Catharine G. Schauer
February 23, 1996
(804) 864-6122
Release No. 96-010

NASA PROGRAM HELPS STUDENTS HAVE FUN WITH MATH

NASA Langley Research Center, in recognition of National Engineers Week, has created an entertaining math lesson "Think BIGG" that airs on WHRO's Channel 15 at 1 p.m. Feb. 27. It also will be shown in area schools on the station's ITFS channel Feb. 27-29 at 9 a.m. and Feb. 27 and 29 at 1 p.m.

The "fun" math lesson lets student viewers help Biggs and animated characters Mission Man and Arf find the fastest route to recovering an antidote for their computer friend Gigs (short for gigabytes). Gigs is suffering from a computer virus. Using mapping skills and mathematics formulas, the team's journey becomes a race against time.

The program, geared to students in grades 4-6, shows how science, math and engineering relate to the world around the students and why their studies are important. Materials to support the program were distributed to area schools this week.

"Think BIGG is yet another mechanism for reaching out to the students, especially those we cannot visit personally during National Engineers Week," said NASA Langley's director, Paul Holloway.

The National Engineers Week program, now in its sixth year, is the single largest outreach effort sponsored by NASA Langley. Last year, 217 employees participated, reaching more than 19,000 students in 12 local school districts.

Think BIGG marks the beginning of Langley's distance learning initiatives, a project of the Office of Education's Langley Learning Laboratory. Students and teachers from 19 school districts in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina will now be reached.

For more information, call Dr. Shelley Canright at 804-864-3313.

text-only version of this release