Galactic Garden Virtual Laboratory

PIs: Norm Lownds, Carrie Heeter

In Spring, 2002, we worked with 69 sixth graders and one third grade class to conduct prototypical plant growth experiments using simulated Mars dirt collected by Johnson Space Center and given to us by NASA scientist Chris McKay at NASA Ames.. NASA's goal is to learn the minimum requirements to grow a plant on Mars. In addition, the participating classes learned about the process of scientific experiments in a fun, meaningful context while conducting real research. Here is the Mars Experiments Garden web site used by the schools.

Here is the report from our spring classroom experiments. They have helped us clarify plans for a Galactic Garden project, for which we are now seeking funding.

We seek to construct a virtual national galactic garden laboratory through which K-12 schools would propose and conduct plant research in support of NASA's need to grow plants to feed astronauts in space. The virtual laboratory would provide rich, age appropriate, fun, inspiring, educational resources to inform and motivate kids and teachers and to support them in their research. The virtual laboratory would connect teachers with MSU and NASA to guide their research planning, support their classroom research, gather and share data, and publish the findings. We would develop scientific visualizations of the data and simulations of the process of science research and of basic biological plant and human-plant processes. The virtual laboratory would provide a communication channel between participating classrooms and plant scientists at MSU and NASA. Parallel and related research in the Mars Experiments Garden at the MSU Children's Garden would be viewable by webcam. Robotics would maintain the virtual space station garden.

We would maintain three parallel interfaces which share much of the same content, look and feel -- one for kids, one for teachers, and one for NASA scientists. The “above the fold” interface would be the same for kids, teachers, and NASA scientists – it would be the kid interface (described below). Below the fold, if you scroll down, the teacher site would have teacher explanations, lesson plans, ties to national and state standards, and information about proposing experiments, a discussion board for talking with Plant Scientists and with each other about curriculum and data collection and other questions. The NASA scientist site below the fold would include a place that lists the current chat questions from teachers and kids waiting for answers. There would be a way to add News Bulletins, and a place to review proposals and to communicate with MSU to post new RFPs. A scientist's view of the results would be available.

There would probably be a special room for each registered class in the kids and perhaps teacher interfaces.

The kids page main menu would be based on an intriguing scene of plants, science, and space, somewhat like the microbe zoo main page.

We would have fun characters representing lab rat plants (with a funny white red with red eyes peeking out from behind the plant), a cactus with eyes and a mouth representing the extreme environments plant, and a funny tomato on a tomato plant with eyes and a mouth representing food plants.

There would be a space station in the sky with plant science going on. Mars would be in the sky with plant research going on and astronauts eating carrots.

Kid scientists in lab coats would be conducting the plant science. Test tubes with colored bubbling liquids, pressure domes, and atmosphere readouts would add atmosphere and fun.

There would be a copy of the Journal of Classroom Galactic Garden Science as an interface to the research already conducted for this project.

There would be a bank of computers to do searches on different topics as kids do research on a topic.

Each small area would be a link to that main content area.

Live weekly bulletins from NASA would scroll across the bottom of the screen, clickable for more detail.

We could tie in with Space Camp by having Space Camp Galactic Garden module they do while at SC, then can follow up on when they return to the classroom. Links the the pages might link to an explanation of the Space Camp galactic garden module.