Athena

Background

In 1994, the space physics group at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in Bellevue (later in Bothell), Washington, responded to NASA’s request for proposals for their new Public Use of Earth and Space Science Data over the Internet program. SAIC teamed with the Washington state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction and four local school districts: Seattle, Bellevue, Lake Washington, and Northshore. We proposed to develop K-12 curriculum materials using live and archived data and to make them available over the Internet.

Educator-scientist writing teams actively developed curriculum materials for the three years of the project (1994-97). Limited development and maintenance continued until 1999.

Example Content Development

One of the most rewarding development projects for me was the earth science lesson in cartography. This project was a collaborative effort with educator Rob Westcott and scientist Hugh Anderson. The underlying idea was to zoom in from space using remote sensing data at global, continental, state, regional, and local resolutions.

Using data images at the various resolutions, I developed most of the student activities, produced the illustrations, and designed the layout of the related pages.

I have included a copy of this lesson here, but disabled external links. The lesson is also available at NASA and OSPI.

• Cartography - the Art of Making Maps, the Science of Where You Are
  • World Maps
  • Maps of North America and the USA
  • Maps of Washington State
  • Puget Sound Region Maps
  • Maps of the Seattle Area
  • Cartography Review
  • Technical Terms
  • Table of Contents
  • Cartography Web Sites

Graphics

Original home page

Revised home page

I developed graphics for many of the Athena lessons. For lesson headers and illustrations, I used raster and vector drawing programs such as Jasc Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Expression (then from Fractal Design). I used analysis tools such as Microsoft Excel and MATLAB from Mathworks to produce data plots and maps.

In 1997, I re-designed the home page, employing a brighter color scheme. We retained the owl, as the symbol of Athena, goddess of wisdom.

Maintenance

As the final Webmaster for the project, I was responsible for manually uploading (via FTP) new and revised content to the three mirror servers and running the log file analysis. Dr. Hugh Anderson, project principle investigator, included site statistics in his regular reports to NASA.