities. Instead, some groups are turning to comic books to communicate information to children (see “Space Weather Comic Books” sidebar). In 2001, NOAA released a comic book called “Space Weather,” illustrated by Zander Cannon (http://www.bigtimeattic.com). Several years later, borrowing from the strong Japanese tradition of manga, Yohsuke Kamide, then at Nagoya University's Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory (STEL), began producing comic books about the Sun-Earth relationship. In these books, the Japanese girl Mol and her robotic dog Mirubo explore their curiosity about space weather. Illustrated by Hayanon, a leading science cartoonist in Japan, and originally published in Japanese, these nine manga have been intensely promoted by the international Scientific Committee on Solar-Terrestrial Physics (SCOSTEP). “So far, these comic books have recorded more than 2 million hits per year at STEL and SCOSTEP,” said Kamide, now at Kyoto University but still involved with STEL outreach activities. Inspired by NOAA's comic book, scientists at the Center for Space Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas developed a comic book in 2005 called “Cindi in Space” to highlight the Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation (CINDI), a joint NASA/ U.S. Air Force–funded project. Built by the Center for Space Sciences, the CINDI instrument consists of two sensors, one for ions and one for neutral particles, designed to analyze their composition and dynamics in the ionosphere. CINDI is operating on the Air Force's Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast Satellite (C/NOFS), which launched in April 2008. The book, illustrated by Erik Levold, features an android girl named Cindi who searches space for space dogs: dogs with positively charged bodies and negatively charged tails. A dog with its tail is average, neutral, sedate. But if the dog eats an energy biscuit, his tail flies off, and the dog becomes positive and upbeat. This creates a quantity of dog tails floating around in space, searching for new owners. If a tail finds a new owner, the dog becomes neutral again and expels his energy biscuit. Cindi has special nets to count neutral and positive dogs, analogous to the two distinct CINDI instruments. Why do comic books have so much appeal? “Comic books are easy for a general audience and kids to approach space weather and science in general,” Kamide said. “We use a girl, Mol, to try to encourage females to focus on science.” Kamide explained that Mol loves science and isn't afraid to ask her teacher questions. “In this way, readers feel that science is everywhere in daily life.” While many efforts to engage students in learning about space weather focus on ties to national standards, some groups instead focus their program more locally. For example, Mary Urquhart, an associate professor of science and mathematics education at the University of Texas at Dallas, prepares educational materials for CINDI's outreach pages (http://cindispace.utdallas.edu/education/index.html), which contain education materials specifically tailored for Texas state standards. But beyond simply supplying information on a Web site, Urquhart has integrated Web site materials into her university's Regional Collaborative for Excellence in Science Teaching, a professional development program for teachers. “Each teacher is supposed to go out and train additional teachers after attending our workshops,” Urquhart said. This is very different from just downloading something off the Web. “We found that actually trying something in a workshop makes a big difference as to whether or not it is actually used in the classroom or after-school science program,” Urquhart said. Back in Alaska, Williams continues to prepare her lesson plans. “Ultimately, I have to pick activities that students will understand,” she said. “If I navigate to a Web site and I see that its content is too complex, I know that it will frustrate kids too much. So I'll either modify or simplify the content, or I'll skip it.” For Traeger, in California, one of the hardest parts of his job is that several of his students are new to physics. “They don't understand magnetic induction, so it's hard to grasp how magnetic fields are made within the Earth,” he said. “Getting them to grasp what is meant by the solar wind is also difficult—they think that it is like the wind on Earth.” Bringing abstract space weather concepts down to a level that kids can understand is, according to Johnson, the basic challenge for teaching kids about space weather. Easily understood Web resources (see “Educational Materials” sidebar) are critical. Nonetheless, “Many scientists have a hard time discerning the boundary between all the knowledge they have and what an eighth grader can understand,” Johnson said. “That is why people who focus on education in the geosciences, who are well grounded but have a love, passion, and talent for education, are so desperately important.” Mohi Kumar is a staff writer for the American Geophysical Union.