Digital Globes Offer a Dynamic Vision

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/science/digital-globes-a-new-way-to-view-the-world.html

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In the main hall of the hands-on science exhibits at the Cape Town Science Center in South Africa, a lifeless, tattered globe stands under naked fluorescent bulbs, all but ignored by children passing through on school tours.

Global Imagination's Magic Globe demonstration.

Not every school has been content to wait. Since 2007, the Mayo High School in Rochester, Minn., has used a digital globe in earth science lessons. Lawrence Mascotti, director of the school’s planetarium, noted that children today display such confidence with digital media that he regards the globe as a means for teachers to “play” at the students’ level, rather than vice versa.

He also finds the sphere a “more democratic” educational tool than textbooks or computer screens. While some children have difficulty with language-based concepts and mental manipulation, the digital globe works for nearly everyone, Mr. Mascotti says. “It’s simple. The mind follows the eye.”

Digital globes have obvious relevance to earth sciences and astronomy. But their potential in other subject areas is already being exploited. In China, where digital globes have found particular favor in schools, less than half the lesson plans are science-based, said Mr. Foody (in an ironic reversal of globalization’s typical tide, around 80 percent of Global Imagination’s orders are bound for China). Chinese schools use them mostly to teach social sciences, like the geography of religion and language, and history.

Whether the digital globe is used to teach earth sciences and astronomy or social sciences, the display itself generally represents Earth (or another astronomical body). But Math on a Sphere, a National Science Foundation-financed project, treats the digital globe as a generic spherical screen. In the study’s workshops, children use math skills to build and manipulate their own spherical creations. The results — which suggest art as much as math — will be applicable to classroom-based globes, too.

Sherry Hsi, a project investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, observes that however technically sophisticated children today may seem, opportunities to instruct a computer directly are increasingly rare. With Math on a Sphere, children give a computer specific graphical instructions, and manipulate the results live on the “uniquely compelling” sphere. According to Dr. Hsi, many parents have been particularly surprised by the interest their daughters have taken in this literally three-dimensional programming.

Digital globes already appear in the occasional corporate lobby, perhaps an infinitely adaptable replacement for tired time-zone clocks. Upstairs, a digital globe could take on more sophisticated deployments: summarizing sales data or market penetration, say, or resource allocation, or the locations of globe-trotting team members.

It is after hours, though, that digital globes may find the most unlimited potential. If prices bring them into the realm of home use, then a globe may provide a luminous living room centerpiece for adults and an educational tool for children. Think too, of music visualizations, digital aquariums, geotagged vacation photos, real-time flight tracking of your spouse’s trip, Risk-style “board” games. Or the mischievous, blinking digital eye that followed trick-or-treaters as they walked up to Mr. Foody’s house on recent Halloweens.

When it comes to digital displays, the iPad has set a high bar."High,"Mr. Foody said. “But flat.”