Earth Science Data for a Mobile Age

Earth science data access needs to be interoperable and automatic. Recently, increasingly savvy data users combined with more complex web and mobile applications have placed increasing demands on how this Earth science data is being delivered to educators and students. The MY NASA DATA (MND) and S'COOL projects are developing a strategy to interact with the education community in the age of mobile devices and platforms. How can we provide data and meaningful scientific experiences to educational users through mobile technologies? This initiative will seek out existing technologies and stakeholders within the Earth Science community to identify datasets that are relevant and appropriate for mobile application development and use by the educational community. Targeting efforts within the educational community will give the project a better understanding of the previous attempts at data/mobile application use in the classroom and its problems. In addition, we will query developers and data providers on what successes and failures they've experienced in trying to provide data for applications designed on mobile platforms. This feedback will be implemented in new websites, applications and lessons that will provide authentic scientific experiences for students and end users. We want to create tools that help sort through the vast amounts of NASA data, and deliver it to users automatically. NASA provides millions of gigabytes of data that is publicly available through a large number of services spread across the World Wide Web. Accessing and navigating this data can be time consuming and problematic with variety of file types and methods for accessing this data. The MND project, through its' Live Access Server system, provides selected datasets that are relevant and targets National Standards of Learning for educators to easily integrate into existing curricula. In the future, we want to provide desired data to users with automatic updates, anticipate future data queries/needs and generate new data combinations--targeting users with a web 3.0 methodology. We will examine applications that give users direct access to data in near real-time and find solutions for the educational community. MND and S'COOL will identify trends in the mobile and web application sectors to provide the greatest effect upon relevant audiences within the science and educational communities. Greater access is the goal, with an acute focus on educating our future explorers and scientists with tools and data that will provide the most efficacy, use, and enriching science experiences. Current trends point to cross-platform web applications as being the most effective and efficient means of delivering content, data, and ideas to end users. Universal availability of key datasets on any device will encourage users to continue to use data and attract potential data users and providers. Projected Outcomes Initially, the outcome for this work is to increase the effectiveness of the MND and S'COOL projects by learning more about our users needs and anticipating how data will be used in the future. Through our work we will increase exposure and ease of access to NASA datasets relevant to our communities. Our goal is to focus on our participants mobile usage in the classroom, thereby gaining a greater understanding on how data is being used to teach students about the Earth and begin to develop better tools and technologies.