3D Weather Data Visualization and Analysis

Powered By: Mississippi State and National Science Foundation

The 3D Weather project seeks to A) improve secondary science education’s capacity to foster scientific and computational knowledge and literacy; B) improve secondary science teachers’ competency to innovate science learning by integrating large scale-atmospheric data and computational thinking and practices into science instruction; and C) make a significant contribution to the body of knowledge regarding how to create STEM education pathways by harnessing the data revolution.

These three goals will be achieved through five objectives: 

Objective 1: Develop and test 3D Weather learning modules that integrate computational thinking and practices into atmospheric science learning through data analysis, and 3D visualization and interpretation of large-scale weather data; 

Objective 2: Develop and conduct teacher professional development that supports integration of computational thinking and practices into secondary science instruction and empowers secondary science learning with large-scale weather data; 

Objective 3: Investigate how the integration of 3D weather data modeling and visualization into earth and environmental science classes support students’ and teachers’ development of computational thinking and model-based understanding of the complexity of the atmospheric systems; 

Objective 4: Investigate teachers’ experiences and perceptions of integrating computational thinking and practices into atmospheric science instruction in order to learn how to support teachers to engage in these instructional practices; 

Objective 5: Develop a research-based framework guiding teachers’ future efforts of developing new instructional materials integrating computational thinking and practices into science instruction.