Abstract
Science on a Sphere (SoS) is a compelling educational display installed at numerous museums and planetariums around the world; essentially the SoS display is a large spherical surface on which multicolor high-resolution depictions of (e.g.) planetary weather maps may be depicted. Fascinating as the SoS display is, however, it is in practice restricted to the use of museum professionals; students (and for that matter, older museum visitors) are unable to create their own displays for the surface. This paper describes a working software system, Math on a Sphere (MoS), that democratizes the SoS display by providing a simple programming interface to the public, over the World Wide Web. Briefly, our system allows anyone to write programs for spherical graphics patterns, and then to upload those programs at a planetarium or museum site and see the result on the giant sphere. This paper describes the implementation of the MoS system; sketches a sample project; and concludes with a more wide-ranging discussion of our user testing to date, as well as strategies for empowering children and students with greater control of public displays.
Highlights
When educational technologists refer to "display devices", there is usually a tacit assumption that they are talking about flat screens–perhaps on a desktop or laptop computer, or mobile phone
This paper focuses on one such unorthodox example–a remarkable one called Science on a Sphere (SoS), created by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and installed in over 80 museum and planetarium settings around the world. (NOAA, 2013) The SoS display, shown in Fig. 1, is a large (1.73m diameter) solid-white spherical surface accompanied by four synchronized projectors; these four projectors are directed at the surface from distinct surrounding positions to produce a seamless, continuous "spherical picture"
This paper describes a working and publically available system, called Math on a Sphere (MoS), that allows users to create graphical patterns that may later be displayed on an actual SoS surface in a planetarium
Summary
When educational technologists refer to "display devices", there is usually a tacit assumption that they are talking about flat screens–perhaps on a desktop or laptop computer, or mobile phone. Youngsters could gain a provocative introduction to non-Euclidean geometry through interactive programming on a spherical surface By producing their own patterns on the SoS surface, children (and interested adults as well) could encounter notions such as geodesics, intrinsic curvature, and spherical coordinates in the course of compelling, personalized projects. This paper describes a working and publically available system, called Math on a Sphere (MoS), that allows users to create graphical patterns that may later be displayed on an actual SoS surface in a planetarium. The fourth section focuses on several more recent steps in our development of the MoS system, discussing ongoing work in extending the spherical language to accommodate more advanced programming projects. This article extends the earlier work in providing an introduction to more advanced spherical geometry projects, and in elaborating on our earlier discussion of central educational issues raised by the MoS system
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