'Living Space' and 'Radi-N2 and You'
Do your students a favor and visit these two websites for fantastic STEM projects!
The Living Space Project and Radi-N2 and You Project
We signed up with 'CurioCity' (explorecuriocity.org) - a free STEM website that offers all sorts of resources, and 'Let's Talk Science' (letstalkscience.ca) - another free STEM website that offers wonderful resources! Both of these websites offer an amazing variety of STEM challenges and projects that come with teacher resources!
This year, with Canadian Astronaut David Saint Jacques being on the International Space Station, we were able to sign up for two amazing space related projects through Let's Talk Science and CurioCity. Both projects can be found on the CurioCity website for free and include teacher resources! These projects allowed us to learn about space, the ISS, and do some awesome STEM activities that got our students really engaged!
The Living Space Project: This project focused on health and well-being of astronauts and also Canadian students and school staff! We used microbits (this is also mentioned on the Robotics and Coding Challenges page) to program a carbon dioxide and humidity sensor to read levels of carbon dioxide, humidity, and temperature in our classrooms. The microbits were provided as part of the Living Space program for schools that qualified, and the carbon dioxide/humidity sensor were also provided. Both of these technology items can be purchased separately for schools that were not involved in the project - details for ordering microbits is on the Robotics and Coding Challenges page, and we ordered 2 more carbon dioxide/humidity sensors from this link to BuyaPi.ca - https://www.buyapi.ca/product/co2-sensor-for-microbit/.
As our students worked through the lessons provided on CurioCity, our students learned about the effects of carbon dioxide levels, humidity levels, and temperature on the overall health and well-being of people and students. They conducted sensor readings three times a day in our classrooms for a couple of weeks and did some interesting spot test studies on other classrooms and rooms around the school. We compared our readings to ISS readings, and students thought it was awesome to see real-time data from teh ISS being displayed in our classrooms! They then prepared slideshows showing their data and discussing the implications of their data for our classrooms. We used their research to make some changes to our classrooms to help with our particular issues, namely low humidity and high afternoon levels of carbon dioxide. We purchased carbon dioxide removing plants and used our UV lights to provide light for the plants, as our classroom is in the school basement. We also borrowed humidifiers to see if we could find a good sized one to help in our larger rooms.
The Radi-N2 and You project: This project was focused on measuring neutron radiation levels. We signed up for this project on CurioCity.ca also. David Saint Jacques, the Canadian Astronaut aboard the ISS, was also doing this same investigation on the ISS to measure how much neutron radiation is permeating the ISS and how that could affect the astronauts long term health. Our classroom received a 'bubble detector' from Bubble Technology Industries in Chalk River, Ontario in order to conduct our similar investigation in our classrooms. This dosimeter can be found using this link to bubbletech.ca - http://bubbletech.ca/product/bd-pnd/.
Our students followed the detailed lessons provided on CurioCity - a couple of them were a bit difficult for Grade 6 so we did not do them (optional activities). Our students then used the bubble detector for a week to measure neutron radiation levels in our classrooms and then uploaded our data to the ISS, which had the same experiment going on up there! It was easy to use and follow, and the students were very excited to see one bubble finally appear during the second week we used it!