SOS Explorer

Open data platforms offer educators and students access to vast amounts of information in just about every corner of science, yet effectively utilizing and interpreting these data remains a challenge. This presentation addresses these needs and provides a few example strategies to bridge the gap between the availability of open data and its effective use in educational contexts. We will present the NOAA Science On Sphere team's collaborative efforts between scientists, data visualizers, and educators to create visualizations of climate model outputs, marine debris, and data stories, like "The Pandemic & Air Quality." Then we will discuss putting those visualizations and stories into a free NOAA mobile app called SOS Explorer that allows a user to go to one place to view a wide variety of data visualizations. Additionally, we will discuss an NSF-funded education research project focused on integrating art observation techniques with data visualization to increase critical thinking and understanding by students. These techniques are effective even if the students have very little background knowledge about the art and data and also removes barriers for teachers who don't feel ready to answer all the questions a student might have about a complex data visualization. These approaches are further informing our content and technology development for NOAA's Science On a Sphere, which is a 6-foot diameter spherical video display of Earth and space visualizations and animations. Suspended in a dark room, it can make a viewer feel as if they are floating in space looking back at Earth. The system is widely used in informal education institutions; there are more than 185 in museums worldwide. The data catalog is open to all and offers over 550 curated datasets, including real time data. To further enable access to the data catalog, we have created a flat screen virtual globe, SOS Explorer, and a free app version, SOS Explorer Mobile.

Building Insights through Observation is a project funded by the National Science Foundation, designed to advance our understanding of how science teachers can learn to incorporate arts-based teaching methods and visualizations of authentic science data into their pedagogical practices in order to improve students' data literacy and critical thinking skills. The project uses data visualizations from the Science On a Sphere (SOS) project, a six foot 3D globe exhibit installed in over 172 museums. In 2019, the Science On a Sphere project released a free flat screen 3D globe mobile application, SOS Explorer Mobile, which allows users to access the SOS data catalog in the palm of their hands. This opened the door for teaming up to test pedagogy techniques for data visualizations in the classroom, a space that was not accessible for the large museum exhibit. Building Insights through Observation is a four-year project beginning July 2021 with an ultimate goal of creating a Data Visualization Toolbox for educators. In this talk we will discuss our research project, how the SOS Explorer app can be used, and how the data and resources developed through the project can benefit education professionals.