Prospects for Scientific Visualization as an Educational Technology

Abstract

Scientific visualization has the potential to make science education more acces- sible and to provide a means for authentic scientific inquiry. The role of scientific visualization within science is explicated through examples of its use and by presenting a sociological account of science that portrays scientific visualization as an important new inscriptional system. Three examples of using scientific visualization within education are provided: the ChemViz Proj- ect at the National Center for Supercomputing Activities, the Image Processing for Teaching (IPT) project at the University of Arizona, and an undergraduate climatology course at the University of Chicago. Potential problems of integrat- ing scientific visualization within secondary education are described, including students' need to learn basic scientific practices, incompatibilities between the format of the traditional high-school classroom and scientific inquiry, and the need for additional infrastructure within schools. Finally, possible solutions to these problems are described, culminating in a view of scientific visualization as a means to provide education with an important new inscriptional system for exploratory, inquiry-driven learning and to link the aims of education to the practices of science. Scientific visualization (SciV) stands for diverse scientific and social enter- prises that include a new t ype of graphic representation; the creation of dramatic scientific images and their animation; an emerging academic field that combines e lements of science, computing, semiotics, and the visual arts; and the coordination of a suite of advanced technologies to collect, store, process, and image large data sets. The rallying cry of SciV has acted as a catalyst