NASA chooses
Hampton Roads
school team
for microgravity
experiment
A teacher gets dunked with apple sauce (top photo) during a performance of “FMA Live!” at
Hardy Middle School in Washington on Monday, Sept. 16. With the help of a student participant (bottom photo), “FMA Live!” crew members explain Newton’s second law of motion
during the same performance. “FMA Live!” is a program sponsored by NASA and Honeywell
that teaches Newton’s three laws of motion mixed with dance and music.
Images: NASA/Jay Westcott
science and math, it’s become vital to get children interested and
excited about the subjects.
“We thought about what it would
take to enliven the classroom, create a more dynamic conversation, empower teachers, create
excitement among students, and
we landed on a concept of an oldfashioned traveling road show that
was updated to be hip-hop and
powerful and high energy,” Buckmaster said.
Pride, who taught science for 11
years, said programs and action
www.RocketSTEM.org
shows like FMA Live! help students
see the relevance of the science
they’re learning with real-life application.
“It gives some excitement, it gives
some energy to what some students
unfortunately would think of as ‘Oh,
my gosh. I’ve got to go to science
class,’ and it really puts things – like
it says – in motion,” she said.
The show at Hardy was the first of
a planned 30-show tour. The next
stop is Philadelphia.
For more information about FMA
Live!, visit: www.fmalive.com.
Students at the New Horizons
Governor’s School for Science
and Technology (GSST) in Hampton, Va., will have the chance to
design a microgravity experiment
that may some day fly on board
the International Space Station
(ISS).
GSST was one of 14 schools
across the country picked for the
opportunity by the High school students United with NASA to Create
Hardware (HUNCH) Extreme Science Program, based at NASA’s
Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The first step in the process is to determine what sort of experiment
might meet the needs of the ISS.
After they come up with the
concept local students will design,
fabricate and document their
idea. Then comes the real exciting
part - to help make sure their experiment works in space’s weightless environment, three of the students and a teacher will fly with
their project onboard the Zero
Gravity Corporation’s G-Force
One plane. That is scheduled to
happen in April of next year at Ellington Field in Houston.
The local HUNCH program,
which is run by the Engineering
Directorate at NASA’s Langley Research Center also in Hampton,
has partnered with more than a
half dozen local schools to fabricate real-world products for NASA
and put students’ science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills to good use.
The Governor’s School for Science and Technology serves the
approximately 490,000 residents
of the Virginia peninsula, from the
Chesapeake Bay to Williamsburg.
For more information about the
NASA HUNCH program, visit: www.
nasahunch.com/.
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