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Connected Learning Ecosystems: Educators Learning and Growing Together
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By NASA
Learn Home Professional Learning: Using… For Professionals Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 3 min read
Professional Learning: Using Children’s Books to Build STEM Habits of Mind
On October 14, 2024, the Science Activation program’s NASA eClipsTM Education team from the National Institute of Aerospace’s Center for Integrative Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM) Education (NIA-CISE) delivered a professional development session entitled “Using Children’s Books to Build STEM Habits of Mind” to 62 Media Specialists and Gifted Teachers from Richmond Public Schools in Virginia.
The session kicked off with an engaging overview of NASA’s methods for gathering Earth data, including the use of stratospheric balloons. Participants then took part in the Balloon Aerodynamics Challenge 1 & 2. Divided into small groups, the teachers assumed the role of “stratospheric balloon engineers” and were tasked with adjusting helium-filled balloons to achieve neutral buoyancy. Initially, teams analyzed qualitative and quantitative aspects of their balloons before exploring the materials available to help them reach the target height. Once they achieved neutral buoyancy, their next challenge was to guide their balloons around the room using only a straw and a 5×7-inch card. As they completed this task, participants linked the activity to Bernoulli’s Principle and Newton’s Laws of Motion.
Following the activity, teachers were introduced to NASA eClips’ newly released Guide Lites: Comparing Science and Engineering Practices Using Black Box Models. During this segment, they discussed the distinction between engineering and science, reflecting on the engineering practices applied in the Balloon Aerodynamics Challenge and how scientific concepts influenced their balloon modifications.
Additionally, teachers explored Favorite STEM Books and Activities: A Literary Collection Curated by the NASA eClips Team and Advisory Board Members, a resource designed to integrate children’s literature with STEM learning. Participants reviewed at least two book entries from the collection, assessing their alignment with educational standards, evaluating associated activities, and offering feedback on strengths and suggested improvements. As a final activity, teams selected a STEM trade book from the curated collection and analyzed it for potential cross-disciplinary connections, including inquiry, engineering, or hands-on activities.
The event was planned collaboratively with Judy Deichman (Coordinator of Library Services for Richmond Public Schools), Lynn Pleveich (Coordinator for Programs for the Gifted and Talented in Richmond Public Schools), Dr. Sharon Bowers and Joan Harper-Neely (NASA eClips Senior STEM Specialists), and Betsy McAllister (NIA’s Educator in Residence from Hampton City Schools).
NASA eClips is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AB91A and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn
Teacher teams discussed the alignment of STEM books to educational standards and provided feedback for the new activity, Favorite STEM Books and Activities: A Literary Collection Curated by the NASA eClips Team and Advisory Board Members.
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Last Updated Nov 04, 2024 Editor NASA Science Editorial Team Related Terms
For Professionals Opportunities For Educators to Get Involved Science Activation Explore More
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Learn Home Watch How Students Help NASA… Citizen Science Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 2 min read
Watch How Students Help NASA Grow Plants in Space: Growing Beyond Earth
Since 2015, students from across the USA have been partnering with scientists at NASA to advance research on growing plants in space, ultimately to feed astronauts on long-distance space missions, as part of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden’s Growing Beyond Earth project, which is now in its 9th year. This classroom-based citizen science project for 6th-12th grade students includes a series of plant experiments conducted by students in a Fairchild-designed plant habitat similar to the Vegetable Production System (VEGGIE) on the International Space Station.
This year, 8000+ students from 400+ schools are testing new edible plant varieties, studying radiation effects on growth, exploring the perfect light spectrum for super-sized space radishes, and experimenting with cosmic soil alternatives.
Watch these South Florida students show us how it’s done.
NASA citizen science projects are open to everyone around the world, not limited to U.S. citizens or residents. They are collaborations between scientists and interested members of the public. Through these collaborations, volunteers (known as citizen scientists) have helped make thousands of important scientific discoveries. More than 450 NASA citizen scientists have been named as co-authors on refereed scientific publications. Explore opportunities for you to get involved and do NASA science: https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science/
The Growing Beyond Earth project is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number 80NSSC22MO125 and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn
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Last Updated Oct 28, 2024 Editor NASA Science Editorial Team Related Terms
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3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This low-angle self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the site from which it reached down to drill into a rock target called “Buckskin” on lower Mount Sharp. When NASA conducts research beyond our world, scientists on Earth prepare as much as possible before sending instruments on extraterrestrial journeys. One way to prepare for these exploration missions is by using machine learning techniques to develop algorithms with data from commercial instruments or from flight instruments on planetary missions.
For example, NASA uses mass spectrometer instruments on Mars missions to analyze surface samples and identify organic molecules. Developing machine learning algorithms before missions can help make the process of analyzing planetary data faster and more efficient during time-limited space operations.
In 2022, Victoria Da Poian, a data scientist supporting machine learning research at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, collaborated with NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation to run two machine learning-based open science challenges, which sought ideas and solutions from the public. Solvers worldwide were invited to analyze chemical data sampled from commercial instruments located at NASA centers and data from the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) testbed, which is a replica of the instrument suite onboard the Curiosity rover. The challenges encouraged participants to be creative in their approaches and to provide detailed descriptions of their method and code.
Da Poian said her team decided to use public competitions for this project to gain new perspectives: “We were really interested in hearing from people who aren’t in our field and weren’t biased by the data’s meaning or our scientific rules.”
As a result, more than 1150 unique participants from all over the world participated in the competitions, and more than 600 solutions contributing models to analyze rock and soil samples relevant to planetary science were submitted. The challenges served as proof-of-concept projects to analyze the feasibility of combining data from multiple sources in a single machine learning application.
In addition to benefitting from the variety of perspectives offered by challenge participants, Da Poian says the challenges were both time- and cost-efficient methods for discovering solutions. At the same time, the challenges invited the global community to participate in NASA research in support of future space exploration missions, and winners received $60,000 in total prizes across the two opportunities.
Da Poian used lessons learned to develop a new challenge with Frontier Development Lab , an international research collaboration that brings together researchers and domain experts to tackle complex problems using machine learning technologies.
The competition, titled “Stay Curious: Leveraging Machine Learning to Analyze & Interpret the Measurements of Mars Planetary Instruments,” ran from June to August 2024. Results included cleaning SAM data collected on Mars, processing data for a consistent, machine learning-ready dataset combining commercial and flight instrument data, investigating data augmentation techniques to increase the limited data volume available for the challenge, and exploring machine learning techniques to help predict the chemical composition of Martian terrain.
“The machine learning challenges opened the door to how we can use laboratory data to train algorithms and then use that to train flight data,” said Da Poian. “Being able to use laboratory data that we’ve collected for many years is a huge opportunity for us, and the results so far are extremely encouraging.”
Find more opportunities: https://www.nasa.gov/get-involved/
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By NASA
Learn Home Science Activation’s PLACES… Earth Science Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 5 min read
Science Activation’s PLACES Team Facilitates Third Professional Learning Institute
The NASA Science Activation program’s Place-Based Learning to Advance Connections, Education, and Stewardship (PLACES) project supports middle and high school educators to engage students in data-rich Earth science learning through the integration of NASA data sets, images, classroom lessons, and other assets. This project draws on a place-based approach as a means to increase “data fluency” — the ability and confidence to make sense of and use data. This means knowing when, how, and why to use data for a specific purpose, such as solving problems and communicating ideas grounded in evidence.
As part of this effort, PLACES facilitated its third Professional Learning (PL) Summer Institute (SI) for 22 educators at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) in Portland, Maine the week of August 12th, 2024. This is the third PL Summer Institute the PLACES team has facilitated, each focusing on engaging educators in place-based, data-rich teaching and learning with NASA data and resources.
The GMRI PL development and facilitation was a collaborative co-design effort between two NASA Science Activation projects (PLACES led by WestEd and the Learning Ecosystems Northeast project led by GMRI) and colleagues from the Concord Consortium and NASA Langley Research Center. During this PL, teachers took part in community science projects developed by GMRI to incorporate youth in ongoing research projects, including a mix of field- and classroom-based experiences that explored the phenomena of Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (HWA) and the changes to intertidal crab populations – two invasive species that are proliferating as a result of climate change. During two field-based experiences, teachers gathered primary data using protocols from GMRI’s Ecosystem Investigation Network and the NASA-sponsored program, GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment). Teachers then explored these primary data using Concord Consortium’s Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) to better understand the geographic and temporal spread of these species. To connect their local experiences to global happenings, teachers then explored secondary data sets, including those sourced from the My NASA Data (MND – also supported by NASA Science Activation as part of the GLOBE Mission Earth project) Earth System Explorer (e.g., Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, salinity, sea surface temperature). The facilitation team also used the MND Data Literacy Cubes to encourage teachers to consider a multitude of diverse questions about place, data, and the phenomena. The GLOBE protocols supplemented existing GMRI data collection protocols, presenting new opportunities for teachers already experienced with HWA and Green Crabs. The MND data and Data Literacy Cubes moved teachers from questions they generated as part of their primary data collection towards new knowledge.
Daily feedback from teachers highlighted their appreciation for the responsiveness of the facilitation team, as well as a growing curiosity and desire for using NASA resources such as protocols from GLOBE and data from MND’s Earth System Explorer. This is exciting to see as the teachers transition from the Summer Institute into a virtual Community of Practice during the school year. The Community of Practice engages them in peer-to-peer collaboration and dialogue as they develop, test, and give feedback on their own place-based, data-rich experiences using NASA data and resources. So far, teachers are planning to tackle a variety of topics ranging from ocean chemistry to human connections to the environment. Teachers indicated their interest in “making place-based experiences meaningful to our unique populations of students and having cultural representation in the classroom,” and focusing on “cross-school collaboration.” Preliminary evaluation data indicated that 76% of teachers thought their experiences with NASA resources during the SI helped them identify ways to bring data into their classroom. 85% of teachers indicated they feel a greater connection to NASA and knowledge of NASA resources for enhancing student understanding and engagement in science. Moving into the fall, teachers will take part in a Community of Practice, where they will work to implement a place-based, data-rich moment in their individual classrooms. In the summer of 2025, teachers will take part in a second summer institute where they will continue to learn more about implementing place-based, data-rich instruction.
The PLACES GMRI Summer Institute was made possible by a large co-design, collaborative effort across our partner organizations. This included:
Facilitation Team: Catherine Bursk (GMRI), Meggie Harvey (GMRI), Sara Salisbury (GMRI), Daniel Damelin (Concord Consortium) In-person Facilitation Support Team: Leigh Peake (GMRI), Karen Lionberger (WestEd), Kristin Hunter-Thomson (Dataspire), Angela Rizzi (NASA Langley) In-Person Team Member Participants: Janet Struble and Kevin Czaikowski (GLOBE, University of Toledo), Svetlana Darche (WestEd) Virtual Observers: Kirsten Daehler, Nicole Wong, Leticia Perez (WestEd), Tracy Ostrom (GLOBE, UC Berkeley), Lori Rubino-Hare (NAU) Additional support: Frieda Reichsman (Concord Consortium), Barbie Buckner and Jessia Taylor (NASA Langley), Sean Ryan (NAU), Lauren Shollenberger (NAU) PLACES is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number 80NSSC22M0005 and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn
Teachers at the GMRI summer institute review NDVI data ranging from 2002 to 2022 and identify patterns and trends. Share
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By NASA
4 Min Read Unique NASA Partnerships Spark STEM Learning on Global Scale
NASA astronaut Thomas Marshburn reading “Goodnight Moon” aboard station for Crayola’s “Read Along, Draw Along” Credits: NASA NASA offers a world of experiences and opportunities to engage young explorers around the globe in the excitement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement collaborates with experts throughout the agency, the U.S. government, and a variety of global partners to spark inspiration in Artemis Generation students everywhere.
Partnerships with the agency reach new audiences. Here are some of the ways NASA and its partners are making exciting STEM learning resources and opportunities available globally.
NASA and Minecraft collaborated to bring NASA missions to life. NASA and Crayola partnered on a series of virtual engagements to encourage students and families to participate in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) content – for example, the annual Crayola Creativity Week. NASA partnered with LEGO Education on educational resources to introduce STEAM concepts and careers with students, teachers, and families. NASA joined forces with Discovery Education to provide curriculum support resources, videos, and events through their online platform. NASA recently signed an agreement with Arizona State University’s Milo Space Science Institute to create new opportunities for students to engage in STEM workforce development through 12-week academies using NASA data sets, information from NASA subject matter experts as well as information on the agency’s missions and careers. NASA partnered with Code.org on the development of computer science and coding resources for teachers and students. NASA collaborated with LabXchange to develop free online resources for teachers and students on topics such as solar eclipses, Mars, astrobiology, and Artemis missions, with more than 700 resources available to date. Representative LEGO minifigures in front of European Service Module that will power the Orion spacecraft on Artemis II. Four LEGO minifigures will fly on Artemis I as part of the official flight kit, which carries mementos for educational outreach and posterity.
Credit: NASA/Radislav Sinyak There’s More to Explore With NASA
International educators and students can find even more ways to engage with NASA’s missions and content through these resources, available online to all.
For the youngest explorers, NASA Kids Club offers STEM-based games for students ages 3-9. The agency’s Artemis Camp Experience features hands-on activities designed to introduce K-12 students to the systems that will enable NASA astronauts to return to the Moon with Artemis. NASA’s “First Woman” graphic novel series tells the fictional story of Callie Rodriguez, the first woman to explore the Moon. Created for students in grades 5-12, “First Woman” includes graphic novels in English and Spanish along with accompanying videos, activities, and more. Through the agency’s internship opportunities, students gain authentic experience while being part of the agency’s work. Student challenges available internationally include the Human Exploration Rover Challenge, in which student teams create and test human-powered rovers, and the Space Apps Challenge, a hackathon that aims to solve real-world challenges on Earth and in space. NASA’s ASTRO CAMP Community Partners Program shares NASA STEM content and experiences through youth organizations and informal learning institutions such as museums and libraries, including nearly 30 international partner sites. Citizen scientists anywhere can contribute their local observations through the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Observer app, part of the GLOBE program sponsored by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Science Foundation, and Youth Learning as Citizen Environmental Scientists. Look up! Use the Spot the Station mobile app and website to know when the International Space Station will pass overhead. NASA is much more than astronauts and rocket scientists. The Surprisingly STEM video series highlights unexpected careers with linked hands-on activities. STEM resources for educators and students can be found anytime on NASA’s Learning Resources website. The agency offers video on demand through NASA+ with unique STEM programming, live coverage of NASA missions, and more. Students put their human-powered rover to the test in NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge.
Credit: NASA Get NASA STEM Updates via Email
NASA STEM’s e-newsletters deliver the latest updates to email inboxes around the world. The NASA EXPRESS weekly e-newsletter offers the latest NASA STEM content and opportunities, while the monthly Earthrise e-newsletter offers themed resources to elevate Earth and climate science in the classroom.
Learn more about how NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement is inspiring Artemis Generation explorers at: https://www.nasa.gov/stem
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Last Updated Oct 02, 2024 Related Terms
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