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Textbook learning issues, literally

Two Washington State University faculty members have been awarded a $50,000 grant to research textbooks in Spanish-language classes, and how those may help or hinder student learners.

Nancy Bell.
Bell

The College of Education’s Anne Marie Guerrettaz, assistant professor of language, literacy, and technology, and Nancy Bell, professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of English, and a colleague from Denison University will receive the grant from the Spencer Foundation, which helps fund education research.

The research is already yielding interesting results.

“I have discovered over the past year that 90 percent of English-speaking American kids that study a foreign language don’t actually learn it,” Guerrettaz said. “That number sort of surprised me, but it also didn’t.”

The primary resources most classrooms have are the teacher and the textbook. While Guerrettaz acknowledges the huge – and primary – role that teachers play in the classroom, her research deals with only the textbook.

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WSU Insider

 

 

Dr. Universe: What are shooting stars made of?

If you are anything like me, you probably like watching for shooting stars in the night sky. A shooting star, or a meteor, is usually a small rock that falls into Earth’s atmosphere.

Michael Allen.
Allen

When I went to visit my friend Michael Allen, a senior instructor of astronomy and physics at Washington State University, he told me a lot of shooting stars are no bigger than a pencil eraser.

“The earth is going to pass a random pebble once in a while and that will make a streak in the sky,” he said.

You might be wondering how such a small rock can create such a bright streak of light. If you’ve ever rubbed your hands together, you may know that friction is what helps them warm up.

When a small rock is falling into Earth’s atmosphere, it falls super-fast. Depending on the meteor, it can travel anywhere from 36,000 feet to 236,220 feet in a single second. As it falls, there is a lot of friction between the air and the rock. With all that friction, the rock starts to get really hot.

It is this friction that will help melt part of the rock. If the rock is small enough, it will evaporate, leaving behind a trail of hot gasses—and that’s the shooting star that you see streaking across the night sky.

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Dr. Universe

A Guided Stroll Through the Past

Beginning this summer, walk in the present while seeing some of Vancouver, Washington’s oldest historic sites with Now iTour, a self-guided, voice-activated virtual tour through the world’s first head-mounted tablet.

When RealWear, a San Jose–based knowledge transfer company, moved into the Artillery Barracks of Vancouver, they essentially became a part of The Historic Trust. With both organizations interested in bringing the local community together, a simple conversation birthed the grand idea of melding together the technology of RealWear, the history of Vancouver, Wash., and the talented students of WSU Vancouver’s Creative Media and Digital Culture program.

Dene Grigar.
Grigar

Since fall 2017, Richard Burrows, director of community outreach and engagement at The Historic Trust, has worked with CMDC Director and Professor Dene Grigar’s students to develop three technology-based projects to provide engaging, interactive opportunities to experience the history of Vancouver in new ways. Each has been the focus of a senior seminar class, the last class taken before a CMDC senior graduates.

The first project was the Providence Academy Journey, an augmented reality experience, and the second, Unfolding Vancouver, an interactive game for tablets and smartphones. The graduating class of December 2018 developed Now iTour, an interactive tour given through a headset considered the world’s first head-mounted tablet, or the RealWear HMT-1. The company provided 10 headsets to The Historic Trust for the students to develop the application and for the Trust to give the tours.

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Northwest Crimson & Gray

Who dominates the discourse of the past?

Male academics, who comprise less than 10 percent of North American archaeologists, write the vast majority of the field’s high impact, peer-reviewed literature.

Shannon Tushingham and Tiffany Fulkerson smile over a stack of books and in front of ancient artifacts.
Tushingham and Fulkerson

That’s according to a new study in American Antiquity by Washington State University archaeologists Tiffany Fulkerson and Shannon Tushingham.

The two scientists set out to determine how a rapidly evolving demographic and professional landscape is influencing the production and dissemination of knowledge in American archaeology.

They found that women, who now make up half of all archaeologists in North America, and professionals working outside of a university setting, who account for 90 percent of the total workforce, were far less likely to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

“The underrepresentation of women and non-academics in peer-reviewed publications is in stark contrast to the landscape of archaeology as a whole, which is rich in gender and occupational diversity,” said Fulkerson, a graduate student in the WSU Department of Anthropology and lead author of the study. “In effect, you have a very narrow demographic dominating the discourse of the past in North America.”

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WSU Insider

WSU grad’s art brought Apollo‑era space flight to millions

Before an age of digital cameras, the world had to rely largely on artist renderings to help visualize the various stages of early space travel, particularly the pioneering Apollo 11 mission that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon 50 years ago this month.

And the artist whose work NASA relied on heavily was WSU alumnus George Mathis.

Rendering of a rocket ship and capsule in orbit around a planet inouter space by artist and WSU alumnus George Mathis.
Rendering by artist and WSU alumnus George Mathis.

Mathis graduated from WSU with a degree in art in 1932 and moved to Oakland, California, to focus on becoming a commercial artist. Along with his wife Jean, he founded a thriving business in lithography, where he focused on capturing the Old West through his art.

But in 1959, he also started working with the Aerojet corporation, America’s largest producer of rocket engines. Aerojet built the engines for the Apollo and Gemini missions and used the artistic renderings by Mathis to illustrate how the propulsion systems were designed to work. He called the art, “engineering concept” renderings and worked closely with Aerojet’s engineers, who studied the images for technical accuracy.

Back in 1969, with international interest in the Apollo 11 mission soaring, the Mathis renderings were widely broadcast by television networks and published in newspapers and magazines to help explain how the astronauts were actually getting from Earth to the moon.

He worked with Aerojet until 1970. Over the course of his career, he became nationally recognized not only for his work depicting space travel but for his art celebrating scenes of the Old West and the California Gold Rush, earning him the affectionate title of “pictoral historian of the Mother Lode.”

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