The Last day at Mountain View Elementary School

April 25^th,  2014

Thank you Ms. Jarvis for having the BSU Microgravity Team! We have had a blast teaching science, engineering, technology, and math to your 5th grade students over the past month.

On Friday April 25^th we finished the egg drop engineering challenge. The students worked in teams to redesign their "rovers" with a few new parameters. This week four team's "rovers" successfully protected their eggs. Now it’s up to the BSU team to pick two lucky winners. We are looking for designs that meet all specified requirements and teams with science journals filled with detailed notes and diagrams of the engineering process.

 

 

   

 

   
Winners to be announced shortly!

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Marian Pritchett

On April 22^nd, 2014, the BSU Microgravity Team had the opportunity to go to Marian Pritchett high school and work with pregnant teens and teen moms. 

We taught these young women about Newton’s Laws of Motion using NASA Toys in Space Curriculum. The girls create their own experiments to explore these laws further and hypothesized how the various toys would perform within a microgravity environment. 

We ended our outreach with these young mothers, by inviting their toddler children in and doing a "mommy and me" science session. During this session we exposed these young women to ways that they can expose their children to science early though play, by tapping into their toddler's natural curiosity and probing their children's thinking through questioning. The team helped these young moms learn how to provide the earliest building blocks of scientific literacy and discovery in their toddler children.

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Day Three at Mountain View Elementary School

On April 11, 2014, we returned to Ms. Jarvis’s colorful classroom for another day of STEM fun! 

This visit we focused on the “E” in STEM education and engineering. We gave the students an engineering challenge to create an egg "rover," after watching the NASA video Seven Minutes of Terror about the Curiosity Rover's Mars landing.

The students were given a bag of materials, a budget to purchase more materials, and a list of constraints for this group project.

After brainstorming, designing, and creating the protection for their eggs, we did the egg drop. Only two groups' eggs survived!

Next time we visit, the students will work to redesign their egg "rovers" for another round of egg drops.

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Day Two and Mountain View Elementary School

On Friday, April 4^th, the Boise State Microgravity Team returned to Mountain View Elementary School for another fun day filled with inquiry, observations, designing, and redesigning. 

The fifth graders were introduced to new vocabulary terms: independent, dependent, and controlled variables. They were then challenged to apply their new knowledge of variables to a simple loop plane experiment, constructed from a straw, two loops of paper, and tape.

They flew their planes and took detailed observations in their notebooks.

The students then redesign their plane by changing one independent variable (number of loops, shape of loop, number of straws, etc.), in an attempt to increase the distance the plane traveled (dependent variable). They were required to keep everything else consistent with the original design (controlled variables).

Two students tied for the title of "Farthest Flying Loop Plane"

Way to go students! See you next week.

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Thank You ISGC

The Idaho Space Grant Consortium (ISGC) granted The Boise State University Microgravity Research Team funding to support our project on March 17, 2014.

 

Thank you ISGC for helping in our endeavor to NASA Johnson Space Center, to test our Reduced Gravity Experiment.

 

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Submission of the TEDP & Stress Analysis

On Wednesday, April 2, 2014, the Boise State University Microgravity Research Team submitted the Test Equipment Data Package (TEDP) and Stress Analysis documents to NASA Microgravity University Program.


We are now one step closer in our endeavor to NASA Johnson Space Center, to test our research project in microgravity!

Scott, Janos, Roxanne, and Libby working late on the TEDP.

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