The accomplishments and potential for SP in education are exemplified by the NSF-sponsored Image Processing for Teaching (IPT) project developed at the University of Arizona, which has pioneered the use of digital image processing as a science and mathematics teaching tool for all grades, from upper elementary through college. Using state-of-the-art software, students and their teachers discover and explore in the same manner as scientists. In addition, the use of images avoids the language- and code-based way science has been traditionally introduced to students. Consequently, more students can be attracted to science and have an opportunity for meaningful participation and learning through exploration and discovery.
The IPT project provides unique constraints on the structure of the NII because it is evidently developing ways for more Americans to use more data in a meaningful and productive way than any other application. Specifically, the targeted user population is 50 million American school students and their teachers; the data include all scientific imaging data, comprising all two-dimensional digital arrays of data from the broad suite of instruments and experiments of recent and future research in all fields. Because most classrooms do not yet have viable access to the Internet, IPT materials and images have so far been distributed via CDROM. As some IPT teachers have found ways to access Internet, they have been able to add an extra dimension of exploration to their students' IPT activities.
For example, several IPT curriculum units involve analysis of GEOS weather satellite imagery of hurricane systems and diurnal surface temperature variations. IPT CDROMs contain time-sequence data sets for these activities as well as supplemental image data for further exploration. Consider the extension of this activity that became possible when an IPT middle-school teacher on the Tohono O'odham reservation gained Internet access: His students were able to obtain same-hour satellite data for correlation with local weather conditions. By using Internet, the IPT activity was extended to a term-long project in weather prediction and satellite data interpretation.
It is critical to recognize that simply making data accessible on the Internet is not enough to ensure that they will be used in education, even as classrooms begin to be connected. These data will only be broadly used by the K-12 educational community if the following support is provided:
IPT has already developed the infrastructure for broad dissemination of those essential components. Over 1000 teachers have taken at least five-day-long workshops in IPT at sites across the country; curriculum materials are available in CDROM form and allow for expansion by those students who have access to imaging data on the Internet; extensive follow-up support and out-reach are readily available through telephone and e-mail hotlines, conferences, newsletters, and school visits. Thus the IPT project serves as a full-scale model of successful implementation of massive widespread usage of the kinds of information that should be made available on the NII.
Another project exploring the use of image processing in education is entitled ``Mathematics Experiences Through Image Processing'' which focuses on the matter of motivating middle-school and high-school students to take mathematics seriously. Because typical American children are brought up today on television and video games, they are at home with images and easily attracted to activities involving special effects and visual transformations. A digital image, however, is not only a visual object but also a mathematical one, and the many mathematical operations on images have corresponding visual effects that are quite striking. As with the IPT project, the NII allows these learning experiences to benefit from fresh, authentic imagery from around the world, and it helps build connections between mathematics and ideas from other subjects, as called for in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. In the future, the NII can make servers available that can compute image transformations designed by student with high-resolution imagery, enhancing the mathematics/image-processing experiences that students get from their local PCs alone. In this way, the NII itself can contribute to the kind of mathematics education that future US citizens will need in order to be intelligent NII users.