Hot off the press, a new module to help you download your nodes. This is a new Drupal 6 module that will be in use on http://nisenet.org. This module will enable you to add two links to a node page -- one that creates a zipped file of all the files in a node, along with files for select nodereferences going 2 levels. The second is a link to a word.doc spit out of the node, which will also be included in the zip package. An example of how we are using this.
While at the Science Museum of Minnesota, I was the main developer on the NISEnet. This website supports a project that unites over 200 science centers across the United States around nanoscience education. My role was to develop the catalog. This catalog allows science educators to share how-to information about running public programs and building exhibits about nanoscience.
The Disease Detectives website accompanying a traveling exhibit developed by the Science Museum of Minnesota.
This was my first Drupal site, which was developed over the course of 3 months. I used exhibit environmental graphics as design elements. I build the Drupal site in Drupal 5, themed it, and added all the content.
I developed several Flash & XML pieces in Actionscript 2 & 3 as well. Some of the Flash pieces use a hybrid of information set in Drupal and fed into the flash pieces through flashvars. The largest flash piece is an interactive timeline.
The flash games were developed by Joel Back.
Learn about theming CCK fields
1/05/2009 - Doing this in Drupal 6 instead of D5 For DrupalDaze, I started putting together some materials for learning about theming CCK fields. Here it is...
The Microscope Imaging Station is a section of the Exploratorium Museum where museum visitors can use research-grade microscopes to look up close at life. The Imaging Station has featured real live stem cells, developing zebrafish, growing frog eggs and more. This project was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The website makes publicly available large images and high quality videos.
In 2008, the site was nominated for a Webby in the category of Science.
This site was built in 3 iterations over the course of several years. I worked on the 2nd and 3rd iteration.
For this site, I worked on developing the design (which matched elements of the physical exhibit), architecture, web media specs and created a simple php/mysql database to help categorize the multimedia. I also consulted with teachers who would be using certain learning activities in their classrooms. This was how we determined the best multimedia for the teachers - as the classroom realities of computers are not always the highest quality.
One cool feature, which was an enormous nightmare to build, was the 'scale' feature. This was very important for teachers, to be able to share the scale of the images with students. However, when you make images from microscopes, the zooming effects the scale. And then when you adapt these images to the web, the scale can change again. We basically restored the scale to all the images. This wasn't pretty, but we suffered through it for the sake of biology education.
Stem cells
It was quite exciting to work on the Stem Cell features. Scientists would regularly visit to meet with us, and we had the opportunity to meet with stem cell researchers. The microscopist Kristina Yu learned how to grow stem cells. The stem cells need to be grown in a sterile & warm environment. There is a special solution that is necessary to feed the stem cells. They put the little cells in a drop of liquid on a slide and invert it. The cells clump together at the bottom of the drop of liquid.
This was an exhibit that I worked on. The kiosk is at the Exploratorium, in the Life Sciences section. For this project, I audited a bioinformatics class at UC Berkeley. This got me started with working with genomic information. The kiosk runs off Flash/PHP/Mysql. I created a database of all the genes in the human genome, which pulled in a few different databases (HUGO, and some ontologies.) The flash interface included an easy to access 'Gene Searcher' which let museum visitors put ATCG... and find genes with their sequence of letters. The gene results (most of the genes!) were organized by 'interestingness' - and so for the first few genes that came up, our content writer Jennifer Frazier found really cool, relevant genes, such as the genes for hair color...and so those would come up first. That project was a lot of fun, because it made genetic information accessible. Here are some screenshots...
