NASA's Continually Scattered Education Activities
Keith’s note: This space education oriented event is underway at the National Academy of Science: Sharing the Adventure with the Student: Exploring the Intersections of NASA Space Science and Education – A Workshop. No obvious mention of this event is made at the NASA Education Office website (unless you happen to look at their calendar and read the microscopic and hard to discern text). No one from the NASA Education Office is speaking at the event. @NASAedu hasn’t bothered to note the event either on Twitter.
This is actually a pretty good session. However the most valuable content is from the people who are not NASA but who, instead are people who developed the next generation educational standards and who are telling NASA how valuable NASA could be if NASA did a better job.
John Mather also provided a thoughtful and useful overview of what educators need o keep in mind in order to gets kids engaged in the wonder of it.
One of the speakers talked about how John Grunsfeld told the Curiosity team he wanted them to make the Curiosity Mars landing the 21st century equivalent of the Apollo 11 landing in the 20th century. The result was the 7 minutes of terror video. Grunsfeld did his job and so did his team in supporting him.
You have to remember this session is ONLY the Science Mission Directorate. SMD puts a lot of effort into educational programs. One of their problems, discussed this morning, was that their programs have not been too well coordinated with one another. The other problem pointed out by a member of the audience was that it is difficult to find the SMD educational content. Its at least 7 menus down in the NASA website hierarchy.
Unfortunately the Human Space and Exploration office is not represented. Of course they do not seem to put any effort into their educational programs. They seem to have little to offer other than “the US astronaut on ISS talked to 30 students this week”. The other 100 million students in US schools don’t matter, I guess.