The RiverWeb Toolsuite&trade;: bridging the gap between high-end environmental science and the classroom
Authors: David Curtis, Edna E. Gentry, Steven I. Gordon, Susan Ragan, Erich Schroeder, Lisa Bievenue, David Emigh, Mary Ellen Verona
Venue: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (CDROM) (1998)

The National Computational Science Alliance's Education and Outreach Team (EOT) is working with the Alliance's Environmental Hydrology Applications Technology Team (EH-AT) to make information technolgies for watershed monitoring, system modeling, simulation, and data visualization and analysis accessible to educational communities and the public at large. The broad vision here is promote the education of 21st century citizens to participate actively in science-based informed debate and policy-making about the management of natural resources vital to their communities. As one step towards realizing this vision, we have assembled a team of middle and high school teachers, instructional designers, scientists and other researchers to build a framework on the world wide web to support inquiry-based, project driven watershed science activities that explicitly address national and state standards. We have named this project the RiverWeb Toolsuite&trade; Our paper will review progress and outline future plans.Project partners have brought together experience from other educational efforts in environmental hydrology and ecology. For example, NCSA is a partner in the Mississippi RiverWebSM Museum Consortium, which expects to be awarded a major grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a number of museum- and web-based virtual reality simulations of river basin processes. Teachers from the Maryland Virtual High School of Science and Mathematics have created and managed a stream quality modeling project through which students state-wide have collaborated in submitting stream quality data and used teacher and student designed computer models to compare stream health. MVHS has also initiated discussions with a University of Maryland Center for Ecological Studies research team to determine how their state of the art watershed model maybe made accessible to educators and students. The Ohio Supercomputer Center brings to the partnership expertise in water quality data gathering and analysis.We are building a "proof of concept" prototype suite of tools that encompass gathering, viewing and analysis of spatial data across various scales, from local field data to regional data. The prototype will support web-mediated interaction with pre-built, demonstration models of watershed hydrology and ecology addressing local environmental issues and problems. We have begun to assess to what extent these tools and supporting curriculum materials promote and support authentic, inquiry-driven learning in environmental science as delineated in state and national standards. Small focus groups of teachers have helped in evaluating aspects of usability and relevance to the high school curriculum. Science and technology coordinators have been consulted on design and content issues related to standards and available technology.Methodology is under development for investigating additional research questions such as whether and to what degree integration of complementary tools within a unified, curriculum-grounded framework can help transform classroom practice, how the use of computational models can promote authentic learning and how this learning can be linked to community concerns. Prototype development is also helping us to provide feedback to the Alliance EH-AT pertaining to its research program to develop and test watershed management decision support systems. Perhaps most significantly, current collaboration efforts have helped us define the needs and strengths of a distributed working group that encompasses the viewpoints of varied constituencies.