Date: August 13, 2010
Title: Bringing Children to Mercury
Podcaster: Bob Hirshon
Organization: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Description: This summer, a team of educators from across the United States came to Washington, DC to learn about the MESSENGER Mission to Planet Mercury and a set of learning materials designed to send K through 12 students on a (virtual) mission to the planet. Podcaster Bob Hirshon met with the MESSENGER Fellows and the project’s manager to learn more about it.
Bio: Bob Hirshon is Senior Project Director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and host of the daily radio show and podcast Science Update. Now in its 23rd year, Science Update is heard on over 300 commercial stations nationwide. Hirshon also heads up Kinetic City, including the Peabody Award winning children’s radio drama, McGraw-Hill book series and Codie Award winning website and education program. He oversees the Science NetLinks project for K-12 science teachers, part of the Verizon Foundation Thinkfinity partnership. Hirshon is a Computerworld/Smithsonian Hero for a New Millenium laureate.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by the Education and Outreach team for the MESSENGER mission to planet Mercury. Follow the mission as the spacecraft helps to unlock the secrets of the inner solar system at www.messenger-education.org.
Transcript:
365 Days of Astronomy Podcast
August 13, 2010
Bringing Students to Mercury
By Bob Hirshon
Welcome to the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. I’m Bob Hirshon, host of the AAAS radio show and podcast, Science Update.
It’s currently not feasible to take a million children to visit the planet Mercury. Just getting that many parental consent forms signed and returned would kill you. But while we can’t actually take children there, we can make them feel like they’re along for the ride. That’s the goal of the MESSENGER Fellows program.
MESSENGER is the spacecraft that is now approaching planet Mercury, and is scheduled to go into orbit in March of 2011. The Fellows program is an effort to train 30 master educators each year on a series of education modules tied to the project. Each of those Master educators goes on to teach 100 teachers, and those teachers each deliver the lessons to an average of 100 students. So, over the lifetime of the mission, that’s well over a million students who participate in the education activities.
Harri Vanhala, Science Researcher at the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education, manages the MESSENGER Fellows program. Recently, he guided the latest cadre of Fellows through a series of workshops in Washington, DC.
Vanhala:
They come all across the country, all the way from New Hampshire and New York, all the way to California, Hawaii and now even Guam. So they really scattered throughout the continent and now overseas as well.
Hirshon:
Aileen Kanos is an 8th grade science teacher who came all the way from Guam for the workshop. She was a 2005 Presidential Awardee for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, and says the Fellows program is especially important for educators in remote school districts.
Kanos:
Since we are on an island, it’s very difficult for them to get these resources. So I just wanted to make sure that we can have a representative who can come back and share these resources that I obtain with them.
Hirshon:
Kanos is a brand new Fellow, and she says one of the highlights for her is working with the returning Fellows—educators who have been involved with the mission for years.
Kanos:
I mean, these are teachers who have been in the program for so long and they’re very inspiring. They have a lot of great advice that, when I go back to Guam, I’m planning on, doing the same thing to ensure that MY teachers are taken care of and they get these resources.
Hirshon:
One of these veteran Fellows is Alex Seilers, from Memphis, Tennessee. She’s been with the program since 2004 when it began. She says that she uses the same six research questions that are driving the MESSENGER mission to inspire the educators she trains.
Seilers:
One of the six questions dealt with, which is a question most people wouldn’t anticipate, is there water on, or ice, on the poles. Because the poles, the craters are in permanent shade and so it’s very cold there. So finding out if there’s ice or water on the closest planet to the sun is the question I really want to know.
Hirshon:
According to Vanhala, it’s questions like these, rather than information about Mercury, that’s at the heart of the Fellows program. He says the goal of the project isn’t just to teach kids about the planet. It’s to help them become explorers.
Vanhala:
So the idea is that the students are not learning facts, they are learning ways to ask questions, and how then to frame investigations that can answer those questions. And then find the answers for themselves. So they are not provided the answers on a plate; they have to sort of cook the meal that provides the answers.
Hirshon:
It’s called “inquiry-based learning,” and it replaces the old notion of a teacher lecturing to a group of kids, the kids taking notes, and then reciting the information later on a test. Instead, the education modules help teachers guide students through a series of challenges that parallels the scientific process. For example, one of the newest modules is called Mission Design, in which students select a world to explore, compose questions they would like to answer about it…
Vanhala:
— and actually go through the design process of how they can build a spacecraft, design and build a spacecraft to study another world. And I think that’s very interesting in the sense that it gives the students complete control over the complete design process, and it really is designed to mimic the process that NASA scientists and mission designers go through when they plan their missions to study other worlds in the solar system.
Hirshon:
Because the MESSENGER spacecraft has to work so close to the sun, one of the biggest factors in its design was keeping its instruments from getting fried. Vanhala says that challenge led to a module called Stay Cool that helps students learn about a number of core science topics.
Vanhala:
And there MESSENGER is a sort of vehicle which we’re, through which we tell these stories of energy, heat, light and energy transformations, but it’s really basic physical principles that we talk about at all grade levels.
Hirshon:
That topic is especially useful for Chad Johnson, a Fellow from Aurora, Nebraska. When he began as a Fellow, he worked at a science center. Then he took a job with a public power district, traveling the state, teaching about energy. He says many of the MESSENGER Education modules fit right in, especially lessons from Stay Cool.
Johnson:
They build a spacecraft out of the aluminum foil on the outside Hershey’s Kisses to keep an ice cube from melting. And we talk about the thermal properties and the properties of our spacecraft so they can sort of learn how build this thing, but that’s a part of energy efficiency is the design of the device. And we tie that into houses and cars and all the other pieces that meet our educational needs.
Hirshon:
And just as the MESSENGER spacecraft has a series of tasks it has to perform within a strict energy budget, Johnson has his students design machines that rely on a single 9-volt battery.
Johnson:
I do a Mercury Rover project, where we’re having kids build prototypes for the next Mercury Mission. They have to build the circuitry, the robot has to move, has to do some sort of a scientific mission, and we basically use the concept of mission design, but instead of using funds as one of our criteria, we use the watts of your 9-volt battery. You’ve got a certain amount of electricity and you have to do all this science. And so they’re building the actual circuitry and measuring that so that all of the circuitry on this robot that has to move, works.
Hirshon:
Johnson works directly with up to 5000 kids during the school year, and conducts teacher workshops throughout the summer.
Vanhala says that while every year has produced its own mission highlights, this academic year is special, because in March, the spacecraft will finally go into orbit, and begin its one-year core mission studying the planet in detail.
Vanhala:
And everything that we’ve learned so far is wonderful, and provides lots of food for scientists to work on for the next several months, but the basic idea is that after the orbit insertion in March 2011, we’re going to be doing flybys a couple times a day—two flybays a day, instead of three over a two-year period.
Hirshon:
Some of the original Fellows attended the launch of the craft seven years ago, and now will have an opportunity to see the spacecraft finally go into orbit. Throughout the journey, they have been blogging about the mission, reporting on Facebook pages—even on Twitter. Last year, Fellows visited mission control when MESSENGER completed its flybys of Mercury. Vanhala says it’s this direct participation, and the ability to convey what it’s like to teachers and students, that may be the most important aspect of the program.
Vanhala:
-so that the students really have the opportunity to experience the mission while it happens, and not just read about it in text books.
Hirshon:
For the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, I’m Bob Hirshon.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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