What We Do
Case Study: North Carolina Zoological Park
Project: Field Trip Earth
Field Trip Earth provides students, teachers, and wildlife enthusiasts with greater access to wildlife conservation research projects ongoing around the world. It continues the award-winning adventures started with The Elephants of Cameroon and The Red Wolves of Alligator River by enabling the continuous updating of existing field trips and the addition of new ones.
Field Trip Earth has been named a Landmark Website for Teaching and Learning by the American Association of School Librarians, a division of the American Library Association. Other Landmark Websites so honored include the Library of Congress, NASA, PBS Teachers, Smithsonian Education, Apple Learning Interchange, Google Earth, WebQuest, and EduTopia.
Above: the Field Trip Earth website home page; fieldtripearth.org
Each of the site's field trips provides classrooms and others around the world the opportunity to interact meaningfully with wildlife researchers and other conservation experts. Students and other users can read researchers' field diary entries, direct questions to the researchers and read their responses, listen to recorded satellite telephone calls and other communications, see video taken in the field, and discuss conservation issues. In a sense, students can use the interactive resources of Field Trip Earth to become part of the research team itself.
"Field Trip Earth helps us focus on wildlife research programs ongoing around the world," said Mark MacAllister, the Coordinator for On-Line Learning Projects at the North Carolina Zoo. "With so much information now available to them, students and other site visitors will be able to learn about more than just red wolves or sea turtles. They will be able to understand the larger conservation issues that impact all species and habitats."
The primary technologies behind the site are Python, XML/XSL, and MySQL. Python allowed for rapid implementation, XSL enabled a separation of presentation from content, and MySQL enabled rapid data storage and retrieval. These technologies are integrated via Maki, an open-source webserving framework developed at webslingerz.
