The IMAGE Education and Public Outreach Program: Bringing POETRY to 
the K-12 community

Taylor, W.W.L., S. Odenwald, et al.

Now that we are near the maximum of solar activity cycle 23, there 
are many more opportunities to explain to the K-12 community and the 
general public, why solar activity has become an increasingly more 
serious issue for our technological civilization. By coupling the 
story of the human impacts of solar and geomagnetic activity with the 
goals of the national education standards (e.g. AAAS Benchmarks for 
Science Literacy), we can enrich the current offerings in K-12 
physical science education with relevant examples drawn from space 
and solar physics.

Since the start of the NASA IMAGE satellite program in 1996, its
education and public outreach efforts have continued to develop a 
variety of space science resources for the K-12 community. Now in its 
fourth year, this program called POETRY (Public Outreach, Education, 
Teaching and Reaching Youth) has worked closely with a teachers in 
Maryland and California to create exemplary teaching resources. These 
resources provide middle school and high school students with added 
insight into how the Sun-Earth system operates, why solar storms pose 
a serious problem for our technological civilization, and how the 
different elements of the system interact from CMEs to aurora.

We will present a selection of our products including a video, a 
CDROM, and four NASA Educator Guides which our team has authored 
during this time. The award-winning, 20-minute video, 'Blackout' was 
developed for the Maryland Event-Based Science program to supplement 
their recent science module by the same name. It describes the 
cradle-to-grave evolution of a solar storm and its terrestrial 
impact. The Educator Guides provide space science activities related 
to the Sun-Earth connection for grades K-5, 6-8 and 9-12. The CDROM 
contains the entire POETRY web site as well as Space Weather 
multi-media educational software, copies of all the Educator Guides, 
and an 1800 FAQ archive. We will also discuss the INSPIRE program 
which allows 1800+ high schools to study whistlers and other Very Low 
Frequency phenomena using an inexpensive receiver which can be 
assembled from a kit by students. We will be distributing copies of 
the CDROM to interested parties.

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Presented at the Fall American Geophysical Union Meeting, 
San Francisco, CA., December 15-19, 2000