Mars Initiative & Teachers in Space
A 2016 grant from the Mars Initiative enabled Teachers in Space to buy arduino equipment which we used to train our own teachers to lead workshops in New York City, Ashford CT, and at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS as well as at the Music City Eclipse Festival at Adventure Science in Nashville TN during the 2017 solar eclipse. At the NYC workshops we gave away arduino sets to over 40 teachers.
In New York City, we worked with District 75 to put on workshops for city public school teachers. We also partnered with the Intrepid Sea, Air, & Space Museum to put on a workshop for teachers covering the usage of Arduino platforms. Teachers were shown how to set up the Arduino microcontrollers, as well as how to integrate and collect data from various sensors.
In collaboration with the Perlan Project and Cosmosphere, we put on an event called “Dream Big: Girls Day Out”. Girls ages 8-18 were introduced to Arduino powered CubeSats, a mock up of the Perlan stratospheric glider, and women engineers and scientists working in the aerospace industry.
In the days leading up to the total solar eclipse, Teachers in Space exhibited multiple projects, CubeSats, space suits, and the mock up of the Perlan glider at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, TN. In addition to seeing the eclipse, attendees learned about CubeSat experiments and the different launch platforms used for scientific flights
