Innovative CEA Information Server: Helping K--12 Teachers and Students Navigate the EUVE Mission Archive

Internet access to the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) mission archive for participants in the Science Online and Science Information Infrastructure programs will be facilitated by an innovative, World Wide Web--based data server being developed at the UC Berkeley Center for EUV Astrophysics (CEA). The Innovative CEA Information Server, being developed for the Science Education Program, will allow the user to easily select and access material from the EUVE mission archive. The entire archive, as part of an overarching CEA project, the EUVE Knowledge Base, will be logically structured into knowledge units. Each knowledge unit is defined as ``all of the information available at CEA about a given subject encapsulated into a self-contained, single, multimedia object.'' The user will be able to specify parameters that indicate the desired levels of complexity, breadth or scope, and format (e.g., text or graphics) of the requested knowledge units. The K--12 education materials for this Server are being developed at CEA via a ``Partners in Science'' teacher internship program funded by Research Corporation. Dr. Nelli Levandovsky, a physics teacher from San Francisco Unified School District's Galileo high school, created the following two tutorial plans this past summer: ``Be an Engineer---Learn How to Operate a Satellite'' and ``Be a Scientist---Learn How to Become a Space Researcher.'' Current development efforts are concentrated in two areas: (1) reviewing types of EUVE archival data and mission information and how these knowledge units can be packaged and presented; and (2) investigating how issues of breadth (e.g., scope or extent) and depth (e.g., complexity) of the knowledge units can be better presented in the construction of the Server. This work is supported by NASA contract NAS5-29298.