The overall goal of Interactions in Understanding the Universe is
to support and strengthen the education and outreach activities
of Grid-based
scientific experiments that utilize federated resources at
U.S. labs and universities.
This year a group of scientists,
computer scientists and educators are committed to building a rich
portfolio of coherent, online collaborative labs and to planning an
Education Virtual Organization to support participants and
developers long-term across projects.
I2U2 will develop and maintain a virtual portfolio of laboratories
("e-Labs" and "i-Labs") for
a diverse range of audiences, and will provide tools and support
services to assist developers in creating these educational
resources.
These laboratories break new ground by using the Grid for
education in the same way that science uses the Grid.
I2U2 is initially a collaboration between
the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum,
Fermilab & QuarkNet,
the ATLAS, CMS and MARIACHI experiments,
the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO),
the University of Chicago,
and the University of Houston.
One potential component of the I2U2 web portal is a set of on-line
discussion rooms, similar to the discussion forums provided by BOINC based
projects like SETI@Home and Einstein@Home.
We are using this site to test the idea that we can use
the BOINC forum code for I2U2 without too much effort.
Is this a useful alternative to e-mail, telecons, meetings, and the logbooks,
or is it just a distraction?
We don't know the right answer yet,
which is why it's called 'research'.
This is only a small part of the overall I2U2 effort for LIGO.
We will also develop e-Labs and supporting software tools
that will allow high school students and their teachers to make
use of the wealth of data collected by LIGO's environmental monitors,
which include seismometers, tiltmeters, magnetometers, and weather stations.
Students will be able to learn about science by actually participating in
investigative projects, and there is a real potential to make a contribution
to LIGO's search for gravitational waves by adding to our understanding
of the sources of background noise.
