igh school science teacher Andy Bullough can't take his students on a field trip to outer space, for obvious reasons. But he can bring outer space closer to them, via cyberspace.

Bullough's classes at the Westfield School in Sheffield, England, are learning about the sun, the moon, and the stars via the Internet. Thanks to the school's online link to the Sheffield Hallam University Centre for Science Education's network resources, the Westfield students are exploring images from the Hubble telescope and downloading NASA graphics and data to help them build small-scale models of the solar system out of cellophane.

There's no snoozing through static slide shows in Bullough's class, no young eyelids growing heavy at the sight of a tedious textbook; here, the interactivity and up-to-the-minute information that the Net offers get every student involved. "It's like dropping into a living library whenever and wherever you wish," Bullough says. The allure of the Internet itself adds a lot of excitement to the classroom as well. "Kids imagine that things related to the World Wide Web are often more grandiose than they are in reality. It's in cyberspace, so to them, it must be huge."