CREATE Lab

The challenge: Gigapixel imaging can reveal a surprising range of animal and plant species in the ordinary and sometimes extraordinary settings in which we live, learn, and work. Your challenge is to capture panoramas of Nearby Nature and share them with your peers at gigapan.org for further exploration. We hope that shared panoramas and snapshotting will help the GigaPan community more deeply explore, document, and celebrate the diversity of life forms in their local habitats.

Gigablitz timing: The event will take place over a 7-day period – a gigablitz – that aligns with the June solstice. Please capture and upload your images to the gigapan.org website between 6am, June 20 and 11pm, June 26 (your local time).

Juried selections:    Panoramas that meet the criteria below are eligible for inclusion in the science.gigapan.org Nearby Nature collection. The best panoramas will be selected by a jury for publication in an issue of GigaPan Magazine dedicated to the Nearby Nature collection.  Selection criteria are as follows:

• Biodiversity: the image is species rich.
• Uniqueness: the image contains particularly interesting or unique species, or the image captures a sense of the resilience of life-forms in human-dominated settings.
• Nearby Nature context: image habitat is part of, or very near, the everyday places that people inhabit.
• Image quality: the image is of high quality and is visually captivating.

Subjects and locations: The gigablitz subject may be any “nearby” location in which you have a personal interest:  schoolyard garden, backyard habitat, balcony planter, village grove, nearby remnant woods, vacant lot meadow next door and others.  Panoramas with high species richness (the range of different species in a given area) that are part of everyday places are especially encouraged.  It is the process of making and sharing gigapans that will transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Here are 3 things to keep in mind when choosing a place:

• The panorama should focus on organisms in a habitat near your home, school or place of work.
• Any life-forms are acceptable, such as plants, insects, and other animals.
• Rich, sharp detail will encourage snapshotters to help identify organisms in your panorama.  Thus, your gigapan unit should be positioned close to the subject habitat – within 100 feet (30 meters) away, and preferably much closer.  Up close mini-habitats in the near-macro range are welcome.

View examples from the June, 2011 collection of Nearby Nature finalists that might inspire your choice of gigablitz subject.

Submission information: You may submit as many panoramas as you wish.  Each panorama should be accompanied by the following:

• A title that includes the location where the image was captured.
• 3 required tags:
  • “nearbynature” = tag #1 (a single word)
  • “June” = tag #2
  • “2012” = tag #3
• A brief statement  (less than 100 words) on your thoughts about the image. Please include your name. Your affiliation is optional. For example:
  • Why did you choose this subject?
  • What is its context?
  • Did you discover anything interesting while you made the image or examined it in detail?
• Google Earth geolocation is encouraged but not required.

Snapshot titles and description: Once you upload your submission, we encourage you to snapshot all the organisms that you can.  Clear snapshot titles will help the jury to consider your submission.  For example, if you find a frog in your panorama, the following words should be shown in the snapshop title:  “nearbynature” (a single word) and “frog”.  If you wish to include more information, please do so in the snapshot description box.  Don’t worry about getting too specific – visiting snapshotters will help you identify the diversity of life in your panorama.  Your ability to correctly identify organisms is not a criteria for jury selection.

to learn more visit: http://science.gigapan.org/

The June Harless Center held a weeklong summer camp June 4^th -7^th, 2012 for children entering 2nd-5th grade on Marshall University's campus.  Allen Perry, a Physics and Chemistry teacher from South Point High School (Ohio), lead the camp with the Harless staff assisting.  Allen participated in the roll out which involved 4 local schools this past school year. Children gained inspiration for their designs from a virtual tour on the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s website and used the engineering design process to create their robots with the goal being to learn how to create and program a robot.

ASK:          

• What do you want your robot to look like?
• What do you want your robot to be able to do?

 IMAGINE:   

• Research
• Brainstorm ideas
• Choose the best one!

 PLAN:        

• Draw a diagram
• Make a list of materials you will need 

CREATE:   

• Follow your plan and create it!
• Test it out!

IMPROVE:  

• Talk about what works, what doesn’t, and what could  work better!     
• Modify your design to make it better
• Test it out! 

On Thursday, a showcase of the student’s work was held and parents, friends and family were invited to attend.  Some of the robot designs included an alligator, truck, Sacajawea, wooly mammoth, and recycle bots. The children enjoyed the experience and the parents were impressed with the designs that their children made and the creativity that was used

The June Harless Center for Rural Educational Research and Development, College of Education at Marshall University, held a year-end celebration showcasing Harless CREATE Satellite projects on May 17, 2012 from 6-8 in the Memorial Student Center’s Don Morris Room.  

Featured projects included: the GigaPan Outreach Project, Arts and Bots, Hear Me, and Message From Me. In addition, a new WaterBot project was introduced.  GigaPan enables students to take GigaPan panoramic images of their communities and activities and share them with peers across the world. Arts and Bots is a customized robot designed to integrate technology, literature, and history through the use of art supplies, circuit boards, lights, motors and sensors. Hear Me seeks to amplify kids voices using media and technology to create a world where kids are heard, acknowledged and understood, thereby giving them the power to inspire change in their lives, communities and the world. WaterBot is a citizen scientist project that prototypes a low-cost, easy and mobile method to monitor water quality, empowering communities, educators and children to monitor their watershed systems.

The Harless CREATE Satellite grant, which was funded by the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, provides rural Appalachian schools continuous and seamless access to technologies, educational resources and ideas generated at the CREATE Lab in Pittsburgh. In addition it enabled teachers to integrate cutting edge technology into existing curriculum.   

Schools showcasing projects are from the Marshall University Professional Development Partnership Schools and include the Early Education STEM Center, Huntington High, Kellogg, Guyandotte and Ceredo Elementary schools, Beverly Hills, Milton, Barboursville Middle schools, as well as Cherry River Elementary in Nicholas county, Beverly Elementary in Randolph county and South Point High School in Ohio.

Dear Educators, 

Kyempapu is a grassroots non-profit organization that is committed to community development, environmental management, and poverty alleviation in Kirinda, Uganda and its surrounding communities. Kyempapu was founded in 2009 and works out of Kirinda, Kitanda sub-county, about 140 kilometers from Kampala. 

Kyempapu would like to welcome volunteers from all over the world.

Accommodation is free and you can apply here www.kyempapu.wordpress.com 
We work with schools, communities ,youth groups and women in the fields
of education, sports, health and social work so whoever is interested
should contact us.
Below are some of the pictures of our students.
Kindly contact me in case this information is not enough to bring it out clearly.

Kind regards,

Sylvia Namukasa
Director
KYEMPAPU
www.kyempapu.wordpress.com

Sylvia was introduced to CREATE lab through one of our gigapan Dialogues teacherAlejandra Lorenzo-Chang, International Program Coordinator at the Waldorf School of Baltimore. Sylvia and her team is working to implement gigapan in the Uganda area and asked us to post this information to our blog. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me Clara Phillips clara@cmu.edu or Sylvia Namukasa:sylviabofry@gmail.com

Mathias demonstrating  the Gigapan to some KYEMPAPU volunteers.

The Marshall University Early Education STEM Center is one of the Professional Development Schools piloting the Arts and Bots project.  The project, originally started for middle school girls, has expanded to include both genders as well as other ages.  This is the first time the project has been used in elementary grades as well as pre-k. Many thanks to graduate assistant Lee-Dorah Wokpara for taking on this task and being creative and flexible with the curriculum. Children were encouraged to make a plan and draw a design before creating their robot.  We can't wait to see what the children come up with! 

Teachers from Huntington High School, Ceredo Elementary, South Point High School and the MU Early Education STEM Center took part in a 2-day training on arts and bots on February 17th and 18th on Marshall's campus.  The 8 teachers agreed to pilot the project and integrate it into existing classroom curriculum and will be using it in a variety of subjects including engineering, physics, chemistry, science and math.  Jenn Cross from CMU's CREATE Lab was on hand to help train the teachers on equipment use while the Harless CREATE Satellite team assisted with curriculum. The project will expand to include additional schools and teachers in the fall and a summer training is planned.   We look forward to seeing what the teachers and students come up with!

Ellis students have been Gigapanning different places of worship. Here you see two students pretty well soaked by the rain at the Hindu Jain Temple in Monroeville, PA.
We were treated to a nice tour, but we were not allowed to photograph inside. However, the outside of the temple is also quite beautiful.

Posted by Karen Kaighin, the instructor of students at the Ellis School.
The students are Valiha (with her coat on her head) and Annie.