Capital City Technical Consulting

Small groups of science teachers will then be called together by HaSTA to talk specifically about NOAA’s websites in an attempt to determine the extent to which the information it provides is utilized and useful to address Hawai’i’s state science standards.

“The government has put a lot of energy and expense into the task of preparing materials that can be used by science teachers in their classrooms,” said Weidner. “Our task is to determine the extent to which our teachers are taking full advantage of these resources.”

A major component of its effort will be a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis of the NOAA materials, products, and services in the Pacific. This analysis by Capital City will enable it to make a series of recommendations to NOAA about how it can best serve the Hawai’i science teachers and increase the relevancy of its environmental literacy products.

Anticipating that its delivery of products and services could be improved, NOAA has charged Capital City with the task of developing a better way of marketing to classroom teachers. For that reason, Capital City subcontracted to Mark Loughridge and his company, Ulua Media, the task of developing a mock-up for a new web-delivery information system.

The project will develop a framework that ensures NOAA content is accessible and compelling for learners of all ages. To do this, Capital City Technical Consulting, Inc. will catalogue selected NOAA content and analyze what parts address which state and federal standards for science and math. Ulua Media will design an easy-to-use, front-end approach so that users can quickly choose the standards they want to focus on and view the appropriate NOAA content ranked according to relevance. Furthermore, the user will be able to choose specific standards in science, choose other standards in math, and then view the most appropriate cross matches in NOAA content in order of relevance.

“What makes this contract exciting,” said Weidner, is the fact Ulua Media is going to bring NOAA to the very forefront of what exploration into information can be. The company intends to embed NOAA content into an immersive 3-D environment so that learners can view the information in the context of a photorealistic simulation. This has never been done before.”

Users will be able to freely explore reef ecosystems, for example, and have relevant NOAA information pop-up in a heads-up display next to the fish the user encounters. The users will be able to explore the past, present, and potential futures of a reef based on years of NOAA data visualized in a photorealistic simulation. Visitors will have the opportunity to virtually dive into regions of the earth and oceans that they might never otherwise experience.

“We all realize our youngsters today are media savvy and adept at digital media,” said Weidner. “But our efforts are going to be able to offer them something that will surprise and delight them, even as it greatly expands their understanding of environmental sciences.”

In the past five years, Capital City Technical Consulting, Inc. has been awarded four other contracts to work in Hawai’i. Two of these contracts were funded directly to Capital City by NOAA and the other two were funded by the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology using NOAA funding.