The Strategic Partnerships Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, announces that the public voting portion of OPSPARC 2016 is open as of April 19, 2016. More than 800 students from across the U.S. participated in this year’s OPSPARC, and NASA is asking for the public’s help in determining the winners for 2016.
The purpose of OPSPARC is to raise awareness of the everyday benefits of NASA’s Technology Transfer Program and to inspire student’s interest in becoming a part of the space program.
For OPSPARC 2016, students in grades 3 through 12 were challenged not only to identify NASA spinoff technologies, but to create their own unique technology spinoff applications for actual NASA technologies, including specific examples from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The students submitted their entries in the form of electronic posters, called glogs, courtesy of a cloud-based platform for presentation and interactive learning developed by a company called Glogster. The Glogster tool allows contestants to combine different kinds of media on a virtual canvas to create multimedia posters, and to access an existing library of educational content created by students and educators worldwide.
NASA has reviewed all of the glogs submitted – more than 250 – and has posted the best-of-the-best online. The public is encouraged to help choose the winners by voting for their favorite. The winners selected in each age category (elementary, middle and high school) will be honored at a three-day workshop and awards ceremony at Goddard beginning June 28, 2016. While at Goddard the students will take part in a behind-the-scenes experience where they will learn from actual NASA personnel about the exciting science and engineering taking place.
As an added bonus for OPSPARC 2016, twenty teams of students in grades 9 through 12, after completing their glogs, will be invited to work with college student mentors to further develop their spinoff concept within a 3-D, multi-user, virtual world setting through creation of computer-aided design (CAD) models and application of engineering and business analyses on their spinoff concepts. The 2016 InWorld portion of OPSPARC is being sponsored by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
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To check out the glogs and vote for your favorite, please visit:
http://itpo.gsfc.nasa.gov/opsparc/
For more information about the challenge, please visit:
For more information about the Goddard Strategic Partnerships Office, please visit:
Darryl Mitchell
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-5810
Darryl.R.Mitchell@nasa.gov