Wright Center wins 2 website awards

A website that traces natural history from the Big Bang through human evolution and even peers into the future, has won two awards. The site was produced by the Wright Center for Science Education, based on the Medford/Somerville campus.

Called “The Cosmic Evolution,” the site includes nearly a half-million words, thousands of images and illustrations, several dozen short animations and a digitally compressed movie.

The website won the 2004 Science and Technology Web Award of Scientific American, which said the site offers “concise, informative images and audio narratives that boil down billions of years of time into an online time-travel adventure.” The site also won the Digital Dozen 2004 Award from the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse of the U.S. Department of Education, which called it “an exemplary website for educators.”

According to Eric Chaisson, director of the Wright Center, 33,000 CD-ROM copies of the site will be distributed free to science teachers nationwide as part of a special issue of the journal The Science Teacher, which will be published in February. To see the site, go to http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/cosmic_evolution.