NASA reaches out to future scientists
Kids from Cache Valley middle schools built catapults, viewed meteorites through telescopes and ran through the snow Saturday parading their model comets at NASA Space Science Day. The event, hosted by NASA and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, was held in the Engineering Building.
Susan Lederer, a scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and the event’s keynote speaker, said she enjoyed speaking at the event and liked working with the Hispanic engineering society’s USU chapter.
“I love that they’re getting kids excited about science,” Lederer said.
For Space Science Day, college students and scientists invited children from fifth through eighth grades to get involved in science through an array of educational workshops. One exhibit displayed extraterrestrial samples collected on NASA missions.
The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers hosted the event to promote science, technology, engineering and math(STEM) education to young students, said Indhira Hasbun, president of SHPE’s USU chapter.
“The main goal is to teach them the fun side of STEM while they’re young, so that later on they’ll say, ‘Oh, yes, I learned about this back at the NASA Space Science Day. I want to do that, and I want to become an engineer. I want to become a scientist,'” Hasbun said. “Our society will be in great need of students that major in science, technology, engineering and math in the future — even right now.”
Lederer’s keynote speech was about the different planets in the solar system and which planets are more hospitable than others. Lederer said she speaks to children three to five times a year as part of NASA’s effort to generate more interest in STEM education among students.
“That’s maybe a little bit more than average (for NASA scientists), because I was a professor at a university,” Lederer said. “I guess it’s a little bit easier to pull together a presentation and give a talk.”
Lederer said she was glad to find a way to share the benefits of her training, education and experience with future scientists and engineers.
“When I was young, we really didn’t have any events like this. I really didn’t have anything other than just reading newspapers to get excited about science,” she said. “But you see the reaction of the kids, and they want to answer the questions, and they’re into it, and they’re excited about science.”
Charles Galindo, a senior scientist at NASA and the founder of Space Science Day, said events like this are designed to help ensure NASA will have qualified candidates to recruit in the future.
“What we’re seeing is a lot of students aren’t getting into the STEM careers, so we can’t fill the positions we have. So what we’re having to do now is go outside to Asian (countries) or other communities that have students with Ph.D. and bringing them instead of using actually our own students here in the U.S.”
His favorite part of his job is working with students and traveling, he said.
Scott Meeker, a seventh-grade teacher at Spring Creek Middle School, said he thought the event was beneficial to the children.
“It’s a lot of good information, especially for the sixth-grade students, because they spend a lot of time studying space and the planets,” Meeker said.
Meeker said he wished the event had been more publicized at Spring Creek.
“We only had a few students that came,” Meeker said. “I wish we had more students here.”
Students from SHPE and Sky View High School helped run the event.
“It’s a way to get everyone involved,” Hasbun said. “Kids come to the event. Then high school students and college students can come in and mentor and help with the event. It’s a way to get everyone involved from all grades.”
Three campus groups specializing in physics brought demonstrations to the event: the Getaway Special Team, the Society of Physics Students and the Chimeara rocket team.
John Fleshman, a member of the Chimeara team, said the demonstrations could show students what science and engineering have to offer.
“A lot of times when you look at equations, or a bunch of science-y things, they kind of get scared, but when they see something practical, like a rocket, they get excited,” Fleshman said. “That is our goal, to get kids excited about science, math, engineering, technological-type things, so once they get to college they’re not scared to enter the (STEM) fields.”
Chimeara is a team in the NASA University Student Launch Initiative, a competition among universities. USU’s team has won the competition for the past three years, Fleshman said.
This is the third year of the NASA Space Science Day program on a national level, Gallindo said. The program, designed to generate student interest in STEM education, has expanded. The first year NASA chose three schools to host the event, the next year it had five schools, and this year NASA is taking the event to eight schools across the country, he said.
Last year was the first year the USU chapter of SHPE hosted the event, and the organization has plans to continue hosting it in subsequent years for the children of Cache Valley, Hasbun said.
“I want to make a call to everyone out there — all the parents, all the teachers — to motivate their kids into going to these types of activities. This is our help to the community, this is what we want to leave as a legacy,” Hasbun said. “When I leave Logan, when I leave USU, I want to be able to say, ‘Hey, I touched this kid’s life,’ and it’s because of my help and our involvement and our commitment to this association that we were able to get this many kids motivated.”
– marissa.shields@aggiemail.usu.edu