Summer Camp Scholarships for Girls!

Exciting news! We are about to announce details of a summer camp scholarship for girls.

This has been in the works for the past month. As you may have seen, I moderated a ‘Women in Engineering’ Town Hall meeting, here in the computer lab on April 21st.

Applications will be taken from students at Salt River Elementary. The scholarship will pay for a summer camp at Arizona State University. These ‘camps’ are for those interested in learning skills such as design, app development, robotics, animation, and renewable energy.

This STEM Scholarship program is being underwritten by The Quarter Project, a Colorado-based non-profit promoting engineering for young girls.

Application forms will be out later this week, and posted to our school website.

This Month’s STEM Talk on Swarm Robotics!

Excited to announce the second in our monthly  STEM Talks series.

The speaker:  Dr. Spring Berman, from ASU’s department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. She is a recipient of the 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award. This DARPA program is to engage the next generation of researchers who focus on national security issues.

The Topic:  Swarm Robots.  Dr. Berman’s ongoing research focuses on controlling swarms and ‘distributed sensing’ of not-so-smart robots.

This will be followed by a demonstration of a swarm. Ruben Gameros, a postgrad student will show how 2-4 bots could be manipulated to do complex tasks. “These tasks or ‘games’ are inspired by ants, which collectively work to deliver food through a tunnel to feed the queen,” he told me.

Date: Mon 9th March, 2015       Time: 4:00 pm           Venue:  Room A122  – Computer & Technology Lab

Light refreshments will be served.

(Check out last month’s STEM Talk)

 

Science and Tech – main topic when students met Energy Secretary

As much as I prepped my robotics students for that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet someone in government, there was the stuff you couldn’t anticipate.

Such as yesterday’s meeting with Energy Sec. Ernest Moniz, who was supposed to stop by their poster for about a 30 seconds. He continued to prod them on details for about 10 minutes. “Who’s next?” he kept asking. We had lined up three speakers. Two 4th graders, and a 6th grader.

The line of questioning was about their communication with a crew on Mars (the simulated community known as the HI-SEAS project) going on. Their project, for the just concluded FLL robotics tournament had extensive detail about how to use indigenous tools and material when, say, 3D printing (something used by the current Mission crew) isn’t enough.

After that high-profile moment, the students went on to check out the science packed into the 3-storey interdisciplinary science building or ‘ISTB4′ at Arizona State University.

This included an underwater robot, a weather station, and of course the impossible-to-resist full-scale replica of the Mars Curiosity rover.

If you’ve never been to ISTB4 at Arizona State University, the newest of the Engineering faculty buildings, it’s definitely worth a visit. It also houses a meteorite gallery, bio-tech labs and other interesting models of rockets, drones etc.

It’s one of the labs we visit when I take a group of winners of the Mars Day competition.

Mars Day 2014 – Video

Thanks to the support from SRPMIV-TV, we had coverage from Mars Day 2014 that took place on October 29th at Salt River Elementary School.

This is the third year we have had this event, which has become a fixture on our school calendar. (Check out last year’s event!)

Once again, thank you to:

• Mars Space Flight Facility
• ASU: Professor Jack Farmer, Sheri Klug-Boonstra, Anthony Zippay, Leon Manfredi
• Conrad Storad
• HI-SEAS Mission 3 Crew: Martha Lenio, Allen Mirkadyrov, Sophie Milam, Neil Scheibelhut, Jocelyn Dunn, Zak Wilson
• University of Hawaii at Manoa
• School of Earth and Space Exploration, ASU

Adding Maker-space component for Mars Day 2014

Exciting plans are underway for Mars Day 2014. It will be on October 29th. Much of it is hands-on.

We have a full day of events, starting a morning assembly.

• Video-conference with space scientist – all classes will interact with speaker via smart boards

• Grades 2-6 will take part in a brand new concept called ‘Maker Mars’ – a NASA-designed STEM project for students to design, and come up with scenarios for what it might take to build a community on Mars

• Pre K, Kindergarten and 1st grade will be involved in a hands-on science-writing workshop, with award-winning author, Conrad J. Storad

• We will also launch a poster competition in two weeks, so that the winners of the competition will be picked on Mars Day

StarLab evokes the big questions from kids

If you cannot visit the planetarium, I’m going to try to bring the planetarium to you, I promised my students in the middle of the school year. With the help of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, that dream came true with the visit of StarLab to Salt River Elementary School last week.

This is how the ‘lab’ arrived.

In less than 30 minutes it would fill the room!

On the inside, Karen Knierman from ASU, setting up for 16 class sessions…

Follow up: This week First Graders in my class had to design and name their own constellations!

Starlab, such a gift to students

Yesterday, at Salt River Elementary School, our students got to experience astronomy in a whole new way. We had StarLab here for two days.

It’s impossible for any kid to sit out this lab!

This 2-day experience was made possible through ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.  (Don’t I sound like a line from NPR!) Translated: We have some really smart, passionate post-doc students working with StarLab to conduct 8 sessions each day.

Two things StarLab struck me about bringing an inflatable planetarium to a school.

• This is what the whole ‘pop-up’ phenomenon has taken after. If you’ve not heard, there’s a new fascination with ‘pop-up agencies’ and pop-up marketing booths at events such as South By Southwest.

• The notion that planet Earth is so tiny when compared to the universe, and how much in science is left to be discovered.

For students the latter could be a powerful catalyst, incentivizing them (even wide-eyed first graders) to consider a career in the sciences.

As for the former, just the fact that you could view galaxies and constellations in a portable space like this, smashes that stereotype that science is boring, and/or hard.

Field trips bring science to life

It’s hard to beat a field trip when it comes to showing students how science work in the real world. That world is often not too far from our class rooms. Two weeks ago I took some students to three mind-blowing science labs at Arizona State University.

Mars Rover – “Opportunity”

First Stop: The Mars Space Facility, a home of the Mars rover. We nudge closer to the model of the rover, Opportunity. The  students ask about those cameras, and solar panels.  They got to hear about what scientists such as Dr. Phil Christensen who work with JPL, see: raw images streaming in, some barely a  week old. They also see that titanium wheel, in context.

Mars Rover – “Curiosity”

Next Stop: ISTB4, the building that’s home to the only full-scale model of NASA’s Curiosity, roughly the size of an SUV. It’s got more cameras and probes than you could shake a stick at.  My students have heard a lot about these rovers, during Mars Day. So this is a big deal! The nearest thing to kicking the tires of space science.

Third Stop: Decision Theater, a scientific visualization lab with floor-to-ceiling screens that render images in 3D. Indeed, urban planning and crisis mapping maybe a bit too heavy for third- fourth- and fifth-graders (esp at the end of a tour), but the students found the 3D model of the human brain (navigating through it, using a game controller!) mind-blowing.

I’m a big believer in field trips. Each year I take my robotics students to visit an organization that either uses robots, or is immersed in engineering that is directly or indirectly connected to the work they do in building and programming devices.

Huge thanks to Sheri Klug-Boonstra, Anthony Zippay and Cynde Garrett for making this happen!

Face-time with NASA makes science come to life

The fourth rock from the sun is a great place to take students –even if it’s a virtual field trip.

Mars Day turned out to be quite an event last week. With a little help from a remarkable piece of engineering, called a Robonaut to talk about. More about this in a moment.

The Mars event came about after some serendipitous discussions with NASA. I asked them out of the blue if we could have someone from the Space Station call in to my class. (Yes, I entertain big, hairy audacious goals!) I thought the folks with more Ph.ds than you could shake a stick at would never get back to me, but within a few days, someone did. Cassie Bowman must be accustomed to such calls, and quickly began to connect the dots.

Turns out the Mars Space Flight Facility, at Arizona State University, has researchers working on the Curiosity Rover. Cool stuff involving software that lets that SUV-sized robot communicate with earthlings.

Wheel of Mars Opportunity

A robot was great point of focus.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, ASU loaned me the wheel of the elder rover, Opportunity, which we displayed in a bed of red rocks, in the library. In my classes, sprinkled with space science and robotics, there’s nothing like a titanium wheel to get children to ask questions.

As for the day itself, we planned it around a series of hands-on sessions with three groups of students – fourth, fifth and sixth graders. Sheri Klug-Boonstra who set up the activity asked students to identify a mystery planet from boxes of artifacts brought back from a hypothetical team of explorers. They analyzed rocks, slivers of fur, shards of metal-like substances, and twigs. Teams were asked to predict what kind of planet this was, and what kind of life it must have sustained. Results were collected on Post-It notes and reviewed.

If this seemed like a great way to see science as a series of discoveries, it was book-ended by two other events:

• A poster competition that we launched ten days ahead.

• A video-conference with Kody Ensley.

Never heard of Kody? He’s a young Native American who was recently hired by NASA. Kody works on the Robonaut project at the Johnson Space Center, designing a humanoid robot that can work side-by-side with astronauts.

Something magical happens when students who tend to see a planet, and the space station, as way out of their reach, connect with a “real” scientist, in the middle of this fascinating science. They asked him about why he took to science, and what planet he would send the next robot to, if he had a chance.

We used FaceTime, an iPad app that lived up to its name, making the distance between Houston, Texas, and Scottsdale, Arizona disappear. It could have easily been a downlink from the space station.

Hands-on With the Mars Rover

Stopped by the Mars Space Flight Facility at ASU this morning to pick up a cardboard box that has some exciting contents.

Nicely bubble-wrapped inside is a wheel of the Mars Opportunity rover. My students have been watching the landing, and discussing the mechanical parts of the latest rover, Curiosity, that’s moving around on the red planet, right now.

But to give them a sense of history and perspective –my robotics class from last year knows this–I compare the dimensions of Opportunity (and its twin, Spirit, that have been hanging out on Mars since 2007), to Curiosity. A wheel is a great way to size up something, isn’t it? Take a look at the comparison in the photo from JPL. The guys in the white ab coats are there for a reason, to give us a sense of proportion.

L to R: Mars Opportunity, Sojourner, Curiosity

Also, more to the point, ASU loaned me the wheel for an upcoming event I am putting together for my 4th, 4th and 6th grade classes. It will be called MARS DAY. It will involve a build up over the next few weeks; the librarian, Mary Chabot, and I have Mars- and space-related material in our lesson plans. Also to be announced, a poster competition, and perhaps one more exciting component.

Stay tuned. The wheels are in motion; pun intended.