Decadal Plan for Space Science
LifeLab: A Virtual
Field Trip into
3.5 billion year old
Australia's history
LifeLab, originally called 'The Pilbara Project', is the result of a Virtual Field Trip high school education project co-led by Jenny Fergusson, formerly of the Macquarie ICT Innovation Centre at Macquarie University, and myself, between 2004 and 2007. The project was developed in collaboration with NASA Learning Technologies under a NASA Space Act Agreement with Macquarie University. The university's former Australian Centre for Astrobiology was one of only two international associate members of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, making the collaboration in this freely available hi-tech high school education project possible.
The project won a $119,500 grant from the Federal Government’s Australian Schools Innovation in Science, Technology and Mathematics fund (applications have a 20% success rate for this fund). The resulting LifeLab DVD was launched via Australia’s most successful science magazine, Cosmos, on April 4, 2007. It was distributed in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and USA, and was the second biggest selling issue ever for the magazine; the associated wiki website http://pilbara.mq.edu.au registered 482,000 page visits by mid-February, 2009 (approximately five million hits). The project is free and open source.
The project has been adopted by the Victorian Space Science Education Centre. During the making of the project I interacted extensively, and over three years of development, with researchers and technical experts at the NASA Astrobiology Institute, NASA Learning Technologies, NASA Astrobiology Institute, NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Kennedy Spaceflight Center, NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, NASA Headquarters, the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Arizona State University, and the University of Glamorgan’s Centre for Astronomy and Science Education.
During the making of this project I also collected data on the scientific literacy of 16-year-old Australian and British students for the basis of my doctorate, "Communicating astrobiology in public: A study of scientific literacy".