NASA's Learning Technologies Project

Live From Earth and Mars

Participating at the University of Washington are faculty, staff and students of the atmospheric sciences, aeronautics/astronautics, and astronomy departments, and the NASA Space Grant program. Other participants include regional and national teachers, Seattle's Pacific Science Center, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, Mars Pathfinder engineering and science team members worldwide, and businesses and corporations.

The University of Washington's "Live From Earth and Mars" project, based in Seattle and sponsored by NASA, develops and disseminates educational materials based on real-time and retrospective atmospheric sciences and space sciences data and information.

These resources are provided to K-12 educational systems, museums, and the public via the World Wide Web, with special emphasis placed on making the resources suitable for use in science and mathematics instruction in kindergarten through twelfth grade.

In the project, local workshops and in-service events assist teachers in developing curricula around these products, while atmospheric sciences resources are tailored to display and explore the unique meteorology of the Pacific Northwest and the Puget Sound region with live data. Science, engineering, and exploration themes from the Mars Pathfinder Mission are integrated in descriptive modules and data from the mission are presented.

From Live From Earth and Mars' homepage, visitors can choose from six interesting categories:

Earth: where students can focus on the weather and climate of the Pacific Northwest.
Teaching Tools: where instructors can choose from a variety of K-12 curricular materials.
Mars: which features science and engineering data from the red planet.
Workshop Materials: where teachers can familiarize themselves with the site and its Web-based materials.
Projects: where teachers and students learn from previously-conducted classroom projects from around the U.S.
Pathfinder: where data, graphs, images, and more on Mars can be downloaded right into the classroom.

"Live From Earth and Mars" also describes some of the Mars-specific components of the program. Past experience with museum exhibits, such as the "Viking View of Mars" permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., the "Traveling Mars Exhibit," and interactions with schools are utilized in the project.

Curator: Randolph Kim
Responsible NASA Official: Mark Leon
Last Updated: 07/02/2002