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| What Happened at NAISEF? | | As Grand Awardees at the 2008 National American Indian Science and Engineering Fair (NAISEF), Courtney Jackson and Sa'Shawna Lone (NCED gidakiimanaaniwigamig students) earned the right to go to this month's Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (IISEF). NAISEF, sponsored by the American Indian Science & Engineering Society (AISES), was held March 26-29 and included 373 students from 13 US states and 2 Canadian provinces. In addition to NCED's two Grand Award winners, several other gidakiimanaaniwigamig students came away with awards: twelve students were NAISEF Category Award winners, seven students received special sponsor awards, and four students were NAISEF math competition winners. All totaled, NCED gidakiimanaaniwigamig students won 30 out of the available 368 NAISEF awards. NAISEF encourages American Indian/Alaskan Native students in the areas of mathematics, science, and engineering and gives them an opportunity to showcase their science projects in a national arena. |  | | Left: Sa'Shawna Lone talks to reporters about her project at NAISEF. Photo courtesy of Leslie Bucar. Right: NCED gidakiimanaaniwigamig students at NAISEF. | | | | Earth Science Literacy Initiative | | NCED's education director, Karen Campbell, is involved in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Earth Science Literacy Initiative (ESLI). As one of 13 organizing committee members, Campbell will help create a document that incorporates the fundamental "Big Ideas" of Earth science from across a wide variety of research areas—a document that will ultimately establish what Americans should know about Earth science. The ESLI began formal efforts to compile this document May 12 with a two-week online workshop: Four hundred and ninety participants from the Earth science, research, and policy communities met to generate the document's idea framework. The ESLI effort will continue through summer and fall of 2008 with a series of subsequent workshops and reviews. This process, informed by the parallel efforts of several organizations (within the oceans, atmospheres, and climate communities) that have made important contributions to Earth systems science literacy, will culminate in January 2009 with an Earth Systems Literacy document ready for broad distribution. With input from the scientific community, and representing state-of-the-art research in Earth science, this document will most certainly play a role in guiding future educational and political policy as well as future scientific endeavours. | | EarthScape Expo at MYRES | | The 2008 MYRES: "Dynamic Interactions of Life and its Landscape" conference, to be held at Tulane University (New Orleans), includes an EarthScape Expo with a "Dams and Living Rivers" experiment, several interactive physical experiments, and a video kiosk demonstrating geomorphic–ecological feedbacks in real time. However, the highlight of the Expo is the "Dams and Living Rivers" experiment. Consisting of a 25-ft long flume, this experiment allows conference participants to see first-hand how a vegetated stream might respond to dam installation and removal. In addition, by attaching three cameras and a topographic laser scan system to the flume, researchers can show how time-lapse experimental data and topographic data are captured in a lab setting. The MYRES (or Meeting of Young Researchers in Earth Science) conference, cosponsored by NCED, Tulane University, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the International Hotel, will be held May 20-23. | |
