Do Killer Electrons Affect You?

This full color tri-fold brochure answers questions about high energy particles in space and how they are produced, when and where they occur, and how they can affect us. It also includes lists of web and print resources for further study. Educational levels: Middle school, Middle school

Black Holes: From Here to Infinity FAQ

Black Holes: From Here to Infinity is a 6-page illustrated brochure that answers the eight most frequently asked questions about black holes. It was developed by the Education and Public Outreach group at Sonoma State University, with funding from the EXIST mission concept study and the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) mission. It is available in both English and Spanish and is part of the “Black Holes” suite of materials that accompany the PBS NOVA show “Monster of the Milky Way” and the planetarium show “Black Holes: the Other Side of Infinity.” Educational levels: Informal education, General public

Technology Teacher: Speaking in Phases

This article describes an indoor, game-type demonstration, incorporating physics (EM wave modulation), math (binary codes), space technology, and music to show how spacecraft put information into the radio signals they send back to Earth. Beat out rhythms on drums or desks and send messages using the same principles used in space exploration. This article was originally written for and published by the International Technology Education Association in its journal 'The Technology Teacher.' It is now archived on The Space Place Web site. Educational levels: Middle school

Kepler Mission Fact Sheet

This 2-page color fact sheet briefly describes NASA’s Kepler mission, its instruments, and ground system. Also included are tables listing the instrument parameters and the major institutions involved. Kepler is a spaceborne telescope specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to detect and characterize hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone. The habitable zone encompasses the distances from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface. Educational levels: Informal education

An instrument for assessing primary students' knowledge of information graphics in mathematics

Information graphics have become increasingly important in representing, organising and analysing information in a technological age. In classroom contexts, information graphics are typically associated with graphs, maps and number lines. However, all students need to become competent with the broad range of graphics that they will encounter in mathematical situations. This paper provides a rationale for creating a test to measure students’ knowledge of graphics. This instrument can be used in mass testing and individual (in-depth) situations. Our analysis of the utility of this instrument informs policy and practice. The results provide an appreciation of the relative difficulty of different information graphics; and provide the capacity to benchmark information about students’ knowledge of graphics. The implications for practice include the need to support the development of students’ knowledge of graphics, the existence of gender differences, the role of cross-curriculum applications in learning about graphics, and the need to explicate the links among graphics

Teaching and Learning Data Visualization: Ideas and Assignments

This article discusses how to make statistical graphics a more prominent element of the undergraduate statistics curricula. The focus is on several different types of assignments that exemplify how to incorporate graphics into a course in a pedagogically meaningful way. These assignments include having students deconstruct and reconstruct plots, copy masterful graphs, create one-minute visual revelations, convert tables into `pictures', and develop interactive visualizations with, e.g., the virtual earth as a plotting canvas. In addition to describing the goals and details of each assignment, we also discuss the broader topic of graphics and key concepts that we think warrant inclusion in the statistics curricula. We advocate that more attention needs to be paid to this fundamental field of statistics at all levels, from introductory undergraduate through graduate level courses. With the rapid rise of tools to visualize data, e.g., Google trends, GapMinder, ManyEyes, and Tableau, and the increased use of graphics in the media, understanding the principles of good statistical graphics, and having the ability to create informative visualizations is an ever more important aspect of statistics education

An analysis of the use of graphics for information retrieval

Several research groups have addressed the problem of retrieving vector graphics. This work has, however, focused either on domain-dependent areas or was based on very simple graphics languages. Here we take a fresh look at the issue of graphics retrieval in general and in particular at the tasks which retrieval systems must support. The paper presents a series of case studies which explored the needs of professionals in the hope that these needs can help direct future graphics IR research. Suggested modelling techniques for some of the graphic collections are also presented

Graphics for uncertainty

Graphical methods such as colour shading and animation, which are widely available, can be very effective in communicating uncertainty. In particular, the idea of a ‘density strip’ provides a conceptually simple representation of a distribution and this is explored in a variety of settings, including a comparison of means, regression and models for contingency tables. Animation is also a very useful device for exploring uncertainty and this is explored particularly in the context of flexible models, expressed in curves and surfaces whose structure is of particular interest. Animation can further provide a helpful mechanism for exploring data in several dimensions. This is explored in the simple but very important setting of spatiotemporal data