The goal of this session is to summarize what the presenters have learned and still need to learn about the design of computer-based materials that could transform science education. The presenters illustrate their points with interactive software from their research, and close with a sketch of research that this area needs. Two of the unique and potentially transformative capacities of computers in science teaching are their ability to permit students to learn concepts by using computational models and to explore virtual and real worlds using probeware. Equipped with probes, computers become instruments for recording, displaying, and analyzing data from experiments. Computational models greatly extend the possibilities of exploration to systems that cannot be brought into the lab.

The following guidelines, helpful in designing these materials, are discussed:

Elicit ideas—Students develop a repertoire of ideas about scientific phenomena that reflects their observations, experiences, and intellectual efforts. When students identify their own ideas, they can test them against new ideas and get feedback on them from discussions with other students.

Add ideas—Adding new ideas is the goal of every science activity, but designing effective ways to present new ideas is difficult. Computer-based visualizations offer a great way for students to interact with phenomena that are too small, fast, or massive to observe. New ideas should connect to existing ideas and personally relevant problems.

Distinguish ideas—Students tend to add new ideas in school and use them in the context where they were learned rather than distinguishing them from their other ideas or using them in everyday life. By exploring personally relevant contexts, students can connect their experiences to class issues. Technology greatly expands the range of contexts that can be used.

Sort out ideas—Ultimately, students need to coordinate productive ideas, prior knowledge, and experience to achieve coherent and durable scientific understanding. Technology helps guide students to organize their ideas in a narrative, explain their ideas to a peer, write a persuasive argument to a government official, or make a comprehensive representation of their knowledge to sort out their ideas.

These guidelines are applicable to non-computer contexts, but having student materials developed online according to these guidelines and integrated with models and probes greatly increases the scope for learning. The presenters have, therefore, created numerous learning activities based on these ideas that are designed to guide student explorations to achieve specific learning goals. Their research has included extensive technical work to develop software platforms that allow non-programmers to create and deliver learning activities. These platforms also can extract data on student progress and thinking for use by teachers and researchers. These platforms are free, open source, and widely used by educators. The presenters are interested in helping other researchers use and extend these platforms in new settings.

The purpose of this session is to engage participants in discussing and sharing strategies for designing classroom uses of data sets and visualization technologies, including large archives and portals of geospatial data sets, data from field sites, Web-based graphing and data analysis tools, and technologies that simulate a field environment. Each of these technologies and data sets is tied to curriculum and instructional resources. Many of the projects focus on the students’ local areas in order to build engagement and connect the data and scientific content to their prior knowledge, experience, and sense of connectedness to their environment. The projects primarily showcase uses of geospatial visualizations, which when representing authentic data, provide powerful resources for exercising spatial, temporal, quantitative, and concept-based reasoning about what is known and not known about scientific phenomena. In turn, such uses reinforce student understanding of how scientists determine which data to collect, how to collect them, when to collect them, and how to interpret and analyze them. Yet real data, whether from student field collection or from public archives and portals, can be “messy” and usually do not tell a simple story. Furthermore, there are tremendous challenges to using public data archives in science classrooms (e.g., user interface issues, data structures, technical vocabulary, and metadata incomprehensible to all but professional researchers and technicians), compounded by the rapid rate of technological change and increase in data volume.

Session goals include sharing the ways the projects employ these technologies in curriculum development and educator professional development, and ways in which learners are using these technologies to document and explore their world. Presenters seek to engage session participants in discussions of how other projects are using technological representations of field sites and planetary dynamics. The presenters lead development projects reaching a diverse range of grade levels and STEM courses on Earth and environmental science and ecology topics. Bodzin’s project, Promoting Spatial Thinking with Web-based Geospatial Technologies, uses Earth science investigations and support materials to build middle school students’ geospatial thinking skills and analysis capabilities. Zalles’ project, Studying Topography, Orographic Rainfall, and Ecosystems (STORE) with Geospatial Information Technology, employs Google Earth and ARC GIS Explorer Desktop software to study regional meteorology, ecosystem, and climate characteristics. Google Earth is also used in Almquist’s project, Cyber-enabled Earth Exploration: Development of Materials for Middle School Earth Science Instruction, for engaging middle school students in formulating claims, evidence, and reasoning to study volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics. Berkowitz and Wyner, of the projects Ecosystems and Evidence Project (Collaborative Research: Berkowitz), Data Explorations in Ecology Project (DEEP) and Ecology Disrupted: Using Real Scientific Data about Daily Life to Link Environmental Issues to Ecological Processes in Secondary School Science Classrooms (Collaborative Research: Wyner) respectively, describe case-based curricula using media and primary and secondary data to help New York City public school students study ecology and human influences. Short describes his project, Learning Science as Inquiry with the Urban Advantage: Formal-Informal Collaborations to Increase Science Literacy and Student Learning, and an ecology teaching case focusing on field research related to the zebra mussel invasion of the Hudson River ecosystem, employing Web-based graphing and data analysis tools. Field research is also the focus of Duggan-Haas’s project, Enhanced Earth System Teaching Through Regional and Local (ReaL) Earth Inquiry, in which teacher participants use a range of technologies to study and simulate field environments. Krumhansl (Oceans of Data: What is Needed to Support Students' Learning with Large Scientific Databases? (Collaborative Research: Krumhansl) provides conceptual anchors for how these projects can be viewed in light of what current cyber-infrastructures hold for supporting educational uses of data sets.