Transcript of Earth Day with Kenji Williams

Narrator: Good afternoon, everyone and Happy Earth Day. On behalf of the entire team here, we'd like to welcome you to NASA's Digital Learning Network at Goddard Space Flight Center— Valerie: Well this show is powerful in that it combines music, science, and earth and space imagery all at the same time. And this is a powerful tool for education for young people, for regular citizens, everybody to see what NASA's doing out there. Marci: In his performance, he incorporates those scientific visualizations, which is a whole realm of careers that students aren't aware of so bringing this together really gives the students an open-eye view to what potential they could have working at NASA. Music Kenji: This very simple story really inspired me to create a project and experience a performance that takes you to space so that you feel like an astronaut and can see the Earth like astronauts do. Music Valerie: Kenji's performance is able to evoke an emotional response that is often times missing in our current views of science, data, and imagery. Student: Why do you sometimes use an electrified violin— Student: --the right kind of music with the art that you have? Helen: --is an animation also, but the difference between, in general, animated movies and visualizations is that visualizations are based on measurements. Marci: We didn't prep them with the questions; we didn't prep them with the answers. Yet those were the right questions to ask about the teamwork, about the type of education they needed, about how the ideas came about, about the teamwork it took. That, to me, tells me that it was successful because the students actually showed interest and came up with their own ideas.

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