Our environment will be based on ongoing collaborations headed by Douglas Toomey and Jan Cuny. Their collaborations have already resulted in an environment for research in marine seismic tomography (TIERRA), a WEB-based notebook (ViNE), and a set of web tools for building virtual field trips (Oman tour pages). Software infrastructure from these projects will be combined into an environment that will allow professors to deliver field data to the classroom in near real time. It would allow students to analyze real data, obtain their own results, conduct numerical simulations in order to understand complex interactions, and to present their experimental results and interpretations both in standard and "web tour" formats.

The full environment is a multi-year, multi-person project, well beyond the scope of this proposal. Here we seek initial funds to start the project, with the expectation of seeking more significant, outside funding in the Spring of 00. To begin, we propose to acquire a commercial analysis software package and to hire a software engineer to adapt our existing research software for classroom use. We will test our approach in a lab course in the Fall of 99 using data collected during an actual field trip to the Galapagos.