The Jason Project Update

Wow - what a difference a year makes.
I blogged about the Jason Project last year and decided to revisit the site to see what progress had been made. My original post was entitled Ocean Explorer Brings Undersea Science to Life where students at Internet2 connected schools would be able to view the remote camera images from the sea floor and listen to live conversations among the scientists.

Fast forward to January 2010 and let’s check out the site. It’s called Jason Science and you will need to create a free account to have access to everything in the site.

Let’s take a quick tour. Here is an image outlining the teachers tools availabe.  Teachers can use the Jason Lesson Plans and they can customize those lessons to better fit the needs of their students.

Currently three curriculums have been created for the Jason Project – Monster Storms, weather curriculum, Resilient Planet, ecology curriculum and Infinite Potential, energy curriculum. Each lesson has a syllabus, five lessons and a final project for the students. Teachers can download the curriculums or use the online curriculum. A new geology curriculum will be released later this year. There are also 3-D games, roller coaster creator, lab kits, and professional development for teachers.

The philosophy behind the Jason Project is to immerse students in challenging, real-world situations where students are mentored by scientists from NASA, NOAA, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Geographic Society.


The Jason Project was founded in 1989 and was redesigned in 2007 to include a new curriculum of educational games, videos, live interactivity and social networking that has won five national technology awards. All of the Jason offerings are classroom ready and fully scalable and aligned to national and state standards.

To check out the Jason Science site please go to:

http://www.jason.org/public/whatis/start.aspx

Create an account and get started.

Images and information from:

http://www.jason.org/public/whatis/start.aspx

Ocean Explorer Brings Undersea Science to Life

Robert Ballard founder of the JASON Project

The JASON Project connects students with explorers during live sea expeditions to motivate and excite students about science. It’s called “telepresence” technology that enables an unmanned robot submarine to stay in the ocean 24-7. If a robot submarine finds a major discovery – maybe a lost city or sunken ship - experts in the scientific fields can be at a command center within 20 minutes, remotely controlling the submarine and its cameras. Through a live production studio students will be able to experience these breakthroughs.

How is this possible? Fiber-optic cables will transmit video feeds from cameras on the robot submarines to a command center at the University of Rhode Island’s Institute for Archaeological Oceanography. Other command centers are being built at 11 other oceanography institutes across the country which are linked through the ultra high-speed Internet2. National Geographic is spending $11 million to help build the live production studio.

Students at Internet2 connected schools will be able to view the remote camera images from the sea floor and listen to live conversations among the scientists. Rhode Island middle schools are connected to Internet2 and the district is building remote command centers in the school libraries. With this access the students will be able to see firsthand the explorations and be able to remotely control the submarines. How cool is that?

According the Robert Ballard the reason for targeting the JASON Project to middle graders was simple – he wants the future stars to be scientists and educators and if students aren’t interested in science by eighth grade he doesn’t think they will become interested in the upper grades.

To learn more about the JASON Project go to: http://www.jason.org/public/home.aspx