Gigapan Outreach

GigaPan at Science Fair in Aldeia, Brazil

2015-10-07T20:42:00Z

GigaPan was highlighted in three booths during the science fair at the Internacional School of Aldeia (EIA) in Camaragibe - PE, Brazil.

The theme for the science fair was I Like and I Share My Love for Aldeia. Aldeia is a neighborhood 15 km west of the city of Recife with a large area of well preserved Atlantic Forest.

Mrs. Juliana’s 4th grade booth used a GigaPan image as a backdrop. This GigaPan was taken by a group of 6th grade photography students. The image is of a fruit stand located about 100 meters from the school. The booth showed the importance of informal business in Aldeia.

Mrs. Ana Maria and her students designed a recreational guide for Aldeia. She used a GigaPan image taken of a small stream located on school property. View the GigaPan with the snapshot guide here: http://gigapan.com/gigapans/179312

Mrs. Vivian used an image of a Cashew tree to represent a timeline of Aldeia. The fruits, which were represented by photos, were hanging from the large print. On the left branches of the tree, the images show Aldeia before its major growth and development, and the pictures on the right of the tree, were current images of Aldeia.

The education gained and the experiences had, working with GigaPan and each other at EIA, is just the beginning. There are many more projects on the horizon.

Guest post by: Clara Phillips, Escola Internacional de Aldeia

Art, Conflict and GigaPan in Northern Ireland

2015-04-06T12:51:00Z

16 Carnegie Mellon University students spent their spring break in Belfast, Northern Ireland as part of a new Art, Conflict and Technology course, a collaboration between CMU CREATE Lab, College of Fine Art and Department of English. Read more about the trip here or view their GigaPans here.

Macroinvertebrates gigapixel project wins IXD award

2015-02-13T20:58:00Z

This week, The Aquatic Macoroinvertebrates Collection won the Engaging category of the national IXD Awards. The Interaction Design (IXD) Awards recognize and celebrate examples of excellence in Interaction Design across domains, channels, environments and cultures.

The macroinvertebrates project leverages an emerging class of gigapixel image technology to make the process of learning to see and identify insects more visual and engaging, without sacrificing scientific detail. Accurately identifying stream insects is a vital aspect of tracking water quality and protecting the health of watersheds, but it requires developing observational skills and knowledge to be able to participate. The site enables a variety of learners to more fully engage and participate in monitoring, environmental decision-making, and activism around the protection and conservation of our freshwater water resources.

Big congratulations to the entire Macroinvertebrates team!

More info about the IXD Awards and the other entries can be found here.

Lycée Louise Michel & Manchester Craftsmen's Guild: GigaPan Education Partnership

2014-06-09T17:08:00Z

We recently had the pleasure of working to help organize a cultural exchange through GigaPan between Lycée Louise Michel in Grenoble, France and Manchester Craftsmen's Guild Youth & Arts here in Pittsburgh, PA.

The partnership between these classrooms was born of a shot in the dark, an e-mail sent to Manchester Bidwell Corporation after watching an especially moving TED talk by Bill Strickland. After a discussion between Paolo Nzambi and Dave Deily in Pittsburgh, and Rebecca Clark in Grenoble, we decided a virtual exchange could be set up between two schools across the Atlantic. The project is being led by Rebecca and Justin Mazzei of the Manchester Craftmen's Guild.

Their one aim for this collaboration is for the world to get a little smaller for our students, and for them to understand themselves, their surroundings and empathize with others, their environments, surroundings, and cultures. Their aim is to help teens see that the world is just a village, to be shared by all, so that we can learn to appreciate each other and the wealth of our diversity.

The project began by a first videoconference, which took place on March 27th, 2014. In order to accommodate both groups, they met at 6:00pm for the French students and 12:00 for the Americans!

Says Rebecca, it was really great to be able to talk to students on the other side of the world about school and studies. The French students did a great job speaking English and the Americans had set up a great videoconferencing theater.

Justin Mazzei, teaching artist coordinator from MCG Youth and Arts, proposed using CREATE Lab and their Gigapan project as a way for students to share pictures and talk about their lives. Below are some of their images.

GigaPan Curriculum Collection - Celebrating 41 Educators

2014-01-08T18:42:41Z

For the past six years, CREATE Lab GigaPan outreach has inspired projects in 20 countries, engaging 1,176 educators, 6,371 students, and 153 leading scientists across the globe.

Today we are proud to announce the release of a GigaPan curriculum collection including 20 lesson plans, based on projects that were developed and implemented by 41 of our partner educators, featuring a variety of content areas and unique approaches to GigaPan. We're proud to show off their work.

The curriculum collection is available on: gigapan.com/cms/use-learn.
Each unit details the related common core and state standards.

In addition to our gratitude toward our partner educators, we dedicate a very special thank you to Jennifer Geist of Zeitgeist Creations Global Education Tools, who curated all the unit plans and uniformly formatted them for easy reference and implementation. To complete the collection, Jennifer bundled these units with educator guides for online resources, hardware, activity ideas as well as a project design template.

Photography becomes transformative when the image maker is empowered to capture what is most valuable to them, and even more so when they share this perspective with others. By creating and sharing GigaPan images, educators, students, and scientists can share the stories of their own landscapes and ignite conversations with participating groups all over the world.

We asked some of the educators featured in this collection to share their perspective about GigaPan.

Here's what they said:

Elizabeth Lallathin, Kellogg Elementary School, Huntington WV, USA

"Using GigaPan in my classroom has allowed all readers access to inferencing skills and to be part of a greater conversation. Images found on gigapan.com have become a virtual window to the settings of books, lessons, and news. Readers are able to place themselves inside of the picture and see it close up. The images grab the audience and hold the attention begging the onlooker to inquire more deeply with every zoom...GigaPan is a tool that I highly respect and enjoy using within my classroom."

Download Elizabeth's projects: World of Diversity and Travels Through Literature

Hari Prasetyo, SMA Al-Izhar, Jakarta, Indonesia

"GigaPan is an amazing tool. Using GigaPan has taught me and my students many things, such as, partnership, exchanging the ideas, and because we are from Indonesia we practice our English conversation by communicating with our partner school. The gigantic panorama produced by the GigaPan enables us to find/zoom in on unique or strange pictures/phenomenon/scene in our daily activities or cultures. We then can discuss these findings within our class or ask for an explanation from our school partner's students and teacher. So much cultural diversity or biodiversity that we can understand and learn about."

Download Hari's project, School Daily Activities, here.

David Williams, Huntington High School, Huntington WV, USA

"What I liked about the GigaPan is that it allowed the students to make discoveries without me telling them and it allowed me to see what interested them. It allowed their peers to help them because they were the only ones online to communicate with. It made the students excited and engaged. I had fully engaged students and by being on the computers students that might not participate in discussions could discuss via the keyboard. This project did a good job hooking my students on learning about the Incas."

Download David's project, Inca & Ancient Civilizations, here

Linda Twedt, South Fayette Middle School, McDonald PA, USA

"The magic of GigaPan is as much in what it can show as in what it can 'erase'. With assistance, we were able to peek inside the contents of a frozen food truck seemingly without the doors. GigaPan excites the students with its Facebook-style interface, allowing them to use their foreign language skills to get to know their partners, who may live many thousands of miles away."

Download Linda's project, Alimentation/Nutrition, here

Briana, student of Brandon Keat, Propel School, Pittsburgh PA, USA

“I must admit Gigapanning for me became a new craving! All I thought about when I walked around was 'this would be a great place to do a GigaPan.' I learned it all – how to set the machine up and how to adjust everything correctly and take awesome pictures. It was an amazing experience and I'm glad I got to be apart of it!"

Download Briana's classroom's social studies project here

Khosi Ntuli, Tlhatlogang Junior Secondary School, Soweto, South Africa

"I am an educator teaching Life Orientation at Tlhatlogang Junior Secondary in South Africa. Students are faced with challenging dilemmas. Life is all about choices and priorities. My subject aims at equipping them with skills and techniques to face their challenging background. Meeting with other educators made me realize that one way or the other we are all the same. We are faced with the challenge of changing the minds of those kids that God has placed to our care.”

Download Khosi's project, Global Health, here

Becky Severino, Beverly Elementary School, Beverly WV, USA

"The Self-Portrait GigaPan project sprang from a discussion with a preschool teacher about found objects. We decided that we would ask our students to go on a treasure hunt at home and bring to school any small treasures they could find. We used the objects as springboards for creative play. When it seemed that the students had exhausted all possibilities, we introduced the concept of self-portraits. Using the GigaPan site, we visited museums and art galleries to see original self-portraits by famous artists. We used our found treasures to build faces, working without glue so that we could change our work, revisit it, recreate the faces depending on the objects chosen. Finally we created our own self-portraits. We then created puppets from our objects and wrote stories about their lives.

We were so fascinated with that GigaPan that we decided to create our own using the self-portraits of famous artists. We made small thumbnail copies of their works and placed them in various spots around our classroom. We then made larger versions of the same pictures and used those to cover our faces and placed ourselves in the GigaPan. We were very pleased with the outcome of our work!"

Download Becky's project, Beautiful Stuff: Self Portraits, here

Bonnie Conner, Milton Middle School, Milton WV, USA

"I created the project for a classification unit I do near the end of the year. My students are always amazed at how the GigaPan works. Students enjoy trying to find the organisms and classify them. I even taught a student teacher how to use the GigaPan last year and used it in my digital imaging club with 6, 7, and 8th graders."

Download Bonnie's project, Nine Phyla of the Animal Kingdom, here

Marti Louw, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA, USA

"Gigapixel technology brings a 21st century spin to the natural history diorama. Explorable images not only make accessible the remote, rare and hard to see, the technology enables learners to explore, observe and discover meaning in their own way."

Download Marti's project, Stories in Rock, here

Jason Jackson, Beverly Hills Middle School, Huntington WV, USA

"The projects main focus was to broaden the horizons of children. Many places around the world seem so similar to us here in the US, but the differences in everyday activities, like grocery shopping, can be surprising. During this project we took time to look at local prices for a gallon of milk and compare that mathematically to the price of a gallon of milk in other locations. We started our investigation by asking family and friends who lived in other states what a gallon of milk cost. Then, we explored the GigaPan site and other internet sites for the price of milk per gallon. After locating several outlets, a convenient store in the middle east, a European Sweet Shop, an Asian open market, and grocery stores in the United States, the data comparison assignment started. As a culminating assignment, students had to use the information that we had learned to create a visual representation of how the prices varied among other objects located in our class' original GigaPan. Most students chose a spread sheet which related back to our math basis."

Download Jason's project, Nutrition & Markets, here.

View the full curriculum collection here

History - Ancient Civilizations

2013-07-26T16:06:08Z

In this project we will look at how Greek and Roman architecture has inspired modern buildings in Washington D.C. and then in Huntington W.V.

Look at the gigapans of Greek and Roman architecture. What do you notice when you look at the buildings? What is the style of Greek and Roman architecture? Why do you think it is still used today?

Compare it to the gigipans of Washington D.C., do you see many similarities? Why would Greek and Roman design be used in Washington DC.?

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/211

Download ancientcivil_gigapan_project.pdf

GigaPan with Eyes as Big as Plates

2013-07-26T15:17:45Z

This is the headquarters of Eyes as Big as Plates on a two month artist residency in New York's Redhook. A collaboration between the Norwegian photographer Karoline Hjorth and Finnish artist Riitta Ikonen, Eyes as Big as Plates photography series explores older people's nature relationship.

The residency was hosted by the Recess Session and located in the stunning Pioneer Works building in Brooklyn. This plastic hut was set up as a temporary measure to try to keep a small part of the studio warm in the winter. A precious Gigapan was also trusted in our care for documenting the process of photographing charismatic New Yorkers in the pockets of wilderness.

(I had a hard time sitting still for too long, hence the red patches all over the image…)

Here is life outside the 'Hot Hut' and the actual studio space:

Gigapan was quite a crowd puller whenever it was in action.

Here we are at Forest Park in Queens, capturing Bob amongst the pine forest.

Eyes as Big as Plates# Bob © Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth

Many Thanks Gigapan!

Yours,

Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth

More information on Eyes as Big as Plates: http://eyesasbigasplates.wordpress.com/

Language Arts - Literature

2013-05-09T20:06:00Z

Students read and examined tales from international and national authors. They first researched elements of writing, types of narration, styles of characters, the time in which the tale took place, the location, and the social-cultural context. Afterwards they used the GigaPan to photograph themselves as they represented the author’s vision. Students had to represent characters so they dressed themselves up as their particular character would. They decided to act out a scenario and with roles in place used the GigaPan to record the scene. When the GigaPan finished the recording the images were uploaded to the GigaPan Dialogues Community education website. Students shared the GigaPan image with other classrooms that in turn did the same.

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/197

Download itell_gigapan_project.pdf

Science - Earth Science

2013-05-09T20:02:00Z

Elementary students in a small town in West Virginia study different rivers and the seasonal impact upon them.

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/191

Download cherryriver_gigapan_project.pdf

Science - Environmental

2013-05-09T20:00:27Z

The projects goal is to share images of Western Pennsylvania native plant and tree species. Also to compare waterways of McCutcheon Run at McKeever and "The Ponds" at Burgettstown.

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/41

Download environ_gigapan_project.pdf

Social Studies - Other Cultures

2013-05-09T19:57:51Z

Elementary students in a small rural area of West Virginia broaden their cultural awareness when they compare, contrast and analyze lives in different parts of the world.

“Our continent of study in third grade is South America and this project offers us great opportunity to visit places without ever actually going. Students can map out their own points of interest within Rio de Janeiro and never need a tour guide. Instead of teaching proper grammar from a worksheet, students are able to practice real life experiences through making posts about the pictures.”

-Elizabeth Lallathin, primary teacher

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/186

Download world_gigapan_project.pdf

Science and New Technologies

2013-05-09T19:54:39Z

This project is a segment of the new 7th grade "Science and New Technologies" course offered at Escola Parque Gávea in 2012. The course's main objective is to develop critical thinking about sustainable development, while building 21st century skills and digital literacy in the classroom. We aim for both student action and introspection by proposing activities that allow for a hands-on approach through cross media, while exploring the impact of technology (old and new) in the system's ecology.

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/228

Download escolaparque_gigapan_project.pdf

The project was highlighted at the GigaPan.com November newsletter

Language - French

2013-05-09T19:50:58Z

Students from multiple schools across the globe practice their French by discussing what they see on their way to school.

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/230

Download school_gigapan_project.pdf

Language Arts - Writing

2013-05-09T19:39:59Z

The purpose of this project is to help students write descriptively through collaboration and discussion. Students will be looking at local areas and giving accurate descriptions that bridge the gap between writing and detailed, descriptive writing by looking at local environments. Students will be able to relate this to their own life through the content.

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/231

Download descwriting_gigapan_project.pdf

Terrenos Kelluwen en la ruralidad rural

2012-07-20T16:29:00Z

Kelluwen is a project aimed to develop didactic experiences involving social web tools in schools under poverty in southern Chile. We are making pilots, twice a year, involving several schools from different cities in southern Chile. Some of these classrooms are running special instructional designs using GigaPan Edu equipment and site.

Profesora Johanna Valenzuela y sus estudiantes de Séptimo Básico del Colegio Pumanque en el límite entre Puerto Montt y Alerce.

Estudiantes de Octavo Básico que se preparan para una foto de muestra cuando comienzan su experiencia de Fotografiando la Revolución Industrial - Escuela Particular Horizonte.

Profesor Claudio Villarroel y sus estudiantes de Octavo Básico de la Escuela Particular Horizonte (en las faldas del volcán Calbuco, entre Alerce y Colonia Río Sur).

Gigapan in Nicaragua

2012-06-18T20:11:00Z

I'm Marielle Saums, a student at Carnegie Mellon University and a Project Leader for SIFE: Nicaragua. Our group spent ten days in the community of Rosa Grande, Nicaragua conducting education and art initiatives this past May. Our initiatives are developed with the help of Bridges to Community staff as well as recommendations from community members and leaders in Rosa Grande. Our specific accomplishments this year were conducting art classes with young students and computer workshops with teachers. We also helped build latrines, pro-respiratory stoves, and the beginnings of the new community library.

SIFE: Nicaragua seeks to foster community dialogue between Rosa Grande and Pittsburgh, and the opportunity to use Gigapan allowed us to map out the community in a way that is accessible to the public on a global scale. Understanding the layout of Rosa Grande is not only helpful for our own group members to plan future projects, but it also served to capture the community at a critical time of growth and transition.

Community members were quite interested and inquisitive about the Gigapan equipment. When I used the Gigapan to photograph the education buildings, the students were eager to appear in multiple shots! Parents and community leaders were also excited about being able to view the Gigapans online, as Rosa Grande recently acquired laptops and (limited) internet access through the European Union.

While the Gigapan equipment is quite easy to use, there were still unanticipated setbacks that hindered my ability to take more images. The lack of access to a steady electrical supply made it difficult to recharge the Gigapan scanner and digital camera. I also had to account for poor lighting conditions, as few homes can afford lighting, and prevent the stray farm animal from knocking over the tripod as I shot images. However, these inconveniences were an important reminder of the many resource limitations that rural communities face as they establish development projects.

People in Rosa Grande have experience with using visual methods to identify areas of social need. In addition to the SIFE: Nicaragua art workshops, local citizens have also collaborated with a group from the University of Virginia using PhotoVoice photography methods. If the Rosa Grande's internet accessibility improves, then the Gigapan website can be another method for crowd-sourcing solutions and providing informed perspectives about life in Rosa Grande. I also hope that the Gigapans will convey the commitment and passion evident in the many community-driven projects, from stoves to art classes.
The images also try to provide an idea of what SIFE:Nicaragua experiences in Rosa Grande and how we are able to contribute to the community. We are always seeking potential partnerships in both Rosa Grande and Pittsburgh and you can learn more about our work at sifenicaragua.tumblr.com

Best,

The SIFE:Nicaragua Team

[Image 1: Group shot of SIFE: Nicaragua, our host Don Agusto, and other community members]

[Image 2: This shows me taking a Gigapan of the school and talking with students about the project.]

Have you been sharing Gigapan with others?

2012-02-17T22:24:00Z

Examples of activities we would like to track related to Gigapan:
(robot, websites, prints or otherwise)

using Gigapan with your students
showing it to teachers
engaging your community
training your colleagues
otherwise sharing / teaching Gigapan

Stories need not be limited to actual hands-on experience with the robot. If you used a Gigapan print to teach a concept (or loaned one to a school) we want to learn about it. If you collaborated with other researchers via an online Gigapan image, or otherwise used Gigapan images online in education or community context, please let us know.

Thank you!

Gigapan in Antarctica

2012-02-01T20:13:00Z

I am a first grade teacher on a scientific research team deployed at Palmer Station, Antarctica. We are here studying a wingless fly called Belgica antarctica. It is the southernmost, free-living insect in Antarctica and it's the largest animal that remains on land throughout the year. As the team's educational outreach coordinator, I used Gigapan technology to connect students in my school district as well as nationally with scientific research taking place at the bottom of the world. Antarctic Gigapan images can be found on my team's outreach blog at www.crestwoodexplorestheworld.org along with descriptive information and scavenger hunt challenges. Gigapan gives (preschool-grade 12) students an opportunity to explore detailed images of the Antarctic environment, provoking thoughtful questions and higher levels of learning.

Correcting the Ghost People

2010-11-14T12:00:00Z

A photograph captures a moment in time. A GigaPan is often presented as capturing a single moment, but

as we know it captures many disconnected moments, and things happen between those moments.

One of the most distracting things is when people move between frames. Often there will be a reasonably complete image of a person in the space where two or four images meet. If the person has moved the Stitch program tries to blend the different views into one view. Sometimes this is an entertaining effect, but mostly it is simply distracting.

The most frustrating are the images where there is a good image of a person on one of the pictures, but it is being obscured by another image. Wouldn't it be great if you could just make the 'extra' images go away? Read on for a simple way to fix (some) of these GigaPans.

The simple way to make the Stitch program ignore something is to take it away. So the essence of this technique is to simply delete the parts of the person which are confusing the stitcher. But normally if you erase part of a JPG image you get a white, or black, area in the picture - which just messes up your image more.

So the trick is to create a transparent layer in your image, and then save the image in a format other than JPEG, like the PNG format, which supports transparency.

Here is a sample image. There is a certain charm to some of these distortions, but perhaps a more realistic depiction is desired...

First look at the images in the 'Select Images' tab. If you hold your mouse over an image it reveals the image name.

You want to identify the images which overlap to include your subject.

Then open these images. I am going to use The Gimp program in this example. The Gimp is an open source image editing program. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and because it is open source everyone can download it for free.

So once you have the files open look for the best images of your subject. In this case I we are lucky (well, we are lucky because I selected this example in order to maximize for luck :-) We have a clear view of the woman in one shot.

The image below this includes an unfortunate movement, and an overlap of the subject.

We add a transparent layer by going to Layer->Transparency->Add Alpha Channel

Then use one of the select tools to select
the area which we want to get rid of.

The lasso tool is likely your best bet, but depending on the details in the subject the Rectangle Select may be fine.

Once you have selected the area you want to get rid of go to Edit->Clear.

The area you selected is replaced with a light and dark grey checkerboard pattern as a marker that this is now transparent.

Save the image in PNG format by File->Save As, and then select 'PNG' format. There is a dialogue box, but for now accept the defaults and save the image.

I use the original image name, in this case 'IMG_3843', but the extension is changed to PNG. This means that you have two copies of the image - the original (most likely) JPG, and the new image.

Repeat this process for each image which has a bad view of your subject.

1. Layer->Transparency->Add Alpha Channel
2. Select the area to remove.
3. Edit->Clear Make sure you get the checkerboard pattern. If you get an empty white area it means you didn't do step 1.
4. File->Save As and change the extension to PNG

Now back to the Stitch program! Select Add Images and add all of the images with a png extension. This is easier if you click the 'date modified' column so that the newest images are shown first - since you just edited the png files they will appear first.

Finally, remove the original JPG files which are now repeated by the PNG's. You will get images with black holes in them - but that is okay. The Stitch program knows that these are areas which are transparent, so it will not use the information from the transparent area during the blending process.

So save and stitch the panorama, and you should have a much improved image!

There are still some artifacts in the stitched version of my example, but at least it doesn't look like a Picasso painting.

(not that there is anything wrong with Picasso!)

Happy stitching, and if you have questions, or a better way to do this, please let me know!

GigaPan: Democratizing information and bolstering bioliteracy

2010-09-27T12:00:00Z

Fine Fellow Alex Smith wrote a fantastic article about his experience with gigapan for the quarterly newsletter of the International Barcode for Live Project.

Alex concludes, "There are many parallels between the GigaPan and DNA barcoding as complementary forces for democratizing information and bolstering bioliteracy. Both are publicly accessible, both will be annotated through time by a community of experts and non-experts alike and both exist as a synthetic connection from the digital to the natural world.

One key to our capacity to understand the changes caused by the increasing pressures of the urbanization and degradation of natural environments will be ongoing monitoring through time. If such monitoring is democratized and publically available as DNA barcodes and GigaPans, then a marginalized environment may become more valued by the human population."

Check out the full article at http://ibol.org/gigapan/.

LBJ's Oval Office

2010-02-24T17:00:00Z

Thanks to David Engle, there are GigaPans of LBJ's Oval Office and Lady Bird's office ready for exploration- and there is a great deal to find. Enjoy.

Fossil GigaPan

2009-12-03T17:00:00Z

Thanks to Professor Richard Edmonds in Dorset, UK, there is a new and beautiful example of macro-GigaPanography of a rock with a whole lot of fossil evidence.