A new science club founded by former astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, aims to link girls who are passionate about science and technology with each other and with women already in science careers.

The goal of the Sally Ride Science Club, founded late last year in San Diego, is to keep elementary and middle-school students from losing their interest in science, math, and technology at an age when statistics show they are most likely to do so. Designed as a forum for girls to discuss math and science, learn from professional women, and participate in science-centered activities, the club aims to inspire the next generation of female scientists and engineers.

“Our philosophy is to keep young girls interested, to introduce them to women role models and show them the range of opportunities open to them,” Ride said in a recent interview.

The club’s current roster of 1,000 members have access to a members-only web site, monthly newsletters, and eMail updates about upcoming science events for girls. Membership costs $30.

Eventually, Ride envisions the club spreading nationally through local chapters that meet after school.

The club is the centerpiece of Imaginary Lines Inc., a for-profit company Ride started last fall to host nationwide community science festivals for girls in grades six through eight, and to offer girls-only events with partners such as Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala. The company is also working with Smith College, an all-women’s institute, to sponsor a national toy design contest for elementary school boys and girls. Future plans include developing science-centered products, such as books and computer software.

The combined efforts already are earning praise from club members such as Carrie Leneweaver, a 13-year-old from Chandler, Ariz., who joined the Sally Ride club after her engineer-dad took her to one of Imaginary Lines’ festivals, a daylong event at Arizona State University in March. The honors student said listening to Ride talk about her career was a highlight.

“She talked about how she went off into space and how she saw a hurricane from space. It was really neat,” said Leneweaver, who became intrigued with electronics, circuits, and all things scientific in the fourth grade and has no plans to give them up.

Not every girl feels the same way. Studies show an overwhelming number get frustrated or turned off by math and science beginning in middle school, even if they have succeeded academically in the subjects. Some simply decide math and science aren’t cool.

The result is that while boys and girls do equally well in science and math in the fourth grade, boys pull ahead by the eighth grade, a trend that does not reverse.

“We believe that back in elementary school there are a lot of girls who are really interested in math and science who could very well go on to pursue careers in these fields,” Ride said. “But perhaps they might not get quite the same encouragement that a boy might. A girl might not get quite the same reaction from her friends, or the same encouragement from a teacher. Parents might not find quite the same range of products to support her.”

Ride knows firsthand the importance of a supportive family. Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, she developed a love of science that was supported by her parents, even though neither was a scientist: Her mother was a homemaker and her father, a political science professor.

“As a girl I loved math puzzles. I loved science puzzles,” Ride said. “I was fascinated by the space program.”

At 18, Ride was inspired by watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. She went on to study physics at Stanford University. At 27, armed with three degrees in the subject, she answered a call by NASA for astronaut candidates and was one of six women chosen from among 8,000 applicants.

Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983 as a communications officer aboard Challenger, and completed a second journey the next year. (Valentina Tereshkova of Russia became the first woman in space in 1963.)

Today, Ride is concentrating full time on her new mission. As president and CEO of Imaginary Lines, she has raised close to $1 million in private investments and created partnerships with Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and International Rectifier to sponsor events. She also has recruited many of the female scientists who have taken part in the company’s science festivals.

Several moderators said they enjoyed seeing the girls’ excitement about science issues and careers.

“I talked about cancer research and cell biology,” said Susan Kane, a professor of molecular medicine at the City of Hope’s Beckman Research Institute in Los Angeles, who hosted workshops at a festival held at the California Institute of Technology in March. About 900 girls attended the event.

“I found that there wasn’t enough time to talk about everything that I wanted to talk about because the girls were asking so many questions,” Kane said. “It was fabulous.”

Another moderator agreed.

“Not everybody has parents who know very much about science,” said Marianne Bronner-Fraser, the first woman to chair Cal Tech’s faculty, who also participated in the Cal Tech festival. “Once you see that it can be done, it makes it much easier to visualize that you can do it, too.”

Links:

eSchool News Buyer’s Guide
http://www.eschoolnews.org/buyersguide

An emerging technology known as “augmented reality” soon will allow people peering through computer-powered goggles to overlay virtual images atop those of the real world. Researchers say the technology has practical applications for everything from law enforcement to education.

For a firefighter, a computer-aided streetscape might show a school’s fire exits and sprinkler connections—vital details in a fire. For a police officer responding to school incident, the goggles could relay video surveillance images of an assailant, helping the officer get a bead on the bad guy.

And for students, the technology might provide virtual images to supplement lessons.

Chris Dede, Timothy Wirth professor of learning technology at Harvard University, envisions a scenario in which museum exhibits, for example, are augmented by virtual environments. At a panorama showing dinosaur bones found at a tar pit, the technology might depict a virtual reconstruction of the dinosaurs that were trapped at that prehistoric location.

For now, augmented reality—a clever amalgam of computing, Global Positioning System navigation, and a device that tracks a person’s head movement—lives mainly in the cluttered realm of university research labs.

The systems first are supposed to determine the user’s exact location and field of vision. Then, depending on the program running on the hard drive, the computer augments the scene with images—a yellow building label for the firefighter, a blinking red dot for the sharpshooter, a virtual reconstruction for the student.

Researchers at Columbia University are fashioning some of the innovations. There, users can strap on a backpack frame bristling with 25 pounds of antennas, batteries, and computing gear and take a tour of the upper Manhattan campus.

Instead of seeing only the university’s Greek revival halls and tree-draped plazas, the computer goggles superimpose images of long-demolished Victorian buildings that housed an insane asylum predating the school. Building name tags pop up and disappear when you turn your head to gaze around the campus.

The project, created by Columbia’s schools of computer science and journalism, has a more pressing purpose than mere campus orientation.

The lead federal agency funding the project is the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research, which is spending $2.5 million a year on augmented-reality research.

Spurred by the deaths of United States military personnel in Somalia in 1993, the Navy wants scientists to develop a belt buckle-sized computer and slim pairs of computer glasses to help the Marines fight better in cities.

The Navy also is developing a version for amphibious landing craft that aims to guide invasion forces through minefields, fog, and other hazards. It seems plausible that the resulting technologies eventually will find their way onto school buses, say, to reduce the risk of transporting students during periods of poor visibility.

In Singapore, developers are building an augmented-reality system for a military defense of that city-state. And in Britain, researchers want to use it to “see” buried pipelines during construction projects.

Other research projects under way across the United States and elsewhere aim to use augmented reality to aid everything from surgery to education to jet engine repair.

Columbia computer science professor Steven Feiner, who gets about $150,000 per year of the Navy’s funding, is developing the visual interfaces seen by wearers of the computer goggles.

The clunky backpack system built by Feiner and his students is cobbled together from a laptop computer and a pair of GPS satellite receivers—one developed by the Russian military—along with a head tracking device, a high-speed wireless internet connection, and a tiny video camera.

When the wearer’s location tells the computer to augment the scene with an image, it pops up on a pair of Sony goggles with a see-through liquid-crystal computer display.

“We are not implying that someone should walk around with something that weighs even half of this,” Feiner said, giving a tour of his lab, where mannequin heads are scattered among computer parts and workstations. “Being able to look at stuff, and seeing information in context with that stuff, that’s what [this technology is] all about.”

Augmented reality should be ready for consumer use in a decade or so, Feiner said, and it could be ready for education even sooner.

First, U.S. soldiers will be trying it on for size.

One impetus for the Office of Naval Research’s Battlefield Augmented Reality System, known as BARS, was the 1993 battle of Mogadishu, where 18 Americans—and hundreds of Somalis—died in fierce urban combat.

A three-dimensional cityscape is one of the most treacherous battlefields, laced by tunnels and sewers below and buildings above, with clutter and traffic at street level. Enemy forces can be tough to distinguish from friendly ones. Snipers and mines could be anywhere.

In the Mogadishu battle, U.S. military personnel on a critical rescue mission got lost in the city’s sandy alleys, because street signs had been taken down.

In future city battles, U.S. soldiers with augmented-reality viewers will see labels on buildings and streets and also active details, like areas of sniper fire and locations of friendly forces, said Lawrence Rosenblum, director of virtual reality research and systems at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

“All of a sudden, [a soldier using augmented reality] can be really involved in what’s happening and know what’s going on around him,” Rosenblum said. “We’re taking that information, giving it to him in a way that’s never been done before. That’s got to make him better.”

When such technology makes its way to the classroom, it’s bound to make teachers better, too.

Links:

Columbia University’s Mobile Augmented Reality Systems project
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/mars/mars.html

Office of Naval Research’s Battlefield Augmented Reality System project
http://www.ait.nrl.navy.mil/vrlab/projects/BARS/BARS.html

Chris Dede’s web site
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~dedech

With students’ test scores soon to affect how federal aid to their schools is allocated and spent, educators are looking for whatever tools might give their students an advantage on high-stakes exams. Now, some 200 schools are using heart-monitoring software to help their students learn how to manage emotions such as anxiety and frustration so they can improve their performance during testing.

Students who experience extreme anxiety, frustration, or worry tend not to do as well on exams as they could, the software’s proponents claim.

“You want a little adrenaline because it gives you a little edge, but often anxiety goes over the edge,” said Jeff Goelitz, program developer for the Institute of HeartMath, a nonprofit research organization in Boulder Creek, Calif.

Goelitz and his colleagues at the institute developed Freeze-Framer, a software program based on more than 10 years of heart research that helps students manage mental and emotional stress and smooth out stressful heart rhythms.

“Emotion dictates where our attention is,” Goelitz said. “If your emotions and thinking brain are not in sync, then your ability to think straight is jeopardized.”

Different emotional states affect the patterns of the heart, Goelitz said, so HeartMath figured if people could learn to control their heart patterns, they could control their emotional states and perform better.

“What anxiety does is it creates a noise, a mental static, so it blocks our ability to retrieve what we know,” he said. “The worry overloads the brain circuits, the ones needed for retaining information.”

While sitting at a computer, students insert their finger into a pulse sensor that is plugged into the computer. The heart rhythms are then displayed in a graph on the computer screen, so students can see what their heart rhythms look like.

Students are asked to shift their focus to their heart and breathing, then generate a positive image and hold onto this state for five to 15 minutes while they watch their heart rhythms change. Throughout the exercise, students learn what positive emotions look and feel like, so they can train themselves to move their heart rhythms from jagged to smooth.

Once they’ve mastered that, students play three different games to practice their new skill. In one game, students use their positive emotional state to turn a black-and-white meadow scene into color on the computer screen. In another game, students move a hot-air balloon off the ground by holding a positive emotional image. If students lose their positive state, the balloon begins to fall.

“Freeze-Framer trains students to get in this optimal learning mode,” Goelitz said. However, “the critical part is taking that calm, focused learning state and applying it when taking a test.”

Twenty high school seniors from the Minneapolis Public Schools who had failed the state’s exit exam five times or more did just that.

They passed the Minnesota Basic Standards Test after using Freeze-Framer for three-weeks. Collectively, their math scores reportedly increased 35 percent and their reading scores improved a reported 14 percent.

“We found [the software] helped students feel calmer and more focused when they took the test,” said Stephanie Thurik, a reading specialist at Minneapolis Public Schools. “These were all kids who had struggled in school, but stuck with it and were able to pass.”

For the last five years, Diana Govan, a resource teacher at Carmel High School in Carmel, Calif., has been using Freeze-Framer at the beginning of the school year so her students can learn to shift emotions, anger, and frustration to a positive state. She said her class usually spends 50 minutes a day on the program for two weeks.

“It sets us up for the rest of the year to be much more optimal,” Govan said.

Most of her students have a history of failure in mainstream classes, as well as negative memories, emotions, and feelings about school. “It teaches them to neutralize their feelings and emotions about an upcoming test or assignment,” Govan said. “For most of my students, unmanaged emotion is their roadblock to success.”

Govan said Freeze-Framer was critical in helping one of her students graduate. The student was labeled with severe attention-deficit disorder, had a history of poor academic achievement, and had difficulty managing his anger.

“He learned Freeze-Framer instead of punching someone,” Govan said. The software “has nothing to do with academics, but it has everything to do with how successful he is going to be.”

Freeze-Framer is more effective at helping students achieve a calm state of mind than deep-breathing exercises, Goelitz said.

“You can be in a relaxed state of breathing, but if a strong emotion comes on, it still hijacks your brain,” Goelitz said. “Breathing is helpful, but the emotional component plays such an influential role in our thinking process.”

He added, “Attitude and emotion have an overriding factor.”

The Freeze-Framer kit costs $295 and includes a finger sensor, software, music, curriculum, and technical support. Site licenses also are available.

Links:

Institute of HeartMath
http://www.heartmath.org

Minneapolis Public Schools
http://www.mpls.k12.mn.us

Carmel High School
http://www.carmelhigh.org

An internet clearinghouse launched May 16 aims to counteract the barriers to creativity its founders believe is fostered by current copyright law fosters. The clearinghouse is meant to help educators, students, artists, and researchers find creative works they can use without fear of being sued for copyright infringement.

The Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization based at Stanford University and formed by legal scholars and web publishers, will encourage authors and other creative persons to donate selected writings, music, video, and other works for free exchange.

A student filmmaker needing a shot of the New York skyline could then use the clearinghouse to find royalty-free footage, or a small-town school drama department with limited funding could find plays to perform for free.

Currently, a filmmaker or drama director must track down a copyright holder, obtain permission, and often pay royalties. Unpopular projects might never take off if copyright holders won’t license their works, and confusion often exists as to whether works are protected under copyright law.

Copyright holders who choose to participate in the Commons may set general conditions for use of their works, such as allowing royalty-free use only in noncommercial settings, but they won’t be able to veto individual projects.

Users would be able to search for digital and physical materials at creativecommons.org.

Glenn Brown, assistant director of the project, said the web site does not host any content itself and does not offer educators the ability to link directly to the materials. What it does do is locate works that artists have agreed to share without penalty.

“We are like a card catalogue. We can link you to the information that you are looking for,” he said.

According to Brown, the site could be used by teachers who direct their students to create their own web pages, but who want to make sure the information compiled does not violate copyright law or fair-use exceptions.

Spearheading the effort is Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, a prominent scholar who complains that the current strict legal interpretation of intellectual property rights frequently stifles the type of sharing that spurs innovation.

The Creative Commons seeks to counteract that tendency.

Molly S. VanHouweling, the project’s executive director, said the clearinghouse is ideal for start-up bands and lesser-known authors who want their works more widely heard or read.

More established creators, meanwhile, might wish to donate their works so noncommercial projects could succeed, she said.

Contributors retain copyrights on their works. They can still sell them; for instance, they can offer them through the project royalty-free for noncommercial use but charge others independent of the Commons.

The Creative Commons has raised nearly $900,000, mostly from the Center for the Public Domain, a nonprofit foundation.

The clearinghouse is necessary, its founders say, because the scope of copyright law has grown over the years.

Initially, a book’s author or publisher had to register works with the U.S. Copyright Office. Now, a copyright is automatic.

And while copyrights lasted 14 years in 1790, Congress gradually extended them. A 1998 law protects works owned by individuals for 70 years after their death and those owned by corporations for 95 years.

The extension means that web sites must wait longer to legally post works that once would have quickly entered the public domain. Web publisher Eric Eldred, a board member for the Creative Commons, is among the plaintiffs challenging the 1998 extension in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Several groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have pledged administrative support. O’Reilly and Associates, a technical publisher, plans to donate some of its books, while the Internet Archive and Prelinger Archives are looking to contribute their archives of moving images, according to VanHouweling.

The Creative Commons will need much more to be useful. Organizers are hoping to get more contributions over the next several months and begin allowing exchanges by the fall.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a University of Wisconsin professor critical of modern copyright laws, praised the initiative as enabling creators to become less than totally beholden to traditional publishers and distributors.

But the Commons won’t address key objections raised with a separate 1998 law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it illegal to circumvent copy-protection technologies or discuss methods for doing so.

Critics say the prohibitions restrict scholarly research and other “fair uses” that are normally legal under copyright law.

Links:

The Creative Commons
http://www.creativecommons.org