Throughout the school year the M-STAR fellows had the privilege of attending several STEM Day events to talk with K-12 students about the fascinating technologies that we are working on in support of NASA’s Artemis program. UCF hosts this event twice a year and welcomes over 1500 students! Usually around 75 students sign up for our sessions. Since the M-STAR program started, we have spoken to over 200 students.
Here we shared our research experiences and aimed to provide a sort of “crash course” on the NASA projects we are working on. Topics ranged from the studying of lunar dust, to the engineering of aerospace materials, the biological effects of space exploration, and simulations on spacecraft entry, descent, and landing. We had regolith samples that the kids loved to get their hands on and homemade “lungs” made of plastic bottles to demonstrate a vacuum. There was a lot to cover but we still had an opportunity to speak in detail on our different subjects. The best part about the entire experience was the way that the students eagerly absorbed the knowledge, often asking too many questions for us to keep up with!
This year the M-STAR fellows also had the opportunity to attend Embry Riddle’s STEM Day event. Here we prepared several activities with the aim of giving students hands-on experience with the same concepts. For aerodynamic control, we had a quick design build fly mini-workshop to explain the basic aspects of rocket design. Initially we had students launch simple tubes. This resulted in erratic flight paths. Through simple modifications we added simple flight surfaces such as a nose cone. This provided much more flight results. Mainly students gained firsthand experience in learning the importance of aerodynamic stability and a mass to propulsion budget. Additionally, we had an egg drop design challenge. Here students worked with household material to build a payload module that could protect the egg from the impact of a landing event. The afternoon was filled with lots of laughs and learning, and hopefully sparking the interest of future space technologists.
Published: May 29, 2023
Author: Andres Torres-Figueroa, John Yonkauske, Jessica Schwend