USA
2010NASA’s Mission Directorates and Center Education Offices have provided a variety of new educational programs and resources for NASA’s elementary, secondary, higher education and informal education partners, both in the United States and abroad.
In 2009, NASA and the Arab Youth Venture Foundation in Dubai, UAE, partnered to provide three to 12 UAE engineering students each year the opportunity to work with U.S. students, scientists, and engineers on NASA missions. This summer, the first group of UAE students in the programme worked alongside their U.S. peers on an internship project at the Ames Research Center in California. Also during the summer of 2010 (June 1 to August 6), students from across the United States, as well as from Australia, Canada, France, Italy, and Japan worked directly with NASA scientists on cutting-edge research as part of the NASA Academy internship programme.
The NASA-sponsored ISS EarthKAM programme (Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) continues to grow. During the latest EarthKAM mission onboard ISS Mission 10_04, launched 20 December 2009, 10,615 students from 164 different schools directed a camera onboard the ISS to photograph specific locations on Earth, (https://earthkam.ucsd.edu/).
In early 2010, 70 teams from 18 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany, India and Romania competed in NASA’s 17th Annual Great Moonbuggy Race at the Marshall Space Flight Center. The race challenges students to design, build and race lightweight, human-powered buggies that tackle many of the same engineering challenges dealt with by Apollo-era lunar rover developers at Marshall in the late 1960s.
On 20 March 2010, an international celebration of Sun-Earth Day took place (http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2010/SED2010.php) with events around the world in connection with the Sun-Earth Day theme "Magnetic Storms". Social media networking groups were formed on Facebook and Twitter. A webcast highlighted the theme and some recent results from NASA Heliophysics missions. Since March, 500,000 downloads of the Podcast have occurred.
For the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, NASA hosted a “NASA Village” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. during the week of 17-25 April 2010. Hundreds of students and teachers visited the village tents with NASA researcher lecturers, multi-media and hands-on learning activities and exhibits. In addition, a special event was held on 19 April 2010 for this 40th Anniversary of Earth Day at NASA Goddard’s Digital Learning Network (videoconference and webcast technologies to connect students from across the United States and the world to NASA educators and specialists.) A one hour show featuring director and musician, Kenji Williams and Bella Gaia (Beautiful Earth), followed by an informal lesson on polar ice and climate change by NASA Cryospheric scientist, culminated with live Q&A from 9 schools, including 500 students and their teachers (http://tinyurl.com/2ckg2rh ).
In July, NASA sponsored U.S. graduate student researchers to present at the COSPAR meeting (18-25 July 2010). NASA also sponsored students students to attend the IAC in September in Prague, Czech Republic. During these events, NASA co-hosted a series of educational programmes at the International Space Education Board’s International Student Zone.
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