Another NASA Semi-Stealth Outreach Activity

NASA 50th Anniversary Essay Competition, NASA IPP

“The Innovative Partnerships Program at NASA Headquarters, in conjunction with the Office of Education, announces the NASA 50th Anniversary Essay Competition for middle and junior high school students during the 2007-2008 academic year. The essay competition consists of two separate topics each with a limit of 500 words. The first topic challenges students to describe how they benefit in their everyday lives from aerospace technologies built by NASA over the last 50 years. The second topic requires students to imagine how their everyday lives will have changed because of NASA aerospace technology years into the future.”

Editor’s note: Wonderful idea. Too bad NASA IPP did not expend a lot of energy to tell everyone. Yes, this is mentioned on NASA’s Education homepage and on IPP’s homepage, but no press release was ever issued as far as I can tell. It does seem that a message was sent out to the NASA Education EXPRESS list too. As such only those folks who happened to visit these web pages – or are on the mailing list – would ever know this was going on. To be certain this is not a complete secret, but a little effort on IPP’s part and the audience of potential participants could have been much, much larger. Why tell the news media, eh?