ETX in Action

Chris Mead and Geoffrey Bruce from the ETX Center traveled to the Arctic earlier this month to start gathering assets for “Polar Explorer”.  Polar Explorer is a virtual reality teaching tool being developed in collaboration with scientists at Northern Arizona University, the Arizona Geological Survey at the University of Arizona, and the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder,

Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Polar Explorer is an iVFT-based learning experience through which students will learn about permafrost, its importance to the Arctic environment, and how this region is experiencing rapid change due to global climate change.

Read more about this project

Infiniscope’s newest lesson release, “Fate of the Plates,” dives beneath the Earth’s crust to explore the mechanics of plate tectonics. The lesson features a simulation that allows students to model plate boundary interactions and observe the features formed at different plate boundaries. The NGSS-aligned lesson helps learners to answer the central question: How does convection of the mantle explain the wide range of ages and features across Earth’s surface?

This hands-on approach makes learning about plate tectonics more accessible by eliminating the mental model gymnastics and enables direct exploration of the variables involved. You can experience the lesson for yourself at Infiniscope.org

The ETX Center, in partnership with Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, is creating general chemistry courseware to address equity gaps in first-year chemistry courses. With a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, the project aims to address inequitable outcomes that are in a large part a result of chemistry instruction that is not relevant or responsive to the diversity of learners.

The effort will incorporate materials and findings from demonstrably successful chemistry efforts from the two projects, including the Center for Education Through Exploration’s Critical Chemistry and Open Learning Initiative’s General Chemistry I and II. The course will be built on the Torus platform, developed by CMU, which offers open, interactive courseware for better learning outcomes and enables research and experimentation.

Read more here

The ETX Center is excited to have students in its two flagship courses, HabWorlds and BioBeyond, on the new Torus platform from Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative and hosted by Argos Education.

HabWorlds and BioBeyond launched as universal learner courses through ASU’s Learning Enterprise at the beginning of May, expanding opportunities for non-traditional students. The initial offering resulted in over 500 registrations for these adaptive digital courses. HabWorlds, which is also part of SESE’s online Astronomy degree program, will welcome 250 students when it launches for the Summer Session B.

Visit inspark.education and ea.asu.edu to learn more about these courses.

The ETX Center was doubly present in the exhibit hall at the 2022 Astrobiology Science Conference in Atlanta, Georgia representing both Studio Services and the NASA SCoPE project. The SCoPE team was there recruiting subject matter experts (SMEs) to learn about the Science Activation network. The SCoPE project met with over 100 SMEs to talk about possible interactions with the 48 different NASA Science Activation teams.

The Studio Services team which develops courses, lessons, labs and other exploratory science learning experiences, engaged with scientists to model and discuss how to broaden their impact through co-development of interactive, adaptive, digital learning experiences.

NASA SCoPE
Studio Services