NASA provides education for K-12 classrooms nationwide

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA offers professional development, tools, and resources to K-12 educators around the country through their Educator Professional Development Collaborative. Here’s an excerpt from their blog, where they teamed up with a Chicago elementary school to create a lunar landers lesson:

You may already know about the online lessons and activities available from the Education Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (If not, check them out here.) But did you know that JPL and all NASA centers nationwide have an education specialist focused specifically on professional development for teachers – including how to use those online lessons in the classroom? It’s part of a program called the Educator Professional Development Collaborative, or EPDC, a free service for any K-12 classroom educator in the country.

During the 2016-2017 school year, the EPDC at JPL participated in more than 120 school events focusing on teacher professional development, including implementing Next Generation Science Standards, helping schools initiate science fairs and community events, and assisting with student presentations. That number includes more than 5,000 teachers and students who worked with the EPDC on initiatives designed to get NASA science and engineering into the hands of future space explorers.

The Touchdown Lesson

In Chicago, Burley Elementary staff reached out to me via our distance learning program to revise an existing lesson for an elementary-level special education audience. Working together, the staff and I created a project using JPL’s NGSS-aligned Touchdown lesson to demonstrate the value of the engineering design process, revision and collaboration.

Students at Burley Elementry in Chicago design lunar landers as part of JPL’s NGSS-aligned Touchdown lesson. Burley Elementary teachers worked with the EPDC at JPL to modify the lesson for their students.

At the onset of the project, students were tasked to develop a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts safely on a distant planet. Each day concluded with students testing their designs and documenting the changes they made. Again, student groups captured their revisions digitally, praising others and crediting them for ideas that influenced their work. As a result, student groups learned the value of collaboration over competition.

From the educator’s point of view, the evolution of students’ designs also provided a narrative for assessment: Each student group had three designs constructed along with written and recorded diaries discussing the changes they made. The rubric included analysis of their own trials as well as the peer designs that shaped their future trials, creating in-depth student storyboards.

NASA offers a number of free lessons and activities on a variety of topics. Check them out here. And, find more opportunities for K-12 teachers here.

Source: Helping Teachers Bring NASA Into the Classroom | Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA