The NASA Saturday in the Pee Dee, an underserved region of South Carolina, is a three year project led by ScienceSouth, partnering with The Dooley Planetarium at Francis Marion University, to deliver hands on programming, astronomical viewing sessions, and planetarium programs to increase public awareness of NASA and its on-going missions, and to generate an interest in the areas of STEM education and the pursuit of careers in these fields. The audience is the residents in a ten-county region of South Carolina known as the Pee Dee, with Florence, South Carolina as the economic hub of the region. The Pee Dee has a very high percentage of minority residents, people living at or below the poverty level, and poor performance on standardized test especially in the STEM related topics. There will be a total of ten hands-on programs directly related to on-going NASA missions, including astrobiology, near earth objects, robotics, rocketry, geocaching, deep space, weather systems on Earth, the sun and distant stars, telescopes, and planetary objects. These programs will be held at the ScienceSouth Pavilion or Dooley Planetarium. The programs will be complemented initially with eight observation sessions the first year, with the number expanding in the following years to include more rural areas in the Pee Dee. The Florence County Library system and Florence School District One have agreed to assist in increasing public awareness of programs and provide additional resources for further information about related topics.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Stephen WelchJeannette MyersNathan FlowersAnthony Martinez
The goal of this project is to advance STEM education in Hawaii by creating a series of educational products, based on NASA Earth Systems Science, for students (grades 3-5) and general public. Bishop Museum (Honolulu HI) is the lead institution. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is the primary NASA center involved in the project. Partners include Hawaii Department of Education and a volunteer advisory board. The evaluation team includes Doris Ash Associates (UC Santa Cruz) and Wendy Meluch of Visitor Studies Inc. Key to this project: the NASA STEM Cohort, a team of six current classroom teachers whom the Museum will hire. The cohort will not only develop curricula on NASA earth science systems but also provide guidance to Bishop Museum on creating museum educational programming that best meets the needs of teachers and students. The overall goal of Celestial Islands is to advance STEM education in Hawaii through the use of NASA Earth Science Systems content. Products include: 1) combined digital planetarium/Science on a Sphere® program; 2) traveling version of that program, using a digital planetarium and Magic Planet; 3) curricula; 4) new exhibit at Bishop Museum on NASA ESS; 5) 24 teacher workshops to distribute curricula; 6) 12 community science events. The project's target audience is teachers and students in grades 3-5. Secondary audiences include families and other members of the general public. A total of 545,000 people will be served, including at least 44,000 students.