About iConference
The 2014 Goddard Office of Education Summer iConference featured NASA grant teams that will present the success of their work to the world. Three grant teams were selected by an esteemed group of NASA panelists including engineers, educators and mission directorate education and public outreach personnel. The iConference was held on Aug. 5, 6 and 7, with each day dedicated to highlighting one of the three selected grant teams with a live presentation broadcast.
Georgians Experience Astronomy Research In Schools (GEARS)
Team Members
- Dr. Zodiak Webster
- Dr. Juan-Carlos Aguilar
Description of Presentation
The GEARS grant team presents the project’s accomplishments, including the development of an online curriculum for high school astronomy that can be delivered via Georgia Virtual School to all high schools across the state. The GEARS project also prepared a cadre of Resource Teachers that went through an intensive two-semester astronomy course and participated in a summer professional development workshop. The online curriculum and week-long professional development workshop for high school astronomy included units on the sky, the search for life in the universe, the solar system, and galaxies in various stages of completion. These units focused heavily on the use of NASA data from Kepler, Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra missions, and experimental process rather than factual recitation.
These accomplishments contributed to an increase of 81 percent in the number of students taking astronomy in high school from 2009 to 2013.
Teachers In Space Inc. (TIS)
Team Members
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Description of Presentation
Elizabeth Kennick presents Teachers in Space, Inc., an independent nonprofit organization incorporated in the State of New York that stemmed from her teams work through a NASA grant. Kennick, originally the Principal Investigator for the grant is now the President of Teachers in Space, Inc. (TIS).
Highlighted successes include workshops delivered in the summers of 2011, 2012 and 2013 that reached over 250 educators. The topics of those workshops were "Flight Experiments", "Suborbital Astronautics" and "Space Medicine and Human Factors". In 2012, TIS introduced an annual Flight Experiment Design contest for teachers to work with their students and submit 1 or 2 experiment designs for judging in December. Learn about how this contest led to student experiments being flown on the International Space Station (ISS)!
RealWorld-InWorld NASA Design Challenge
Team Members
- Shelley D. Spears, Principal Investigator
- Sharon Bowers, Program Manager and Sr. STEM Education Specialist
- Jim Egenrieder, STEM Education Specialist
- Shannon Versytnen, Project Coordinator
- Jan Brown, Collaborator, USA TODAY Education
- Julie Fletcher, Collaborator, LearniT-TeachiT
- Scientists, engineers and education and public outreach team members from the James Webb Space Telescope mission (NASA Goddard)
Description of Presentation
Jim Egenrieder presents the success of the RealWorld-InWorld Engineering Design Challenges, developed and led by the Center for Integrative STEM Education at the National Institute of Aerospace. These challenges provide secondary students with authentic, NASA space exploration inspired challenges that emphasize science and engineering practices through problem and project based learning and team competition. The challenges align with Next Generation Science Standards' Practices that describe behaviors in which scientists engage as they investigate the natural world and the key set of engineering practices that engineers use as they design and build models and systems. RW-IW strengthens and improves student and teacher understanding of the connection between science and the engineering design process through “RealWorld” and “InWorld” (aka virtual world) teaching and learning experiences.