Making geodesy accessible and relevant: Educator and student resources for enhancing learning about geosciences and geodesy

Wednesday 4:30pm-5:45pm TSU - Humphries: 118
Poster Session Part of Wednesday

Authors

Donna Charlevoix, EarthScope Consortium
Beth Bartel, UNAVCO
Shelley Olds, EarthScope Consortium
Beth Pratt-Sitaula, EarthScope Consortium
Kelsey Russo-Nixon, EarthScope
Geodesy is the study of Earth's shape, gravity field, and rotation. Geodetic applications and data are used to understand many societal issues such as land surface change, drought monitoring, climate change, snow depth, and vegetative cover, in addition to monitoring plate tectonics. Geodesy can be incorporated into almost any topic being taught in geosciences, however, most educators are not aware of this because geodesy is not typically included in the undergraduate curriculum and only taught in graduate programs that focus on geodetic research.

Our aim is to make geodesy accessible to both educators and students and to provide content that can be leveraged and incorporated into geoscience courses and investigations. As a science support facility of the National Science Foundation, we provide scientific data and educational resources to educators and researchers. UNAVCO manages NSF's Geodetic Facility, GAGE. In service to our geodetic community and the broader geosciences community we focus on developing resources that leverage the data and instrumentation of the GAGE Facility. These materials are ones that educators can teach with or that students can explore on their own.

As managers of the GAGE facility, we support a broad NSF community. In this poster, we will share with EER participants how they can access these materials (many of which are available on the SERC website). We will also provide tips and strategies for incorporating resources into existing courses, and provide suggestions on how to help students explore these resources including information about careers in geosciences and geodesy.