June 17, 1996 Contact: Robert Irion (408) 459-2495; irion@ua.ucsc.edu

UC SANTA CRUZ STUDENTS HELP DESIGN VIRTUAL EXHIBITS FOR SAN JOSE'S TECH MUSEUM OF INNOVATION

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Thanks in part to students from the University of California, Santa Cruz, it's a snap to peek inside the new home of San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation, which won't even open for two more years. All visitors have to do is turn on a computer and tune to the World Wide Web.

UCSC undergraduates designed and built four of the first six exhibits in the museum's new on-line creation, called the "HyperTech." Guests to these exhibits hunt for genes to learn about DNA, shoot lasers at cataracts to see how lasers work, break computer codes to learn about privacy in the computer age, and watch the ground shake in an exhibit on earthquakes.

The students created the exhibits as part of an advanced class in on-line publishing led by Marti Atkinson, instructional development specialist in UCSC's Division of Natural Sciences. Working closely with exhibit developers from the Tech Museum and with experts from the Adobe Corporation, student teams gathered information, illustrated, created animations, wrote, and programmed the Web pages.

"I'm tickled pink!" says Mike Rose, Web publisher for the Tech Museum. "I think this partnership we have going is better than we could have imagined." The Tech Museum provided partial funding for the UCSC projects.

Beyond figuring out how to integrate technology and education for the HyperTech, students worked out the details of building museum exhibits. They debated the merits of ideas such as a laser- shooting pickle, a talking firefly, talking dogs, and mutating the names of visitors. By the end of the quarter, the exhibits blossomed from outlines and storyboards to entertaining educational displays.

Atkinson's class also heard from guest lecturers funded by an instructional improvement minigrant. Professionals visited to teach the newest tricks and advanced languages used on the Web, including Shockwave, Perl, JAVA, and virtual reality modeling language (VRML).

Students in Atkinson's previous classes built Web sites for nonprofit organizations in the Monterey Bay Area. She hopes to continue the UCSC partnership with the Tech Museum by creating more exhibits in future classes.

The virtual exhibits are a preview to the 1998 opening of the Tech Museum's new $59 million facility in downtown San Jose. Viewers may point their Web browsers to the following address (for best results, use Netscape 2.0 or above): http://www.thetech.org, then click on "HyperTech."

Editor's notes: Cassie Ferguson, a graduate student in UCSC's Science Communication Program, wrote this news release.

You may contact Marti Atkinson at (408) 459-4027 or marti@cse.ucsc.edu

This news release is also available on the World Wide Web at UCSC's "Services for Journalists" site (http://www.ucsc.edu/news/journalist.html) or via modem from UC NewsWire (209/244-6971).

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