Creating a Maker Culture at NASA
Responding to the President’s Call, a New Effort to Help More Students be Makerse, OSTP Blog
“As the President said at the launch of his Educate to Innovate campaign to improve science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, “I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it’s science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent — to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.” That’s why today, we are excited to highlight a new effort that responds to the President’s call to action: the Maker Education Initiative (MEI). With leadership from Dale Dougherty, a White House Champion of Change and founder of Maker Faire, MEI has founding sponsorship from Cognizant, Intel, and O’Reilly Media.”
– Keith Cowing at Maker Faire: Famous NASA Hacks
– Matthew Reyes at Maker Faire: Smartphone Smallsats and Hybrid Rockets
I want to do one or more Maker projects with 5th graders at our elementary school in Mountain View next year. What is happenning with the Titan I? I would really like to help with it. I have taking students to see it a couple times after the LUNAR launch days.
Complete reverse of direction from how NASA has pursued human space flight over the last 25 years. Since the initial period of Shuttle development was over most of the NASA HSF people have focused solely on contract management. Based on schedule and cost they apparently were not very good at it. It meant that almost an entire generation of NASA HSF people did not know how to do or make anything for themselves. I suspect this was why an accident like Columbia could happen-because the people in charge could not understand how their system actually functioned. Not only did you have a large part of a generation of NASA people with no demonstrable hands-on knowledge, but in organizations like ISS, they actually promoted those with no hands on ability or first hand experience at the expense of those that had the experience, which explains why ISS is in the predicament of having reached an operational point in its lifetime with little of significance to operate on. The people in charge were focused on closing out paperwork: contract task orders and international agreements. Though the new change of direction is healthy there are a lot of people who are now in the way and who need to be countered. This includes virtually everyone in HSF and ISS management. Virtually none of them have ever done anything real.