Science Through Arts (STAR)

The Head of Science at my school informed me that the NASA Glenn Learning Technologies Project (LTP, Cleveland, Ohio) “did video-conferences”, and could we participate in one? I contacted Glenn, and they said, “No.”

Only US schools were eligible, apparently.

I decided nonetheless to send them some of our cross-curricular teaching and learning resources on Light, and Ruth Petersen immediately emailed me back to say that NASA would, in fact, be very interested in working with us, and that they would pay the cost of the ISDN conferencing - £200 an hour at that time (September 2002). This initiative lasted for two years, and we soon added our school colleagues in Osaka into the mix. Below, they are playing music that they kindly composed for our STAR stories.

The background to the project is explained on MirandaNet, with a full illustrated report.

Joe Kolecki, NASA Pathfinder scientist, can be seen above answering the pupils’ email queries.

In 2004, we moved the project to a new STAR section on Literacy from Scratch, with full teaching resources. Follow the links for further detailed information, including lesson plans, support materials, and examples of pupils’ inspirational work. There is a time-saving Excel database of useful Space Science web sites, suggested by NASA and created for the project by UK Year 7 pupils (Your Y7 pupils will need to update the links…..) as well as an extensive science tutorial by Joe Kolecki.

Science Through Arts, a forerunner of Literacy from Scratch, is a successful way of inspiring an interest is science, through story-writing, film scripts, classroom drama, music, maths, and dance. Katie’s story, “Mars, Lost and Found”, is just one example.