Congratulations!

The winner of our High School Design competition is...

Team "JAC":
Jessica Floyd
Alicia Allen
Courtney Howell

From Lumberton High School

Their experiment is titled "The Space Cube". It involves the study of how microgravity effects the total time to melt an ice cube.

Congratulations!!!

Thanks to all the teams that participated in the competition. There were a lot of great ideas.

Outreach Opportunity

I talked to Katrina Brent about getting some letters from a couple of schools to verify their interest in our outreach ideas. She is also planning on writing a letter to state that she will act as liaison between our team and the schools. This will add strength to our proposal if we can get them.

Also, she sent me an email about an activity on campus that we can participate in:

"Would your group be available to speak with about 40-50 students from Lumberton High School about your project on Monday, December 3rd? Lumberton High School’s Science class will be visiting our campus and the College of Engineering on this day and I thought it would be a great opportunity for you and your group to speak with these students and teacher about your project. It would probably be in the morning sometime."

We should check our schedules to see when we would be available.

Outreach Update

Doug Goforth replied back that everything sounded good. He gave only two stipulations:

The student's experiment would have to be present and attached on the Monday of the TRR (Test Readiness Review).
Also, due to the TRR taking place only once as well as badging issues, we will need to limit it to one team (3 students + 1 teacher).

I will type something up this weekend so we can bring it to Katrina next week.

Outreach Plan

I emailed Doug Goforth at NASA to discuss some of the concerns he had about our outreach plan. I will post his reply when I receive it, but here is what we're looking at right now:

We are now planning to set up a competition among area schools to fly a small, automated experiment along with ours. We will have to take measures to ensure the safety of their design (we will likely require that it be self-contained, within a certain weight limit, etc.). We plan to have only 1 ground crew member (Gary), so we can allow 3-student teams plus a teacher, which is within the 5-member GC limit. This will be a little more meaningful than just a random drawing after our presentations.

They may only need to be there on one flight day. Travel arrangements can be made with Lamar to use a school van to bring them to Ellington that day. The students will be responsible for designing, building, transporting, and possibly loading their experiment. We should be able to easily create a slot/space within the framework of our own experiment into which theirs can fit.

One question I had for Doug Goforth is if we could allow two separate HS teams (one for each flight day) to participate? There wouldn't be more than 5 GC members at one time, but this would allow more students to be involved. I'm not sure if having two teams is wise, due to the time involved in making sure their design is safe, etc., but I just wanted to know if this was an option. I also asked if they would be required to attend the first day or if they could just come for the one flight day?

I feel that this is a viable outreach program, and aside from a few administrative concerns, Doug Goforth seemed to think it was workable. Since we are so close to Houston, travel is not an issue. This would also introduce high school students to the RGSFOP and the design/proposal process, which will hopefully encourage them to participate at the college level.

One question for the high school teachers is if this could fit well with the high school curriculum, especially in the AP and advanced science courses?

Let me know if you have any ideas or concerns.

Outreach

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?