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UPDATE #10 - December 6, 1996

PART 1: New WebChat sessions announced
PART 2: Revised schedule for The Great Plant Debate
PART 3: The SMORE team answers your questions
PART 4: What's up in space: nothing new
PART 5: Busy as a bee

NEW WEBCHAT SESSIONS ANNOUNCED

A reminder about an upcoming WebChat session on Wednesday, December 11 from 10-11 AM Pacific (1-2 PM Eastern). Cecilia Wigley is a System Safety, Reliability & Quality Assurance Lead at NASA Ames Research Center. She is responsible for insuring that equipment flown in space is safe and functions properly. Please read Cecilia's biography at before joining the session. It is available at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/smore/team/cwigley.html To participate, please RSVP for each event to Andrea by sending a brief Email note to andream@quest.arc.nasa.gov with the date(s) you plan to participate. This RSVP is very important, since it will allow us to ensure that the chatroom does not become too crowded. For more information about all of this, please visit the web page at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/smore/events/interact.html

REVISED SCHEDULE FOR THE GREAT PLANT DEBATE

Currently students are engaged in Part 1 of The Great Plant Debate, discussing with one another and with NASA experts issues about hardware designs for growing plants in space. Originally this activity was scheduled to have already finished, but because it was slow to get started, we are extending the discussion until the start of Christmas vacations around December 20. Newcomers to the activity are still welcome. The second part of The Great Plant Debate involves students growing plants and sharing data about these plants. Originally the schedule called for the data sharing component to take place now. But to avoid conflicting with part one (as above), we are rescheduling the discussion to begin in the second half of January. This will enable schools to start part two after Christmas break and still do the plant growing in time to join the discussion. Apologies to anybody inconvenienced by this delay. Please consider getting involved in Part 2 of The Great Plant Debate. If you intend to be involved, please send a brief RSVP to me at marc@quest.arc.nasa.gov. For more details about Part 1 or Part 2, see this web address: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/smore/events/datashare.html

THE SMORE TEAM ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS

The opportunity to send email questions to the men and women of the SMORE team is available now through January of 1997. In most cases, you will receive a direct reply within 10 days to two weeks. We are grateful to the SMORE folks for generously volunteering their time to support this service. The sections below will describe some guidelines and procedures for the process. K-12 students and teachers can email questions to researchers, engineers and support staff. This interaction will be supported by a "Smart Filter" which protects the professional from Internet overload by acting as a buffer. The actual email addresses of these experts will remain unlisted. Also, repetitive questions will be answered from an accumulating database of replies; thus the valued interaction with the experts will be saved for original questions. (More information about how you can directly search this database will follow later.) TIPS FOR ASKING GOOD QUESTIONS Each and every expert is excited about connecting with classrooms. But it is important to remember that the time and energy of these people is extremely valuable. If possible, please review the materials available online to gain an overall understanding of the basics. It would be best to ask questions that are not easily answered elsewhere. For example, "What is the Mir space station?" would not be an appropriate question. Questions which arise from reading an expert's biography or Field Journal are encouraged. We recognize that this creates a gray area about whether or not a question is appropriate. Simply use your best judgment. Since the main idea is to excite students about the wonders of science and research, please err on the side of having the students participate. If you are not sure whether or not to send a question, send it. Some teachers have used a group dynamic to refine the questions that they email to experts. For example, after first studying SMORE material, students divide into groups and create a few questions per group. All of the questions are then shared, and students are given an opportunity to find answers to their classmates' questions. Those that remain unanswered are sent to the SMORE team. Ideally, the act of sending questions will further engage the student in their learning. It may help to think back to an early stage of development when the 3-year-old learns that repeating the word "why" can get parents to do most of the work in a conversation. The wise parent will try to get child involvement by asking, "Why do you want to know?" The same is true in the classroom. Teachers might want to help students to learn to ask good questions. Here are three questions the students might ask themselves as they submit their questions: What do I want to know? Is this information to be found in a resource I could easily check (such as a school encyclopedia)? Why do I want to know it? (What will I do with the information? or How will I use what I learn?) The last question is the most interesting. Student reflection on why they want to know something is a very valuable learning experience. LOGISTICS OF SENDING IN QUESTIONS (ADDRESS AND FORMAT) Questions will be accepted from now through January 1997. To submit a question, mail it to the following email address: question-sm@quest.arc.nasa.gov. We will acknowledge all questions immediately and answer as quickly as possible. In most cases we should be able to provide an answer within ten days to two weeks. In the subject field, please put the letters "QA:" before a descriptive subject. Also, provide a sentence of background information to help the experts understand the grade level of your students. The following example should illustrate this idea. TO: question-sm@quest.arc.nasa.gov FROM: your email address SUBJECT: QA: space wheat Hello, I am an 8th grader from Mt.View, California. I'm wondering about the wheat that NASA grows in space. Is it a special kind that is only available from special sources or is it like the kind I can buy at my local Feed & Grain store? Thanks, Kelly Valentine ONE QUESTION PER MESSAGE If you or your class has several questions which are unrelated, we ask that you please send each unrelated question in a separate email message rather than as one message with many different questions. While this may be inconvenient, it is important because it will help us to keep track of the questions and ensure that no question remains unanswered. Messages that do not follow this request will be unnecessarily delayed as we go through the extra step of splitting up the messages ourselves. TWENTY QUESTION LIMIT Any individual teacher will be limited to submitting a total of twenty (20) questions every three months. Hopefully this will encourage more classroom discussion about what students want to know and will lead to research done before asking questions. THE QUESTION ARCHIVE All of the question/answer pairs will accumulate online for your browsing or searching pleasure. To visit this archive, use http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/smore/question as the starting point.

WHAT'S UP IN SPACE

Again, we regret that we were unable to obtain information from the past week. This makes several issues in a row without this feature. Next week we will include information about whether this feature will return or not.

[Editor's note: Kenneth Souza is a high-level manager of life sciences activities at NASA Ames, where he helps oversee many unique facilities (like centrifuges). Also his organization does in-house research and works with those outside of NASA to help them use space for advancing our knowledge of biomedical problems and basic biology.] BUSY AS A BEE Kenneth A. Souza - http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/smore/team/ksouza.html Troubleshooting I am really a trouble shooter. I am responsible for interacting with the Life Science Program Office at NASA Headquarters, with the program managers here at Ames, as well as the local management. So on any given day, what typically happens is that I'll have a set of meetings that may take up half of a day. Those meetings range from one-on-one meetings to full-fledged review meetings. In one-on-one meetings, I'm listening to a person tell me about their particular program and the problems they're having meeting schedules, budgets, or new ideas for a scientific capability, whether it's a new instrument or a new mission. In review meetings, I'm reviewing a big program like all of our equipment that's going to be put on a particular shuttle mission or sent up to the Mir space station. Animal Care I have responsibility for the animal care and use program here at Ames. So, I want to make sure that people are adhering to the appropriate laws and regulations. There is a very distinct process for doing that. International Programs We have a lot of international programs. I probably go to six international meetings a year, in which we're trying to coordinate our activities with our international partners--the European Space Agency, the Russian Space Agency, the Japanese, Canadian, and many more--and set goals for new activities. Coping with Daily Problems Some of my days are taken up in advance-planning activities, budgetary problems, mission scheduling or scientific problems, some personnel problems and, of course, incessant email and telephone calls that come from a variety of sources. All of this rounds out a very long day. Interaction with the Press Interaction with the press is quite typical. Yesterday, it was exobiology, of which I am not directly involved. A few weeks ago it was the use of our animals on the Russian biosatellite. The animal rights people are very much involved with reviewing our program, and that takes a lot of my time channeling that activity. Space station budget cuts and potential problems there is another activity. That was today's crisis. Frustrations with the Electronic Media It's unfortunate that in some ways, the electronic media has taken hold because it's requiring instant gratification, and it has just made my life miserable by my being the neck of an hour glass. I get this deluge of information from NASA Headquarters that wants instantaneous response, and having to channel that out to the technical people at Ames, who can provide analytical capabilities and responses back to HQ, and then having to channel the information back to HQ. I just can't keep up with the electronic mail, for example. I typically receive between 50 and 60 email messages a day, along with about a dozen phone calls, and four or five meetings of an hour or two and length. I don't lack things to do.

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