CIESIN is pleased to announce that the TOPS-T SCHOOL (ScienceCore Heuristics for Open Science Outcomes in Learning) project has released 15 lessons organized across four NASA Earth Science thematic areas: Water Resources; Air Quality and Health; Disasters and Wildfires; and Climate and Agriculture. Each learning module is implemented as an end-to-end, reproducible experience aligned with the data science life cycle, incorporating data discovery, access, processing, analysis, visualization, interpretation, and sharing using open-source tools and NASA Earth science datasets. The lessons utilize Python, R, and Google Earth Engine.
The team was led by Kytt MacManus, former senior staff member at CIESIN and now the Applied Science Lead at the Environmental Flow Physics Lab (EFPL) of the Columbia University Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, and involved Greg Yetman, Sri Vinay, Hasim Engin, Camilla Green, Juan Martinez, Linda Pistolesi, Christina Deodatis, with administrative support from Eulalia Santin and Tracy Wen.
The complete suite of interactive, open-access modules is available at: https://www.topstschool.org/
Project materials are also archived in the TOPS-T SCHOOL Zenodo Community: https://zenodo.org/communities/topstschool/
Recordings and how-to videos for working with the data are available at: https://www.youtube.com/@TOPSTSCHOOL
All materials are licensed as CC-BY 4.0 and openly available for adoption, adaptation, and integration into courses, workshops, and training programs with attribution to the original source. CIESIN encourages educators, researchers, students, and open science practitioners to explore the modules and share them widely to help advance open, reproducible Earth science education.
