|
   |
 |
                 
|
PART 1: Special back-to-school
edition
SPECIAL BACK-TO-SCHOOL EDITION Welcome to the new school year with Shuttle Team Online (STO). This message will be unlike most others you'll receive from this list. Usually you'll get stories from the men and women behind the scenes who work in NASA's human spaceflight program. But in this special back-to-school edition, instead of stories, we'll provide an overview of the various learning opportunities available. Brief descriptions of these curriculum supplements are provided here; more details can be found on our Web site at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/shuttle Shuttle Team Online veterans will notice a few changes from last school year. Now, in addition to the space shuttle, we intend to provide lots more information about the International Space Station. Also, a new series intended for high school and college physics students will be provided; these messages will contain details of the MSL-1 microgravity experiments recently flown in space. Shuttle Team Online is only possible because of the terrific people (nearly 100 at last count) who share their NASA experiences. These folks volunteer their time to help students and they deserve our special thanks. Also, the STO team includes NASA Headquarters: Alotta and Pam Johnson Space Center: Robert, Stephanie, Francis and Debbie Kennedy Space Center: Gregg Ames Research Center: Oran, Nilay, Linda, Susan, Keith and Alan We always enjoy hearing from you. Please feel free to send your comments and suggestions to marc@quest.arc.nasa.gov and I will see that they get passed on to the rest of the team. Best wishes for a fun and fruitful school year. Your network pal, Marc ONLINE COLLABORATIVE ACTIVITIES Two different activities encourage students to collaborate with other students in remote classrooms: "Students Improve the Shuttle" and "Shuttle Simulations." "Students Improve the Shuttle" has students select a part of the shuttle system to improve. Any shuttle area is fair game, from propulsion to computer systems to astronaut menus to the shuttle paint scheme. The focus has been kept deliberately broad to best help teachers integrate this activity into a variety of subject areas. Each participant researches and designs an improvement, and then provides their design to NASA, where it is shared online. When enough designs are submitted, classrooms from around the world will examine these designs and provide feedback and critiques. Designers will have an opportunity to revise their work, and then NASA experts will provide feedback. This is a middle-school/high-school activity. For more details, see: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/events/improve "Shuttle Simulations" has students pretending they are conducting their own in-class space shuttle mission. Youngsters will first perform a launch simulation with a NASA-provided script. Next, while "on-orbit," an experiment will be conducted, collecting real data. To complete the mission, a landing simulation will occur. Classrooms will be then be teamed with others to share the numerical data gathered and draw conclusions. This will work best at the elementary/middle-school levels. Teachers have flexibility about when they schedule their mission, but we hope you'll register your intent to participate as soon as possible. Please visit: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/events/simulations LESSON PLANS ABOUT ROCKETS AND MICROGRAVITY There are two collections of lesson plans available for in-class use (without sharing). These activities are targeted at middle school grade levels. One set focuses on rockets and the underlying science, mathematics and technology. The background includes: a brief history of rockets, rocket principles and practical rocketry. Twelve different classroom activities include: Pop Can Hero Engine, Rocket Car, Paper Rockets, Balloon Staging and Project X-35. See http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/teachers/rockets The other set of lessons focuses on microgravity science. Besides a background section, 16 different activities include: Free Fall Demonstrator, Gravity and Acceleration, Inertial Balance, Surface Tension, Candle Flames and Rapid Crystallization. Go to http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/teachers/mg We hope you'll use these resources to help make the connection for your students to the real work shared in Shuttle Team Online. CHATTING WITH ENTHUSIASTIC NASA EXPERTS About once per week, another STO expert is featured in an online chat. Students usually find these events quite exciting ("Mom, in school today I met someone who works for NASA!"). It is also a way for kids to practice their reading, writing and question forming skills. A biography of the chat guest is always available beforehand to help students prepare for the experience. To participate, you will need to have basic Internet connectivity in your school. Often teachers arrange for one or two students to type the questions brainstormed by a lively class discussion, so a computer for each student is not necessary (or encouraged). If you plan to chat, you must register for the event ahead of time. Everybody is always welcome to observe the chat (no RSVP is required). For more details, and for the complete schedule, please visit: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/events/interact.html BIOGRAPHIES AND FIELD JOURNALS Shuttle Team Online provides a lot of reading material which will bring to life the real world excitement of America's space program. Almost 100 biographies of the people involved are available. Each person tells a bit about their day-to-day responsibilities and their (often convoluted) career path which led them to their present position. Many articles include personal information like family facts and hobbies. Others have details about the NASA person as a youngster. This material puts a personal face on the action, and tries to help your students visualize a path they might take to one day work at NASA themselves. Also, every week we will publish one or more so called "Field Journals." These stories will describe in detail the work it takes to make the shuttle and space station come to life. The format will vary, and may include "what I did today," or "a problem I recently solved," or a "problem I wish I could solve," or "my goals for the next month." Regardless of the style, the stories should help you and your students understand the diversity of skills and people needed for NASA's space program to work. These materials are written at middle school or older reading levels. We hope that these snippets of NASA's world will be useful as reading exercises and to illustrate related topics within your curriculum. EMAIL QUESTIONS WHICH GET PERSONALLY ANSWERED The opportunity to send email questions to the men and women of NASA's shuttle team is available. In most cases, you will receive a direct reply within 10 days to two weeks. K-12 students and teachers can email questions to engineers, scientists 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. We believe that the email Q&A service is a good compliment to the bios, Field Journals and other materials. Students have an opportunity to follow-up on any Shuttle Team Online information, or they can pursue their own lines of interest. STUDENTS PUBLISH ON NASA'S WEB Shuttle Team Online is really about students taking an active role in studying rockets, space and microgravity. We'd like to get pictures of your students at work on these issues and/or samples of their work. We will then display your contributions on NASA's Web. Many kids will be very excited to point their browser to NASA and see themselves at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/kids We can accept submissions electronically as email, Web pages, or file transfers. If it is easier, send us faxes or mail us hardcopy. For details about how to get your material to us, see http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/events/posting.html We would very much like to feature the work of your students on our NASA site. But we can only display your work if you send it.... so please share! STUDENT STUMPERS: AN EASY ACTIVITY If the curriculum supplements above seem a bit too complex to work into your teaching plan, here is a simple activity that will work on the communication skills of your students while challenging them to think creatively. The basic idea is this: kids make riddles for other kids to solve. Students will create a question about the shuttle that they think will be difficult but fun to answer. Pose that question (we'll put it online in the Kids' Corner of the Web), and others will email their responses directly back. The question creator gets to decide if the respondent is right. Then, we'd love to see the results if you'd like to share. We expect the result to be a bunch of kid-kid email exchanges which heat up the Internet. An example question might be: What are some reasons that the Shuttle's external tank is ejected and not carried for the entire mission. That question isn't too tough; we know you can do better than that! Send your original Student Stumpers to Linda at . Also, visit the web at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/kids/stumpers.html WEEKLY WEBCHATS WITH STO DEVELOPERS An opportunity is now available to connect live with other teachers and the Shuttle Team Online development team. Every Thursday, we will meet virtually online to discuss issues and learn from one another. This is really a forum for teachers (not students) and others who are attempting to use the project with students. Hopefully your questions about the STO project will get answered. I know the STO team will come with our listening-ears on, ready to adapt the project to meet real teacher requirements. We will hold the discussion on the Web using a technology called WebChat. To use it, you only need a Web browser like Netscape or Microsoft's Internet Explorer. These teacher chats will be similar to the student/NASA-expert forums (described above in PART 4) which are being held weekly. So these Thursday chats will allow you to get comfortable with the technology before you bring a whole class into the chat room. On Thursdays, we will alternate the starting time of the one-hour discussion. We hope this will allow for participation from teachers on the east coast, west coast, and everywhere in between and beyond. The schedule for the next few weeks is: Pacific Eastern Sept 4 3:00pm 6:00pm Sept 11 noon 3:00pm Sept 18 3:00pm 6:00pm To join the fun, point your web browser to: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/events/interact.html If this is your first message from the updates-sto list, welcome! To catch up on back issues, please visit the following Internet URL: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/updates To subscribe to the updates-sto mailing list (where this message came from), send a message to: listmanager@quest.arc.nasa.gov In the message body, write these words: subscribe updates-sto CONVERSELY... To remove your name from the updates-sto mailing list, send a message to: listmanager@quest.arc.nasa.gov In the message body, write these words: unsubscribe updates-sto If you have Web access, please visit our "continuous construction" site at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/shuttle |
||
|
|
|
