A UA / Community Partnership Grant Proposal

28-Feb-1998

Prepared by:

What is urban change? For many Tucson residents, certain words personify it: Rocking K Ranch, IBM, Oro Valley, Riparian corridor, Aquifer overdraft, Annexation, Suburban coyotes, Pima Association of Governments, Solid Waste, Jobs, Congestion, Open Space, Competition for resources, Biodiversity.

How do we measure urban change? Landscape change is a dominant fact of life for most suburban communities around Tucson. Peoples' perceptions and attitudes about change vary depending upon its personal impact and their ability to synthesize the connections between what once was and today's headlines. Satellite images of the Tucson Basin over time can give our students and citizens a focal point for further investigations and a unique perspective on what we have lost or gained.

The goal of this project is to give TucsonÆs students the opportunity to explore land use changes around the Tucson basin that have occurred in their lifetime. Both visual (qualitative) and computer (quantitative) analysis of satellite images requires a range of community resources - from sophisticated image processing and data management to training and support for teachers who help guide the students use of these images. Although this effort is focused mainly on the direct analysis of land use changes evidenced in the satellite images, the data can serve as a perfect focal point for a wide variety of other studies ranging from archeology, community planning, the environment, oral history, rangeland management, and civil engineering.

The whole Tucson/Pima County community will benefit from young citizens who have a more comprehensive and integrated appreciation and knowledge of urban growth over the last 15 years. In particular, students will: be motivated by the inquiry-based methods used, better appreciate the use of satellite technology, have hands-on experience studying and analyzing multifaceted environmental and community issues, have opportunities to share their ideas with students all around town.

Tucson area teachers will benefit from new educational outreach training and resources in remote sensing and image processing available through the University of Arizona. This applied science and technology effort reinforces and capitalizes on previous image processing training funded by TUSD.

Other teaching and research units at the University of Arizona benefit from the use of local satellite imagery and the internet-accessible educational material that covers the basics of satellite remote sensing, landcover assessment and urban ecology. The UniversityÆs General Education program is expected to be a significant, long-term user of these resources. Six other departments have expressed their interest as well.

This project funds the purchase of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite data that spans the last 15 years, from 1982 to 1997. It funds the processing and distribution of this data to the K-12 and University of Arizona research community. Most importantly, this project will fund the development and delivery of teacher lesson plans and activity guides that will give teachers from Middle Schools through to University Sophomores the knowledge and tools they need to understand and work with this unique data set. Additional plans are made to deliver similar material to younger students and adults.

(details about each of these programs follows in the Appendix)

NASA Center Of Excellence, UA-ECE (Eric Pfirman and Robert Schowengerdt)

Vail Charter High School, Vail School District #20 (Madelene Orton and Deb Gunderson)

GLOBE, UA-HWR (Jim Washburne)

Tier I General Education, UA-MGE (Mary Poulton)

Precipice Development (Cyndy Henzel) and UA Extended University

Tucson Unified School District (Liz Whitaker, Coord., Instructional Technology)

This proposal originated in discussions we had concerning the delivery of authentic learning and research experiences to students and adults, who often feel divorced from problems and issues related to everyday life. As recent headlines in the Tucson Citizen attest ("County targets urban sprawl", 2/21/98, pg. 1), urban growth is an issue on many peoples' minds. What better way to focus students' and citizens' attention on urban growth than through the use of visually stimulating satellite images and computer technology? Our goal is to develop new activities consistent with the following Call to Action: in National Science Education Standards (1996), which challenges educators to promote inquiry-based, authentic, interdisciplinary and technology-rich instruction:

"This nation has established as a goal that all students should achieve scientific literacy .... Scientific literacy enables people to use scientific principles and processes in making personal decisions and to participate in discussions of scientific issues that affect society. A sound grounding in science strengthens many of the skills that people use every day, like solving problems creatively, thinking critically, working cooperatively in teams, using technology effectively, and valuing life-long learning. And the economic productivity of our society is tightly linked to the scientific and technological skills of our work force." - Richard Klausner and Bruce Alberts

The new standards emphasize a shift away from traditional educational methods (which stress the individual, competition, rigid curriculum design, and memorization of facts) toward an inquiry-based model which more closely resembles how "real science" is conducted by professionals. An inquiry-based model encourages students to engage in authentic research. This means that they (a) generate research questions based upon their own experiences, interests, strengths, and concerns, (b) conduct an investigation using appropriate scientific tools, processes and principles, (c) formulate possible answers to the research questions, based on their observations, (d) evaluate their results in the context of the findings of professional scientists, (e) engage intelligently in public discourse and debate concerning their results, and (f) report their findings to the scientific community.

The new standards promote an interdisciplinary approach to achieving scientific literacy, recognizing the contributions made by individuals from different disciplines, including engineering, computer science, mathematics, geography and the social sciences. The integration of technology is a central focus. Activities designed to expose students to the æÆrole, place, limits, possibilities and relationships of science and technologyÆÆ are strongly encouraged (pg. 191). Technology instruction is seen as an integral part of developing scientific literacy because it allows students to develop skills in the use of specific tools, to solve problems, to conduct research, to analyze solutions, and to present the results of their investigations. The integration of the social sciences is also deemed important. It is argued that an æÆimportant purpose of science education is to give students a means to understand and act on personal and social issuesÆÆ and æÆto help students develop decision-making skillsÆÆ that will enable them to make informed decisions they will face as citizens (pg. 193). Finally, the new standards assert that the responsibility for improving science education is shared within a community. The new standards therefore promote collaborative processes between community members including students, classroom teachers, educational researchers, scientists, engineers, members of business and industry, parents, legislators, public officials, and those who work in museums, zoos, and science centers. The proposal outlined herein provides students and other communities within the Tucson Basin an opportunity to learn and work together.

TASKS

The first and most primary task is to order the satellite images and ancillary maps over the Tucson Basin. A single Landsat TM image (Path 36, Row 38) covers most of the Basin (see Figure 1) and this will be our focal area. We are in the process of applying for a data grant through the EROS Data Center, but will not know the outcome until April (see Budget). Next, the data will be archived to the COE CD jukebox, geo-rectified, and 15 x 15 km subsets for each school or study site will be extracted on demand. Image rectification is the most time consuming task and it is important that this process is carefully monitored by the Center for consistency and uniform quality. Rectification is required to geometrically correct the (oblique) satellite image to a given grid system. An image is registered to a map by collecting and then matching "control points" on the image and the map, and then "warping" the image to fit the map grid. Data set management is not charged to this grant and will be covered by the operational mission of the COE data archive project. The images will be stored in a CD jukebox on the CenterÆs server and made accessible to the schools and to the University via the Internet. A web site will be developed on the server to showcase the studentsÆ work.

Material will be developed to be accessible to students, grades 7 - 14. In particular, Ms. Orton will develop and teach two interdisciplinary environmental science courses that incorporate an inquiry-based project utilizing the COE multi-year satellite data. Both courses will be piloted with 20 - 25 students, grades 9-12 during the Fall of 1998, and offered to about 100 high-school students in subsequent terms. One course will be computer orientated; one will focus on urban ecology. A guide with classroom strategies, hands-on activities and related teacher resources will be produced to share with other teachers. In general, Vail Charter High School students will develop an integrated assessment of land use change within their school-district boundaries. At least two school-to-work students will work collaboratively with Eric Pfirman and Deb Gunderson to process and classify a 15-year time series of Landsat images, coincident with the school-district area, by land-use category (forest, urban, rangeland, riparian, etc.). Issues such as "growth rates", "dump siting", and "open space" will form the basis for investigations using these data sets. Patterns and changes in land cover will be compared over time, and the classified images, numerical data, and studentsÆ conclusions will be synthesized into a multi-media slide-show presentation. The slide-show will be shared with community action groups interested in conservation, development, zoning and land-use issues as well as with teachers participating in the 4-day workshop proposed herein. A web-site will also be established so that students can share their procedures and results with other schools wishing to implement a similar study. Many of these students already contribute to community land-use meetings through their involvement in the Young Naturalist Docent Training program, a partnership between the Vail School District, the Colossal Cave Mountain Park and the Rincon Institute.

There are two other components to the educational materials development. The first takes advantage of many parallel efforts on the UA campus to develop Tier I Physical Science General Education units that examine the role of electromagnetism in nature. Satellite remote sensing is a convenient and interesting application of these concepts. We have arranged to make this data available to Dr. Poulton, in UA-MGE, as she develops her EM unit, which will focus on a web-based activity that demonstrates image processing techniques such as: contrast stretching, filtering, band ratioing, feature enhancement and classification.

Finally, we will work with Precipice Development, an educational and technology consultant, throughout this process with the expectation that they will take our final products and make them more widely available to the Tucson community through several different programs offered by the UA Extended University. This will require some redevelopment work on their part to focus and tune the material for each different audience. Precipice Development has been involved in the development of GLOBE activities and training and are excellent at presenting complex remote sensing, image processing and geographic based concepts to students of all ages.

After the Vail students finish helping Ms. Orton with initial material development, about five GLOBE schools around Tucson will be trained by a team coordinated by Dr. Washburne and will pilot the material in a wider range of class environments. All the UA units will work closely with them to offer technical support and to gather program assessments. The major advantage of starting with this subset of schools is because these teachers have previously been trained in land use classification and image processing. In particular, the following schools will be involved:

All teacher training is hands-on and based on four modules that take approximately 6 hours each to teach. They will be presented both as a three day summer workshop and as four one-day workshops during the school year. Computer lab space is available through the University of Arizona, TUSD and Vail Charter High School. Teachers will not be charged for the training, although TUSD professional development or UA Extended University charges might apply. All instructional materials developed will be bound into a teacher-resource-and-activity guide and published on the web for wide distribution. The first two modules basically cover topics included in the standard four-day GLOBE training so do not need to be repeated by those teachers. The four basic units are (instructors in parenthesis):

Teacher technical support will be supplied by the UA COE as part of its outreach mission. Additional teacher support is available through the GLOBE program. A critical component to a successful program are means by which students or school teams can share and exchange the results of their learning and discoveries. The UA COE will maintain a web journal site where student-initiated research projects are posted as they are completed. The Center will also host an annual student symposium where research presentations and posters can be shared with other students.

The phased implementation of these learning activities gives us time to evaluate their impact and success in the classroom. Materials will be evaluated in terms of content, ease of delivery, practical use, developmental appropriateness and integration capacity. Benchmarks to our success will be drawn from the areas of: data accessibility and quality, usable teacher guides, effective training and the quality and level of participation by students in basin-wide, internet or symposium forums. Teachers piloting the lesson plans will provide written feedback about the materials using an open-ended survey. The National Standards we are following are not aimed at improving scientific literacy for a few but rather at improving the scientific literacy of all our students and our community. Thus both teachersÆ and studentsÆ reactions will be surveyed. We will employ a classroom observer and random interviews throughout the initial piloting phase of this program to gather the most insightful feedback. We will make a preliminary progress report available during the Summer of 1999 and a final development report available during the Spring of 2000.

WORK and MANAGEMENT PLAN

The table below summarizes the major developmental stages of this proposal and correlates the tasks described above with each phase. The primary collaborators on this project are Pfirman, Orton and Washburne and they will be responsible for normal operational decisions. The other collaborators will be kept informed of program status and will comprise an educational oversight board, which meets at least annually to review progress towards mutual goals.

In 1997, the University won a $292k grant from the NASA Mission to Planet Earth to establish a "Center of Excellence in Applications of Remote Sensing to Regional and Global Integrated Environmental Assessments". This project will develop an earth observation resources infrastructure for integrated regional assessments in the Sonoran Desert region. Dr. Showengerdt is the principal investigator and Mr. Pfirman is the system and data manager. Six other UA faculty from six different departments are co-investigators.

A server will be setup during 1998 for archiving and retrieving digital image and map data for the Sonoran desert region, including the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. The focus on regional information will provide a direct and tangible link between our research and instructional programs in the earth science disciplines, particularly as they relate to climate variability and change. The system is a large data server with 1.6TB of CD jukebox storage that will allow us to consolidate scattered data holdings at the UA and to manage the large amount of NASA EOS data anticipated over the next few years.

Internet courseware modules will be developed for use in graduate core remote sensing courses and for outreach within and beyond the UA. The modules will use common datasets stored in the resource system and the latest in distributed, internet-based tools. Instructional image processing facilities will be upgraded to support this effort.

The Center will provide outreach to state and county agencies in our region to provide access to data for the Sonoran desert region and to foster new research projects on linkages between climate, and response in ecosystems, regional economies, as well as social and political institutions. The Sonoran Desert of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico offers unique opportunities to examine the interactions of climate, ecosystem response, land management, and policy over periods ranging from months to decades, in a variety of institutional settings. The University of Arizona currently has numerous on-going research efforts in regional environmental assessments and we intend to expand these by improving access to remote sensing data for the region.

The Center is an interdisciplinary project combining the resources of a number of participants on campus, including Electrical and Computer Engineering, with support from the Office of Arid Lands Studies, Optical Sciences, Management and Information Systems, Hydrology and Water Resources, and Geography and Regional Development.

Vail Charter High School, Vail School District (Madelene Orton)

Vail Charter High School is a public high school chartered by the Vail School District and strategically located at the University of ArizonaÆs Science and Technology Research Park. The goal of the school is to prepare students for appropriate post-secondary educational opportunities by integrating school-to-work opportunities and the use of technology into a college-preparatory curriculum. The school is less than a year old, the first and only high-school in Vail, and serves 100 of the 800 high-school aged students living within the District. Vail School District has the distinction of being the fastest-growing (demographically) in the State of Arizona. Students have witnessed land-use changes in their neighborhoods that are staggering, as places with names such as Rita Ranch, X-9 Ranch, and J-6 Ranch give way to urban sub-division. Students who participate in this project will have a unique opportunity to share and discuss their findings at a variety of public forums where proposed land-use changes are being debated. Deb Gunderson is the computer-lab technician and technology instructor at Vail Charter High School. She will provide technical assistance to the project and will direct students in the formation of a web-site to disseminate their research findings. Madelene Orton is the teacher who designed this project and who will serve as the VCHS site-coordinator. She is pursing an Educational Doctorate degree from the University of Arizona with a major in science curriculum development and a minor in environmental education. Her academic interests include the integration of technology and environmental action projects into the science curriculum. As the districtÆs school-to-work coordinator, she is also responsible for developing "authentic activities" which expose her students to the same tools, procedures, and principles used by professional scientists. Madelene currently possesses a Master of Arts degree in Environmental Education as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in Secondary Science Education, with a teaching major in geography and a teaching minor in earth science. She has five years of science teaching experience with the Vail School District, and has provided leadership in a variety of curriculum development and grant-writing projects. Prior to becoming a teacher, Madelene worked for eight years as an environmental (water/wastewater) technician working for private industry.

GLOBE, UA-HWR (Jim Washburne)

Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) is a K-12, hands-on environmental education program sponsored in the US by NSF, NASA and NOAA. GLOBE is an engaging and inquiry-based science and education program that brings together student observations of their environment with: 1) educators who guide the studentÆs measurements and work the program into existing curriculum, 2) scientists who need more baseline environmental verification data and who mentor young investigators and 3) other schools that use GLOBE observations for authentic learning situations ranging from collaborative research to data analysis using the latest technologies. The program takes a global perspective because only when we look at the complex interacting and integrated Earth System as a whole that we can start to address the most pressing scientific problems of today.

GLOBE observations are made in four general areas: the atmosphere, soils, hydrology and land cover. Approximately six science/education principal investigation teams were formed in 1995 to oversee and develop these focal areas. Arizona is privileged to have two of the teams located at the University of Arizona, Department of Hydrology and Water Resources. Dr. Jim Washburne leads the Soil Moisture investigation and Drs. Roger Bales and Martha Conklin lead the Hydrology investigation. Combined, these projects represent a $350k/yr source of NSF funding through 2001.

PRECIPICE DEVELOPMENT (Cyndy Henzel)

Precipice development is an innovative consulting firm, which offers training, develops applications and curricula for governments, educational institutions and private businesses. Located in Tucson, AZ, Precipice specializes in software development (Desert House, Phoenix, AZ), multimedia (Macroinvertebrates activity), database design and construction (Native Seed Search, FAO Global Information and Early Warning System), educational curriculum development (GLOBE), geographic information systems (ARC-INFO), remote sensing and environmental training (GLOBE).

UA EXTENDED UNIVERSITY (Elisabeth Roberts)

The University of Arizona Extended University offers credit and non-credit enrichment programs for students ages 2 through 14 and their parents, and offers professional development workshops for teachers in the greater Tucson area. Extended University supports a 10-year old, award winning program called SEEK (Summer Enrichment and Education for Children) that draws on the resources of the University of Arizona faculty and facilities to offer "Science Saturdays" during the school year and a 4-week, full-day Science Camp during the summer. Extended University will work with the developers and trainers of the curriculum materials for this project to develop "Science Saturday" and summer science camp modules in image interpretation and geography studies using the Landsat data. SEEK participants pay a low cost for each program (between $15 and $25 per half-day workshop) to cover instructor salaries and materials. SEEK has over 1100 participants annually in its programs and offers some scholarships to low-income families from the greater Tucson area. Elisabeth Roberts, SEEK Program Coordinator, is also a GLOBE trainer who has extensive knowledge of the technology and its learning potentials.

TUSD

VAIL