By Tanner Kent
Free Press Staff Writer
MANKATO —
NASA does a whole lot more than send people into outer space.
And it’s up to Mankato East teachers Dave Burgess and Lynell Senden to illustrate that for students around the country.
“It’s kind of a bold plan,” Burgess said. “It’s going to take some work.”
The teachers are the test subjects for NASA’s initiative to create a series of middle-school science lessons that utilize the agency’s images and data to help students solve real-world problems. In the next few years, NASA wants to develop five separate lessons, all focused on a different area of Earth-science exploration and custom-made for use in planetariums.
Burgess and Senden chose to focus their lesson on both the man-made and naturally occurring pollutants in the atmosphere, and their impacts on life on Earth. They are the first teachers to begin working on a lesson, and NASA is hoping to begin distributing their work — free of cost — to schools and planetariums across the country next year.
“The planetarium can be a really powerful communication tool,” said Holli Riebeek, an education and public outreach specialist for NASA. “And most people don’t realize how much we do with Earth science.”
Earlier this year, NASA officials contacted Burgess about test-running a rough version of an educational lesson in East’s planetarium, which is one of only a handful in the country to install the state-of-the-art projection and software systems needed to show real-time images of the Earth and universe. Riebeek said NASA was so impressed with Burgess’ knowledge of planetarium technology and with Senden’s expertise as an eighth-grade science teacher that they were invited to take part in NASA’s plan to create planetarium-based science lessons.
To collect information for their lesson, Burgess and Senden — as well as Joel Halvorson, a program consulant acting on behalf of the Minnesota Planetarium Society — received a weeklong invitation to the Goddard Space Flight Center earlier this summer. The center is located just outside Washington, D.C., and home to one of NASA’s largest headquarters for missions involving Earth sciences.
While there, the group visited the mission control room where NASA guides dozens of satellites around the Earth, and they visited the “clean room” where scientists are building the James Webb telescope, the successor to the Hubble telescope already in use. The teachers met dozens of scientists and were given an all-access pass to the facility.
“It was, truly, a surreal experience,” Senden said.
Burgess added: “Totally fascinating.”
By next spring, Burgess and Senden are planning to have a rough draft of their lesson finalized. They are planning on a weeklong classroom unit that will feature pre- and post-activities as well as a day of data-gathering and exploration in a planetarium.
Senden said she wants the pre- and post-activities to prepare students for science vocabulary as well as concepts relating to the Earth’s atmosphere. Burgess, who is creating the planetarium portion of the lesson, said he might show students how NASA monitored sulfur dioxide levels in the atmosphere during the 2008 Beijing Olympics when city officials tried to cap harmful air emissions during the games; or maybe how NASA’s so-called “A-Train” satellites fly in formation over the globe, each collecting a different piece of data at roughly the same time.
The challenge, Senden and Burgess said, is taking NASA’s extreme wealth of information and boiling it down to a single storyline or lesson that will engage students.
“We need to find a way to put a story together so students get it,” Senden said. “That’s why this is such a challenge.”
Riebeek said that when teachers finish a rough draft next spring, NASA scientists will double-check the teachers’ work to ensure accuracy. Also, an independent education consultant will check to make sure the lessons meet national standards for science.
“It’s absolutely crucial we work with practicing educators,” Riebeek said.
