The Journey of a Photon: Engaging High School Students Through Immersive Media Development

1. The Journey of a Photon: Engaging High School Students Through Immersive Media Development Presenter(s): Jacob Noel-Storr1, Gregory A. Wyllie 1, Kevin L. Shimkus 2 1 Rochester Institute of Technology: Rochester, NY 2 Texas A&M University: College Station, TX

2. The “Scube” • The Digital Immersive Science Cube, or Scube, is the cousin of the CAVE project that can be found at numerous universities. • The Scube is essentially a portable CAVE that can be brought or created at high schools, museums, or various other institutions.

3. The Scube • The Scube is a 6’ x 6’ x 8’ structure made of 1” PVC piping that is wrapped in a projector screen on all sides. • There is a short throw projector on each side of the Scube that projects through the fabric to its intended audience on the inside. • Everything is run from a single computer outside of the Scube.

4. The goal of the Scube • The purpose of the Scube is to immerse its viewers in scientific topics so that they are more interested in what they are learning, and learn more effectively. • The Scube can be assembled within 40 minutes, and is entirely portable. • The Scube can run a variety of programs in order to teach science materials, and can be taken advantage of by first time users.

5. Celestia • Celestia is a free space simulation software that is one of the popular programs on the Scube. • This program allows the user to travel through the Universe in 3D to more than 100,000 stars, including our solar system, galaxy, and even beyond. • It is possible to make presentations by creating scripts that controls the program to take a set tour of the universe. • The open source program allows users to easily create additional features (satellites, black holes, planets)

6. Breakout Session #1 • Please discuss the following questions with those around you and be ready to discuss any opinions. • How can you picture your school utilizing this technology, such as a Scube, to enhance learning? • What kind of classes or topics could you visualize being taught with this technology?

7. Journey of a Photon • "Journey of a Photon" is an immersive planetarium experience centered on astronomy and detector science topics using the Scube. • Directed by Education and Public Outreach lead Dr. Jacob Noel-Storr, and Principal Investigator Dr. Don Figer.

8. Journey of a Photon • While overseen by Noel-Storr and his undergraduate students, most of the project was designed and carried out by local high school students. • The main objectives of this project was to not only to create an immersive presentation, but to also provide these students with an challenging project in which they must problem solve and forge collaborations with their science teachers, their local scientific community, RIT, the Rochester Museum and Science Center, and the Rochester community in general. The Journey of a Photon high school students visit the SMFL clean room on RIT's campus.

9. Journey of a Photon • The Journey of a Photon team consisted of seven students from local school districts. • These students were driven and interested in the project. This allowed them to start from scratch and create a worthwhile multimedia presentation in the Scube using Celestia. • The students were not all scientists, and therefore had various roles, with some taking lead on gathering information, others writing, and some focusing on programming

10. Journey of a Photon • In April 2008, the students started meeting together to begin theirresearch. Over the summer, theymet twice a week at RIT to interview professors and utilize the facilities. Starting in September, theyhave been meeting as an actual college class at RIT.

11. Journey of a Photon • They got to the pointwhere they were working on writing scripts and visualizing what the presentation will actually look like. To get to this point, though, theyhave had to go through sketching numerous storyboards and composing multiple rough drafts of theirscripts, each time moving them closer to excellence.

12. Journey of a Photon Story The script that the students wrote and animated in Celestia tells the story of a photon traveling to Earth. The video follows the photon from its birth and travels with it through space as it encounters various objects along its journey. This includes other stars, asteroids, other planets, and finally the detectors around the planet such as Hubble that study these photons.

13. RIT’s contribution • In the Spring of 2009, the students presented their project at ImagineRIT. They presented their videos on the Scube for a large number of audiences in the "Immersed in Science" exhibit which, according to polls, was the most popular exhibit at ImagineRIT.

14. RIT’s contribution • The high school students worked hand in hand with college students from RIT to create the show and make it working for this festival. During the course of the project, RIT students Russell Barkley(Imaging Science '08), Kevin Shimkus(Biomedical Sciences '08), Evan See(Mechanical Engineering '11), and Greg Wyllie(Biotechnology '13) worked hand in hand with the high school students to create this project. These students helped keep the high school students on task, working together, and learning about what it is like to be a college student at RIT.

15. Other Uses • The digital immersive technologies, such as the Scube, can be used to show all sorts of presentations in schools. • Any kind of science can be visualized in a 3D environment as opposed to being read in a textbook, which makes it much easier to grasp for some students. • This does not end at Science however, any type of course can use these technologies to enhance the material, the content just has to be designed.

16. Breakout Session #2 • Please discuss the following questions with those around you and be ready to discuss any opinions. • Is this program something that you could picture occurring with students in your programs? • What kind of concerns would you have in trying to implement a program similar to JoP in your school?

17. Future Projects • We just received a new grant from NASA to work with high school students creating experiences to explore planetary surfaces. This includes surfaces on Mars and the Moon, and we are hoping for more projects in the future.

18. Thank You for coming Questions or comments: feel free to email Dr. Noel-Storr at Jake@cis.rit.edu Journey of a Photon is funded by NASA through a ROSES/EPO supplement to contract #NNX07AM68G.