Outreach

We are currently working with a 9th grade Physics class, taught by Mr. Hill, and an Engineering class, taught by Mr. Cannon.

Proposed Outreach Plan:

The Plan

The UC San Diego Microgravity University team has recognized its unique opportunity to reach a disproportionately large audience of underrepresented K-12 students in the greater San Diego region. We hope to take advantage of this situation by holding consecutive, concise, engaging and exciting STEM activities at multiple schools. The purpose will be to inspire young, underrepresented students to pursue an interest in STEM fields and show them that the possibility of doing so is achievable. We will accomplish our goals by having a series of activities combined with student to student mentorship in order to foster continued interest in STEM fields and careers. At the end of each demonstration we will engage the students by asking them to describe what they saw and share what they have learned with fellow classmates before we return for the next activity. Before departing and with the assistance of attention grabbing items - items like videos of the space shuttle, images of galaxies and various other “cool” projects and devices - we plan on sharing the many and varied student opportunities NASA has to offer. In order to support the students continued interest over the multi-activity program, students at the middle and high school levels will be given mentors of representative UCSD team members, two representatives for each school. During this time we will further inform and encourage these many underrepresented students to take advantage of NASA’s many programs, direct them to more resources and answer any specific questions they may have.

The Activities

By focusing on consecutive, concise experiments with large amounts of interaction with students, the UCSD team hopes to engage students at all levels and inspire them to continue learning about STEM fields. All physical materials utilized in the demonstrations will be easily identifiable by the students and used in simple ways. The aim of these relatively basic activities will be to demonstrate material related to the laws of and nature. By emphasizing a sense of simple discovery and wonderment of what the students are witnessing, many for the first time, we hope to inspire students to continue their interest in STEM fields and relate that interest to readily available NASA programs. For instance, EarthKAM and MoonKAM, at the UC San Diego campus, will be used to inspire Middle School students to enter STEM fields and to explore NASA programs.

The When and the How

Each project series is proposed to start in late January of 2013 at the discretion of each individual school and continue on a bi-monthly meeting basis. Once approval is granted and dates have been set, we hope to incorporate our activities with those of science teachers at each school. We will meet and work with the science teachers prior to the first activity to decide how to provide the best experience for the students. This may involve combining resources such as using their computers to watch an interactive video after we have demonstrated a given activity. This may also involve coordinating work space for the activity to be held so that all students can focus on the results. After the conclusion of each activity, we will work with the science teachers in upper grade levels to promote NASA programs and show the students what kinds of exciting projects they can work on in the future. One program we will present to the science teachers in particular is “Dropping In a Microgravity Environment” and “NASA Explorer Schools”. We will emphasize the availability of these programs by describing their proximity, tasks and sheer fun past students have had. Further, we will have a dedicated UCSD Microgravity Team outreach website to direct students and teachers to for links to NASA programs, fun activities, and a detailed schedule of our outreach events. We will also propose hosting a field trip to view labs within the Jacobs School of Engineering as well as other campus facilities. All of these preparations will be presided over by two designated UCSD Microgravity students for each individual school to foster unique relationships between each school's faculty early on.

Proposed Experiments: