The Educator's Guide to NEAR

The Educator's Guide to NEAR is the culmination of two years work by Maryland teachers in the Lockheed Martin Graduate Fellows Program. Lockheed Martin Graduate Fellows team with mentor scientists for a 6-8 week summer internship to participate in state-of-the-art research in government, university and private laboratories throughout Maryland. In the summer of 1995, JHUAPL employed two Maryland teachers through the Lockheed Martin Graduate Fellows Program. The 1995 Fellows, Karen Krupinsky and Tammy Seergae, created NEAR-related lesson plans and compiled information on the NEAR mission, the NEAR spacecraft and its instrument payload. The lesson plans cover science and math topics related to the NEAR mission in order to give a better understanding of the mission, the function of the instruments, and how data will be obtained by the spacecraft. The lessons are intended for use by students or teachers in the middle or high school classroom.

In the summer of 1996, two new Lockheed Martin Graduate Fellows, Steven Bowser and Joy-Ann Maloney were charged with adding to and enhancing this project. Both are very interested in the Internet and its applications in education. They decided to focus on improving the web site by incorporating the latest HTML innovations, adding interactivity, and making it more accessible to the K-12 audience. They added a more user-friendly interface, video clips, online review quizzes, and links to other NEAR-related web pages. They addressed such issues as connection type, software used, and connection speed by adding image descriptions for text-only browsing, a no-frames option for older browsers, and compressing images to reduce their file size for faster loading. In addition to the web page enhancements, they added a performance-based assessment activity that gives students some of the experience of designing a spacecraft. The activity integrates math, science, and language arts.

The material in this area is continuously being reviewed for accuracy. Please report any problems so that they can be corrected.

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Contact Steve Bowser (slbowser@umd5.umd.edu) or
Joy Maloney (jmaloney@umd5.umd.edu) for further information.

This site was last updated on:
Tuesday, August 6, 1996
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