Jonathan came up with a pretty good idea for the outreach portion of the proposal/project. We've been tossing ideas around about the specifics and wanted to get everyone's input. The idea is to visit area schools, do a presentation about NASA and the microgravity program. After the presentation, we will somehow choose a select number of students and teachers to accompany us as "ground crew" for one of the flight days.
We're going to email Doug Goforth who is over the RGSFOP to make sure this is okay, and to get an idea of how many people we can take. We discussed this idea with Dr. Jordan and he seemed to think it was feasible and a new idea, which NASA will hopefully like.
Some ideas we were considering is to make a short trivia-type quiz on space science, NASA, and the microgravity program that the students can take after the presentation. The top scores from each school can be thrown into a "hat" and a certain number chosen at random. We could even break down the schools into areas like Orange: LCM, WOS, Orangefield, etc; Midcounty: PNG, Nederland, etc.; Beaumont: West Brook... you get the idea. We can do separate drawings from each of the areas so we can get a good representation of the whole SETX area.
These are just some thoughts. Does anyone have any suggestions or other ideas for outreach?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I spoke with Katrina Brent with the engineering recruitment office. She offered her asistance for the 'outreach' portion of our project. She has various contacts with couselors and teachers across the region. I believe she would even help us set up visits to schools, as having students going to schools will assist her in her own endeavors. She asked if there were any limitations on the age of the high school students and I told her "no". Seeing that the honors program always wants to get their name out as well, a quick blurb on their behalf will certainly make Dr. Birdwell happy(and count for points if needed).
Is this "Outreach" portion part of the project or part of the Honors Program? I don't see anything mentioned in Dr. Zhou's proposal. Is this part of the RGSFOP requirements?
Honestly though, while this does sound like a good thing to do, I don't see it happening at a very broad scale, logistically speaking. Even if we chose only 12 high schools to present to, that would be 12 days spent on outreach, doing 12 presentations, generating surveys, giving surveys, analyzing the results, etc., etc. etc.. Time that has to be fit in with ALL our current schedules. Not to mention, who's going to be responsible for these additional "ground crew" personnel? A logistical nightmare at best.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is a neat idea to get the community involved, but before we plow headlong into something like this, we need to step back and tone things down quite a bit, or we will be spending a major portion of our (limited) project time on a relatively minor portion of the overall project.
How 'bout we plan on meeting this Friday to sit down and go over all of this.
The outreach is part of the NASA proposal/RGSFOP requirements. This is a major portion of the proposal (about 1/3), so it needs to be done in some form. This idea is a unique one, and might score us some "brownie" points for being a new idea.
We won't be giving any presentations until next semester after we know if the proposal was accepted. I think the time constraints next semester will be less, so this won't be as much of an issue. Also, we can split up into 2 or 3 groups to visit different schools, so we won't all be visiting every school. That will reduce some of the time problems. We don't need to figure all this out right now, but we'll need enough time to coordinate with the schools about scheduling, etc.
Post a Comment