 I will turn things over to Dr. Sullivan. Hello, hello. I'm so excited to be with you here today and share how I teach with NASA and STEM resources in my classroom. So here is my classroom. At Barrett Elementary we call it the Discovery Lab and I teach kindergarten through fifth grade students ages 5 through 11. One thing I like about my classroom is that the door leads to the hallway where the kindergarten classes are and so often in the morning I'm greeted before class starts with students coming in showing me maybe a paper airplane they made with NASA written on it or the new NASA or space shirt that they got to wear to school. So we have a lot of NASA Explorer school spirit at our school. Recently I had the opportunity to meet Steve Cullivan in a free NASA webinar. I actually have participated in many webinars with him because he's a fabulous teacher. So Steve comes to us from Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Hi Steve. This is really a privilege and a pleasure to be talking to you this morning and I look forward to learning with you today. Please feel free. We'll have question answers. I'll try my best to answer your questions. So I'm really glad to be here today and thank you for your time. So I am so excited that I get to talk with you today in Kazakhstan. So we've talked about Kazakhstan a lot in my class and little did I know I would be sharing with you today. So as you can see in my classroom the students fly around their Soyuz rocket and we talk about the Soyuz capsule bringing supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station. This past year I tweeted out a photo of my students and I, some of them before school came into the Discovery Lab and this student who was new to Barrett, she said is this for real? I can't believe I'm watching this and we were able to watch this live streaming on NASA TV. So thank you for being here with me today. So during our time together, what we're going to talk about is why we as teachers should use NASA educational resources. I'm going to share with you some of the ways you can connect with NASA. I'll share four example lessons designing mission patches, engineering lunar landers, experimenting with parachutes, and engineering robotic arm end effectors. We'll also have time for a question and answer Q&A with NASA Educator Steve Cullivan. And all the lessons that I'm sharing today, I put into a digital handout that is available to you including links to the videos that you can play with the lesson, links to the lesson plan, and links to pictures and videos of the lesson in action in my classroom. So I hope you'll find this helpful and maybe think about one of the lessons you'd like to try soon with your students. This is an example of what part of the handout looks like. You'll see it shows the mission patch lesson. There are links to the lesson plans and extended lesson plans. There are video links to show your students and then the link to the photos and videos in action. So I teach with NASA education resources because I have found in my years of teaching that space inspires. Over the years I've seen kids become excited about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics when I share about the people at NASA and the missions at NASA. This year was really fun for the kids to hear about astronaut Anne McLean and how she set the goal to become an astronaut when she was just a young girl. My kindergarten students, first grade students were amazed that someone as young as them already knew they wanted to work for NASA. As much as I can I show women all the types of careers not just astronauts that work in the NASA space program. You can see here a girl who is so excited, a kindergartner who built a rocket out of cardboard and brought it to me. And this boy who just loves to come in and imagine he's building the next rocket of the future. NASA has so many lesson plans for every area I could teach. Whether it's oceans, geology, forces and motion, NASA has a lesson. NASA aims to inspire, engage, educate and employ the next generation of explorers. So I talked about these kindergarten students being excited about learning about NASA. Here are some of my kindergarten students who have come back to visit me years later. So here is a former student who is now in college and he came and talked to me about how some of the NASA challenges that we did such as the engineering a water filter for the space station inspired him to pursue this career in biomedical engineering. Here's Casey. She's currently studying aerospace engineering in Florida and she was fascinated by NASA as a young girl and especially the engineering design challenges and hands-on learning. Here's two more students. This student wants to be a mechanical engineer and has come back and told me what he remembers about the NASA lessons in the Discovery Lab. And just this past June you see a student standing up holding his diploma from high school as he's just graduating and he's showing the current kindergartners what he's done and that he wants to be a teacher and teach about NASA. So how can you connect with NASA and know what's going on that you might want to tie into your classroom? Well first of all start with signing up for the NASA Express email. So what this does is comes to your email every week and it will highlight some current NASA missions. It will also highlight some upcoming webinars. It will highlight new lesson plans and even in-person things that you might want to intend. I'm fortunate that I teach near Washington D.C. so I can go to events in Washington D.C. Here is an example I want to be sure you take care of because it has a deadline of September 30th. So this is so cool. I do this with my students whenever possible. NASA opens it up that you can send your name and your students' names or your class names on a mission to another planet or even looking for exoplanets. So the most current place where you can send your name is to go on the Mars rover 2020 which is launching next summer to Mars. So you can type in your name and you can see Kazakhstan is on the pull-down menu and send your names in and then imagine that and the excitement your students will have as they think about their names roving around Mars. Coming up on August 22nd, if you'd like to get up very early for your time, you can participate in one of the live NASA webinars for free about the Commercial Crew Program and STEM resources they have to talk about this new program for the International Space Station. Another way I find out about NASA and share with my students is by using social media. Every week I try to look on Twitter to see what is happening as far as current rocket launches and this morning NASA was tweeting about one happening in Kazakhstan. On YouTube I watch the NASA Johnson YouTube channel which has videos that are super engaging for my students so I watch them first and if it's appropriate for my students I show them in my classroom. For NASA Facebook, that is something I use for myself, not in my classroom and that just keeps me up to date with NASA missions and also a lot of contests. They have contests such as entering your designs for a calendar that is open to international students so you might want to participate in that. So now we're moving to the next part of our program where I'm going to show some of the lessons I've taught with NASA resources in my classroom. The first lesson is about student teams designing mission patches. This is an excellent lesson to begin your school year with. The students work in teams of three to design a mission patch to show what they want to explore if they were going to go to space. In the lesson plan you'll see there's a link to an astronaut who will talk about his mission patch that he designed with his crew for STS Space Shuttle Mission 133. Here's a mission patch for Anne McClain who is the astronaut I introduced to you earlier who wanted to be an astronaut when she was a young girl. Astronaut Randy Bresnik has finished recently a stay on the space station and in a video he talks about how he designed the mission patch with his team. With the students, this is a whiteboard I have in my classroom and I generally write what our goal is for our time together. And so in this mission you can see I brought in a lot of collaboration and conversation. This lesson is great for kids having to listen to one another and to work to come to a consensus to an agreement of what is going to go on their mission patch. So they talk about what do we have in common where will we explore what destinations what is our mission goal what do we want to learn and do what technology will we use and what symbols will we include. And then at the end the teams share their mission patch with other teams around the classroom. So here is what it looks like in my classroom. I made a handout where the kids are following through and making their decisions for their mission. This is great for reviewing our solar system in a fun meaningful way where I'm not telling them everything about the solar system. They're actually looking at books or papers of the rocky planets that they might want to explore or perhaps they want to explore the sun or our moon. Mission goals, what do you want to do and learn? For my young students I made a check sheet so that they can just talk with their group and then check what they want to do on their mission. Perhaps they want to collect a sample such as from Mars or Moon. Perhaps they want to set up a habitat for people. This gives the kids the visual in order to help their conversations. Another one is the mission goals with the technology that they'll use to accomplish their mission goals. They need to launch with a rocket. If they want to take pictures they need to be sure they have a camera on their mission. If they want to communicate their findings in NASA they'll need to have an antenna. Then they have to decide do we want to land or a rover or perhaps an orbiter on the mission. In first grade the students learn about symbols and so we've included symbols on the mission patch and if it's a group of three students they include three stars just like the astronauts often use stars. We use the symbol of the United States flag or the American Eagle and if the kids talk about we're going to use a lot of math and reading on this mission and science they'll put some of the symbols for those curriculum areas. The NASA STEM in 30 lesson plan that I linked to on your handout has a template that you can print out for the students and they can decide the shape of their mission patch and then at the end the students finish their designs at all different times. So when one group is done I say alright why don't you practice your presentation with one of the other groups that's done or practice on your own first and then be ready to share with another group. And some of my students are learning English and so it's very helpful for them to have sentence starters or sentence stems such as we will explore Mars we plan to and they can look back at their check sheet and look at their mission patch to help plan their presentation. And as I said I saw some groups practice this and rehearse the different parts with each other three or four times before they actually presented to the class. So again it's great for the beginning of the year because the kids are learning to work together and take turns. And here are some of the students in action in my classroom. This group wanted to explore Mars and they grabbed the Mars globe and they decided they wanted to explore the south pole of Mars. A student telling her teacher about the project and planning and discussing and then he is wearing a mission patch just that he stuck up on his shirt. So I have some sample mission patches around my classroom for the students to look at as they're designing their mission patch. So what we're going to do now is if you have questions about the mission patch lesson I can take those questions at the end of the program. We've built in time for that. But right now we want to go to Steve Cullivan at NASA. Now for your time with Steve you can ask him any question you'd like. Now it might be a question that you have that you've been curious about. It could be a question that you think one of your students might ask. So think about your students right now. What have students asked you in the past or what do you think they might want to know about this year and you could say hey I had a chance to ask NASA a question for you. This is what I asked. Or we might also hear some cool facts from Steve. As I say I learn a lot from Steve over the years. Alright Steve, thank you for being here. Thank you Lori. And thank you teachers in Kazakhstan. Once again this is really a pleasure. And the mission patch activity is such a great activity because students work in teams and this mission patch teamwork carry over into other activities. Lori's going to talk about several other design challenges and other NASA activities where students work in teams and once they develop a mission patch in their team because it's something they created together. And it's really a great activity that can lead on to other teamwork activities that Lori's going to share with you. But it's interesting about NASA mission patches actually the first ever mission patch was created by the Soviet Union in 1963 when they launched Valentina Tereshkova the first woman ever in space they developed the first mission patch and in 1965 was when NASA started developing mission patches with Gemini 5 mission in 1965. And after that every mission NASA's had since then has had mission patches and that's actually one of the first things the crew will do once they're assigned to their mission is they'll get in a room together and they'll develop their own mission patch and they put their own input in it and sometimes they may hire a graphic artist to make it look the artwork to look really good but they do their own designing and that gives them once again ownership in their mission and they take pride wearing that mission patch knowing that they designed it. So it's a great activity so if there are any questions I'll take some time to answer those. Thank you Steve Danza. If it's okay I will take the first question to get the ball rolling Steve as a young student you may not believe this about me but I was not that interested in science but I loved sports could you say just a few words about the curriculum program that you developed the Spaced Out Sports and potentially how that might be used in the classroom as well? Developer of a curriculum many years ago at the NASA's assistant space center called Spaced Out Sports and what that curriculum was we challenged students across the country to develop a sport come up with their own game that could be played on the International Space Station the problem is on the International Space Station you do not feel the effects of gravity and so you're in a microgravity environment and that can affect how the game is playing here on the earth you play soccer you play baseball you play basketball you play football all of that is dependent on gravity you shoot a basket basketball you count on the ball coming down into the goal into the hoop in soccer when you kick a ball across the field you count on gravity to pull it back down to the ground or through the net okay and the same thing with baseball when you hit a fly ball you know it's coming down and you got to get under it to catch it so the students were challenged to develop a game that could be played in a microgravity environment so that presented a lot of challenges that they're not used to doing so they had to do a lot of research they had to do a lot of practice and the end result was the students submitted a video of them playing their game and simulated microgravity they set their classroom up they would hang stuff from strings from the ceiling to make it look like it was floating they did a video of them doing their game then they sent their video to NASA we looked at the videos and we voted on what we thought was the coolest game and then we sent the game up to the astronauts on the International Space Station where the astronauts actually filmed playing that game that the students developed so the students were invited to NASA to view that live and so they developed something that was actually done on the International Space Station so it was really interesting because a lot of people don't really think about how things behave in microgravity and when you bring in sports as Lance said he wasn't interested in science he liked sports I was the same way when I was in elementary school I wanted to play professional football didn't think I'd ever work for NASA and I'm very glad I am working for NASA but you bring in sports it's something students can identify with and they'll learn science they'll learn the math they'll learn the engineering with their love of sports so hopefully that was a thorough answer for your question Lance I guess this question was landed at Laurie in terms of your mission-patch activity is that part of the theme teaching I know you have a rocking planet but where does it develop from that first of all and then second for Steve you're talking about gravity and weightlessness in the International Space Station and the sports question and a lot of primary school kids struggle with understanding the difference in mass and weight so are there resources available to help explain that used in the classroom thanks very much okay let me answer my part first Laurie if you don't mind actually I was the creator of a curriculum NASA has it's called mass versus weight where we actually address that question because I taught 8th grade for many years where I started with NASA and the students I taught had trouble distinguishing between mass and distinguishing between weight and so I developed a curriculum where we had the astronauts on the International Space Station videos demonstrations in microgravity and then I developed earth based activities related to what they did in space that students could do in the classroom and record data and look at their results analyze their results and look at how that same activity behaved in a microgravity environment of space and so if you do a browser search and just search for mass mass and mass versus weight you will find a curriculum and there's some really great videos as part of that of the astronauts in space doing simple things that students can see and the students can do similar activities in the 1G environment 1G environment of their classroom so it's called mass versus weight so that was a great question thank you Hi if you can repeat the question I only heard part of it So in terms of the mission patch approach was that part of a more general theme that you had going on in your classroom or was that specifically tied to a rocket planet or something specific I think that the mission patch lesson my purpose for doing that was to build team building skills and also to pre-assess what the students already know as the students are working in groups I heard one of the students talking about staging rockets and I had not taught that class about staging rockets so I said oh he already knows something about that let me find out later what he knows so in my school we have many kids that are learning English so whatever opportunities we have to bring in language we take those opportunities so this was not part of a specific unit it was more of a lead in and I know that in fourth grade when we talk about the solar systems and the kids need to know the rocky planets and the gas giant planets that I've built some foundation in the earlier grade so that they hit the ground running when we come to that unit in fourth grade alright and I do have to add something with Steve talking about spaced out sports challenge my students won that contest one of the years so yeah it was really cool we hung things my co-teaching partner hung things from the classroom and the coolest thing was that the students could not believe that their game that they designed was played by astronauts on the space station and they got to see a video of astronauts playing their game so talk about powerful learning with NASA that was awesome alright let's go on to our thank you Steve and I should say we will have more time to talk with Steve later on in the program we have one more time after this lesson and then we have time at the end as well so keep thinking of those questions alright so Steve mentioned the engineering design process and the challenges that we do with NASA so this is one of my favorite challenges and this can go along with your curriculum when you're talking about forces and motion potential and kinetic energy so the challenge is to design and build a shock absorbing system that will protect two astronauts when they land the astronaut marshmallows will stay in the cup when dropped from one foot or 30 centimeters or more and I think you might see the word for marshmallows on the screen there so in this challenge we use the engineering design process which you see on the screen we start with ask before the kids go to do any work in their teams we have to go over what are you being asked to do and this is also a chance for the kids to ask questions and the more you do engineering design challenges the more the kids get into this iterative process so they'll say well what are the rules or what are the constraints and I'll say you can only use the materials provided or they'll say do we have to use all the materials and I say no you don't need to use all the materials can we use time to work on this and I'll say your time is limited to one class time so this is where they really get clear on what they're being asked to do then we go to imagine and in imagine the students work in their groups they talk, they brainstorm they come up with multiple ideas then again working on skills that NASA really want students to have and many companies how do you work in a team how do you get to the best possible idea how do you reach that consensus so it's great practice with that and I have to say some students get very upset if their idea isn't selected by the group and so the more they work on how do you deal with that disappointment and how do you contribute to the team the more practice they get the better they are at working in a team so then they go to plan where they draw out what materials they'll use after that they create their prototype or their model then they experiment and test it and where I really love seeing the engineering design process is where they go to improve so without me saying oh you need to go back and improve that you know you didn't successfully meet the challenge I'm not the one who usually says that it's the group says oh I know what we can do to make this better let's try this let's see how this works and it's this iterative cycle through here that I love seeing an action in my classroom so from NASA you can download a teacher guide lesson plan that you can see here it shares you see how to prepare ahead of time what materials you'll need how to introduce the challenge to your students the brainstorm the build and test and redesign and then at the end of the lesson how you discuss what happened you also will get a student handout that you can put on the tables as the students work and this is just sometimes the students need even though you've introduced this verbally some students like to see the steps in order on paper that are sent support for them so in my classroom this is what the lesson looked like I made a chart paper that listed the materials that the students could use in the engineering design challenge now sometimes if I don't have a lot of time in between the classes coming in or it's not a large block of time for the building in order to save time materials manager come up and get the materials I'll have students come in after school and make bags for each group so here are all the materials that are listed up on the design you'll see the kids are drawing their idea they have different ideas for shock absorbers right here they are using mini marshmallows and of course can we eat the marshmallows and I say oh hands have been all over them you don't want to eat the ones that are in your materials bag but at the end of class I do have a mini marshmallow for each of you and they're excited to even eat just one mini marshmallow during school so one of the things that comes up is NASA has said one of the constraints is that you cannot eat the cup and so students will be working and seeing other teams and then they'll have a discussion of saying that's covering the cup too much we have to have it that you have a shock absorbing system so the astronauts won't go flying out and here you can see teams working together what I love about this is the teams come up with so many different ideas this team here not only did they put a shock absorbing system on the bottom of the lander but they extended the cup so that if the astronauts did happen to bounce up they didn't fall out of the cup so their design was a success and you're not allowed they say can we tape our astronauts in no you cannot tape your astronauts in so let me show you let me see if I have next here so let's look over oh no I'll go to this one so the first time I taught the lesson I did not have a recording sheet so the students were dropping from 1 foot 30 centimeters 2 feet 3 feet and just trying it and making modification as they go in the older grades we talk a lot about independent variables and dependent variables and what you need to keep constant so the last time I taught this lesson I made this data sheet and we talked about how to be a fair test and how to drop the lander from the same angle you can't put extra force on it and we did multiple trials and they would just say 2 astronauts stayed in the cup 1 astronaut or 0 astronauts before we show this video of the students in action I wanted to show you some of the designs of their landers over here so here is a cup and our brave astronauts are going into the lander so we have 2 in here they're not allowed to be taped and then the students design their landing system so here is one during the ask stage students often ask what have others done so a lot of the students since it's the Apollo 50th anniversary they've seen the Apollo lander here the eagle has landed and so they made their design like this so they would put this in have the ruler and drop I knew that wasn't going to work so you can see here the design was going to tip over and the students would say we need to fix that we were not successful so maybe they bend the straws out a little bit more or maybe they need to go back and do a complete redesign we also had this group has some shock absorbers on the bottom they folded up an index card to absorb the shock and they also put marshmallows on to absorb the shock and then they put the cup on the platform their idea for the straws but if the astronauts started to fly out perhaps they would hit a straw and come back in so you can see their design there and maybe I'll show one or two more you can see that they're all different they have a shock absorbing system on the bottom of this cup and they've raised the cup up and this one has mini marshmallows on the bottom and this one has all the straws on the bottom so what's important to do in the classroom I feel is have time for the kids to share their ideas and their thinking and learn from one another so you can see that you get many unique designs during these engineering design challenges and I like to have the kids pretend that now imagine yourself being an engineer working for NASA and designing the next lander for a mission to the moon so I try to connect it back to future careers as much as possible so they can imagine themselves in the STEM fields so now let's look at two quick video clips you'll see the group testing and a fail and oh no and then they made some quick adjustments and were successful and then you'll see two groups here with their mission success so let's go alright so let me get the clicker from under the lander here and we will go on so now we're going to go back to Steve and Steve will take any of your questions that you have the questions can be about any topic it doesn't need to be about what we've already talked about it can be a question that you have or if you think it's a question that you know a little bit about but you want to get an answer from NASA for your students so you can tell your students this is what I heard from NASA you can ask one of those questions as well alright so back to Steve thank you Lori and I really love that activity the lunar lander design challenge it's one of my favorites because the kids really they design their own thing they get to experiment and they use the engineering design process which I love because it's represented in a circle which shows that learning never ends so even if they're successful they still can improve it and if they're unsuccessful they improve that because actually in real life when the Apollo 11 astronauts were training for their mission to be the first to land on the moon Neil Armstrong was almost killed when he was practicing in the lunar lander research vehicle there was a problem and he had to eject in the lunar lander research vehicle crash but they didn't give up you didn't say well we can't do it let's not go to the moon so they figured out what happened they fixed it and of course the rest is history Neil Armstrong later landed on the moon became the first human on the moon and we landed 11 people 11 people after him walked on the moon so the engineering design process is really something great the students can learn and learn with in doing these so if there are any questions I will open up for questions yeah absolutely in addition to what we've been talking about here in general what do you have the value of teaching about space to students today and what are the broader applications what's the something we should start with on or yeah okay that's a great question space is a part of our life today pretty much we're doing so much in space NASA the Russians other countries the Chinese are going into space I read somewhere India is looking to land something on the moon so space is becoming an integral part of our everyday life and these students that are teaching today are going to be the major part of this in the future and when I talk to American teachers I tell them that we want to the next the first woman and the next man on the moon in 2024 that's our goal and then beyond that we want to send the first humans to Mars and it's going to be those students that are in upper elementary or middle school right now that are going to be doing that and if they're not the astronauts that are walking on the moon are going to Mars they're going to be the engineers the doctors the scientists the carpenters that are the teachers like you and like me and like Lori that are going to be making these missions successful helping to make these missions successful so space research we can learn so much about the earth from space we learn a lot about the earth from the ground here and that's how we did it for thousands of years before space travel but since we've been going into space we've been able to look at the earth with a different perspective that we never had before we went into space and we're able to learn so much more and by going to the moon we were able to learn more about the earth by studying the moon it's gone to Mars so it all ties in together going into space gives us a different perspective about the earth and enables us to learn at a different level and its students that you are teaching today are going to be the ones that's going to be really involved with space because it's going to be so common when I was growing up going into space we looked at the astronauts as heroes Neil Armstrong Alan Shepard they were heroes Erika Guerin they were heroes all of us but now space is so much more common than when I was a student and so kids today know about space a lot more and they're going to be part of it so it's really important that students learn the math science, the engineering even if not directly for space learning about space and going into space but other things here on the earth that are so critical for us to know about so hopefully that answered your question alright as everybody knows teachers not only here in Austin but also in Bounty Coast and I and our colleagues hi everybody sent in a couple of questions the first question is are these lesson plans online in English or are they available in languages and they also asked are there any opportunities for schools or universities that have direct separate webinars or conversations with the education team and NASA okay most of our activities of course are in English well they all are in English some of them we do in Spanish because we have a large Hispanic population in our country I don't know other languages that our lessons are available online but all our NASA resources are available online and if you go to the main NASA site www.nasa.gov GOV our main NASA site there is a little button that says education and if you click on that it will bring you to our NASA education site and there opportunity our lessons our curriculum our engineering design challenges and also as Lori mentioned earlier in her presentation NASA Express I encourage you to sign up for that it's free and you can sign up you don't have to be in our country to do that we have teachers from all over the world that are part of NASA Express and you get a weekly email that gives you what's going on right now NASA in education what opportunities are coming up for educators and in talking about participating in universities and other teachers can participate with NASA resources Lori also mentioned that NASA provides webinars I'm part of those webinars we do about 12 a month and you can find information about those webinars how to join on NASA express as well and I'm actually doing one tomorrow on commercial crew and I have a lot of international educators that participate in my webinars I've had people from Greece from Australia from France from Canada from Italy from Argentina from Romania I've had teachers from all over the place Turkey that participate and there's no cost to participate in these webinars and what we do in these hour long webinars is we showcase NASA missions a particular mission and a particular classroom resources that are linked to these missions and they're an hour long so we don't go into great detail in a lot of this because an hour goes very quickly as we're experiencing here now but we do offer those about two or three times a week about 12 a month and anyone is able to participate and so hopefully that answers your question so we're going to continue on now we'll have one more opportunity for questions so let's go on to the next slide thank you Steve alright so lesson 3 experimenting with parachutes there are many applications for parachutes for space missions as you can see on this slide with the younger students with learning about parachutes we spend a lot of time exploring playing I hear kids say let's try this or what if we do this we're building this foundation I have astronauts this was a gift this is one of the most precious gifts that I got one year it says thank you and it's from a group of kids that started an engineering club in the mornings so the kids play around with the parachutes NASA has templates where you can build an aeroshell or a capsule for a lander and so I give the kids a little baggy that has a lander in it and a NASA sticker here's the lander they fold it up and here they have their capsule right here that they'll drop and then they get to take home and talk to their families whenever possible I give the students something to take home and before they leave the classroom we have a few students role play or pretend that they're talking to their parents about what they learned in my classroom the discovery lab in this video here you will see a group of first graders every student in this class speaks Spanish as their first language and they were just so shocked to see how the parachutes opened as the dragon space capsule was being tested let's take a look at this video and listen for the kids as it opens you can see their excitement about the parachutes and maybe one of them will be designing a future parachute for landing on Mars in this video clip we see some kindergarten students and these girls have designed different parachutes that they've been dropping and they've also been testing them in the wind tube so the students see how NASA we watch video clips of NASA testing parachute designs in wind tunnels and so this is our wind tunnel we call it the wind tube and also testing from parachutes so you'll see one of the students is just so amazed by how her parachute is moving in the wind tube and another girl starts dancing around and she's the time the luckiest astronaut and she's already calling herself an astronaut as a 5 year old student we have a lot of fun with that alright let's go on to some of the words we use our vocabulary while we're learning about parachutes here you can see we talk about the canopy the suspension lines and the load we use vocabulary and talk about forces such as gravity and friction and talk about potential and kinetic energy so again if I'm talking this is a fourth grade unit on forces but if I'm talking about parachutes with the younger students I start using these words when they're younger not explicitly teaching them but developing it so it's a part of their vocabulary so when they read these words in fourth grade and when they're using these words with it and I feel it gives them a leg up before they go on to middle school so with the older students we do a series of experiments with parachutes where we investigate the effect of say the size of the canopy on the parachute drop speed so in the first test the students do they are looking at the independent variable the size of the canopy so you see we have small medium and large and again we talk about the dependent variable we're measuring the speed of the descent we also talk about what needs to stay the same in the challenge so a lot of times the students will say oh I didn't drop the parachute at the same time we need to do it over again I love how the student groups are keeping track of each other noticing that it wasn't a fair test and so they want to try it again when you're doing this in your classroom you can like here I'll show you these are some of the parachutes for testing the canopy size so we have the small canopy here and you'll notice I put a little tab at the top so when you're doing the parachutes you need to drop from high up to give time for the parachute canopy to open so the part at the top is used with a grabber to lift the parachute high up to drop it if you have stairs nearby you could try that so we're looking at the size the kids make predictions and talk about which parachute they think will fall as slow descent we bring in that vocabulary so here's the medium size parachute here and then the large parachute which the kids have never seen a coffee filter this big so even the fourth graders go whoo that is huge so and you'll see they talk about to make it a fair test we need to be sure the only thing we have changed is the size of the canopy we measure the suspension line so that they're the same the load of the clips is the same and the time of dropping is the same for the second challenge that they do we are investigating the effect of the canopy material on the drop speed which material will cause the parachute to fall the slowest so in this one the students are looking at the large large coffee filter as a canopy material a piece of plastic again the same size since we're not testing sizes now we're testing the material and then I know you can't see this very well but it's a piece of fabric that has little holes in it called tool I believe it is so let's go on to see how this looks so I decided sometimes I start with the lesson plan from NASA and teach it and then I think you know what I want to put a different spin on it so at the time I was teaching the lesson this year space X was testing parachutes and they have a new commercial crew dragon and so I had the students pretend or role play that they were NASA scientists and materials engineers and this is what the announcement they got NASA and space X need to know which canopy material will cause the parachute to fall the slowest to the ground please recommend the best material for NASA and space X to use for the parachute canopy materials you will be testing our paper plastic fabric so when they're doing this design challenge now this experiment they actually know that at the end they have to make a recommendation we recommend this material because it was slowed the descent of the parachute now these are not real materials that space X is going to be using but I did just type an email to space X and let them know what the students had found out from their investigations here so you can see they're dropping dropping them from the stairwell or using the extender in the upper area here you can see the students talking about the materials so I gave each group a bag of materials and they could actually take out the little pieces of material plastic and talk about why they thought the plastic might slow the descent and it was interesting hearing the groups because it was not just obvious to the groups which parachute would be the slowest to slow down the parachute and so I had the materials on a tray and here are the kids looking at it so we'll go on here this recording sheet I actually went to a training with engineering is elementary they do a lot of STEM education trainings and I modified their recording sheet and here you can see we have the independent variables of paper, plastic and fabric the constants that are staying the same and then the trials and what I loved about engineering design challenges is I do not have to tell the students now look at the data what does it say they are doing the investigation they want to know what happens and so this group came together and we are saying okay what happened what are we going to recommend what are we going to tell the rest of the class so then the students here oh let's play the video clip of the three different material parachutes dropping from the stairs so the girls were saying plastic wins and what they were meaning was plastic was the slowest in the descent so what warms my heart as a teacher is at the end of a lesson these the student asked can I have some of these materials to take home I have an idea for a new parachute I want to design and then he came to school the next day wearing his NASA shirt and showing his new parachute design so I hope you will try this lesson in your classroom now we only have a few minutes left so I'm going to be very quick in my sharing about this lesson about the robotic arm and defector but you will want to try this in your classroom the kids love it so here we have the robotic arm that's on the international space station here's the arm at the end of the arm is what's the hand the grabbing hand and this is what that part looks like so if you zoom in on the picture you can see there are some wire in there that can actually close in and grip or grab different size objects and pull them to the space station so here you can see the arm is pulling the Cygnus towards the space station and that was going when the Cygnus was going up to the space station I've also in the lesson plan handout for you I've linked to the videos I show this is astronaut Dottie talking about how she controls the robotic arm and end defector so we'll go on so in the lesson you'll see the kids do some measuring they tape the string and then they rotate the outer cup in order to move the object from one place in the classroom to the other they get a little bit silly with it you can see they're moving one girl's hair braid from one side of the room to another but they love this and they get very creative which is what you want to see with the engineering design cycle is that they go on and they say well what happens if we did this how can we do that and one group wanted to see if they could tape multiple bottles together and lift them and move them across the room again I tie it to current NASA missions here's the space X dragon being grappled by the space station robotic arm and also currently we were looking at I actually got to go to the launch of the Cygnus spacecraft to the international space station and this girl is moving a little astronaut that was her choice to build an end defector that could move an astronaut from one place to another so I'll end with showing you the cool whoops the cool end effector so it's as simple as taking two styrofoam cups here and what you do is you stack one on top of the other you cut around the edge so you get two stacking cups like this and then you'll see the cups look very much like the end effector that the students had been watching in the video and you can see how when you twist the cup it will grab or grasp something so you can take something from around the room and put your end effector on it twist and pick it up and move it around and the kids just are I was so surprised the first time they did this how excited they got that it actually it worked they said it worked it worked and if it didn't work sometimes they hadn't fastened the tape or they taped the strings wrong they had to problem solve to fix it but I know this year when I teach the lesson in my classroom I'm going to get a video because I didn't have any videos to include in this but you can talk about the spacecraft that are grappled by the robotic arm such as the Cygnus or the dragon or the Soyuz and then you can just bring bottles that you have around your home or around the school maybe from the recycling area and if you want you could even make a Cygnus spacecraft with solar panels and then inside this is just a piece of paper rolled up that has what the mission what the spacecraft was taking up to the international space station some mealworms were going up on this mission so I brought in the life cycle of the mealworm so you can bring the life sciences into your NASA lessons and we also talked about what they would want to send up to the international space station for the robotic arm to grapple or grab and then you can see some students wanted to make a mini end effector out of little cups but they found that this did not move many items around the classroom so I think that that is it for now for that lesson I explained it very quickly and in the process who knows where I put the clicker alright so well I will find the clicker we will move to questions for Steve oh here it is it's under the parachute there we go alright so that was the last of the four lessons I plan to share with you today I hope that you will choose one to implement in your classroom if you are on twitter I am very active on twitter and I'd love to see what you do in your classroom so you can tweet it out and tag me and I will see it so now is our we just have a brief time since we are out of our time together so if you have some final questions for Steve or for me we can take those now I have a question I'm not sure even just if you have mentioned something about the first robotics competition which is on your website I have googled something about your competition and I have questions do you have any opportunities for your students abroad some kind of mental programs or decent clubs of your NASA I'm not sure whether we have the off or robotics competition in our school and we want our students to get prepared for your competition yeah Laurie you are probably more familiar with the first you participated in that right so we did first robotics competition and some of our other schools do that with the older teams I do not have a first robotics team currently at my school I know there are opportunities for international competitions and I'm not sure with the older kids which ones are international I'm excited about talking with you in Kazakhstan today I started my own learning journey to learn more about the international opportunities as I have just been focusing more on what is in my classroom and I know there are some international competitions with first NASA has a collaboration with first robotics and it is in a space center for many years we have kind of sponsored a Mississippi kind of regional competition but as far as international I really I wish I could give you answers on that the only thing I could recommend is to look back at the first robotics website and there should be a section in there devoted to international competitions so I would encourage you to go back there I'm not that aware of international competitions because I have not personally worked with international competitions with first robotics and if I can step in there I will also look for our American faces we have a lot of Americans throughout Kazakhstan in all the major cities and many of them have robotics clubs, maker spaces different mentoring programs different workshops and different experts coming throughout the year that if you're just checking the schedules to make sure you are aware of the experts coming in you are welcome to take your students or your colleagues to go to participate I just want to say real quickly it's amazing the number one question I've been working for NASA for about 30 years now and nobody asked the actual number one question astronauts get anybody from NASA gets about space I know some of you are thinking that but the number one question believe it or not is how do you go to the bathroom in space and of course I'm going to let you and I always tell students when they ask that question very carefully that's what I tell people but that is actually the number one question that's usually asked by NASA two NASA people is having to go to the bathroom so no one asked that question so thanks for your great questions I appreciate that very much and I really appreciated this opportunity this has been great we had one question came on Instagram they were asking are there opportunities students here in Kazakhstan to visit one of the NASA facilities either as a tourist or for a different program that's a great question pretty much every NASA center there's 10 main centers around the country here and each NASA center has what's called a visitor center a visitor complex where people can go to to see what's going on in that NASA center what's going on at NASA in general the downside is it's hard to get international educators on to the NASA centers because a lot of the NASA centers kind of coexist with military installations and so getting foreign nationals into the NASA centers is difficult but if you go to the visitor center a lot of them will have bus tours they will have guided tours through the NASA centers themselves at Johnson Space Center and Houston at Kennedy Space Center in Florida those two and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama those three actually have some really good guided tours that you can participate in through their visitor center or their museum that's associated with the NASA center so I would suggest looking online first before you come to kind of see exactly what the procedure what the logistics are for that yes and my students love going to the NASA visitor center so we talk so much about NASA that I say if you're going to Florida be sure you go here and you know if you're going to California go to this NASA visitor center so the visitor centers are amazing I can add in as well if any of you are visiting our Washington DC make sure you stop by the Air and Space Museum which is part of the Smithsonian and as many of you may know the museums are free of charge for entry and so we would encourage you to visit and have the opportunity to look at resources like Lori was showing in her classroom to purchase and not give you the details specifically right yet but I will just tell you in October the US Embassy will be making a big announcement about an opportunity for students from Kazakhstan to do the NASA relay and activities that we are just so excited about but we will have to wait until Spits Week in October to make that announcement so Lori and Steve do you have any last comments or questions for the group? Well I sure want to hear what's going to be announced in October I'm curious so keep me in the loop on that and I thank you so much for taking time to meet with us today and again just jump in and try one of these lessons and I think your students will really enjoy it have a great school year thank you I hope to see some of you in my webinars