Day 2-3(5/13/14-5/15/14): Commanding a Mission

On day two, a group of seventh grade students from East St.Louis came to the Challenger Learning Center to build rockets and perform a mission to "visit" Comet Encke and collect data about. While they did not get to Comet Encke, they did find a new comet and named it Comet Lincoln. While they mission mostly went somewhat smoothly, their reading skills were not up to the level I and the other staff expected them to be. Most of children did not know at least half of the words in the given instruction, including "spectrum" and "analyze". I spent most of the time helping the kids read.The rocket building went okay too, but most of the rockets ended up behind the launch pad, as opposed to in front of it.

On day three, a group of sixth grade students from Visitation came to also build rockets and perform a mission to "send" a new crew and a probe to Mars and "return" a crew, which had been living on Mars for the last two years, back to Earth. The mission was a success. Most of the different sub-teams, such as medicine and navigation, finished their tasks within the allotted time period. It was really amusing watching the teams. Some of the girls took the whole mission a little too seriously. The team which was “building” the probe kept freaking out over each little detail and panicking over the time constraints. After the successful mission, the students went to “build" their rockets. The girls were again incredibly serious over their given task. They each took the time to carefully inspect every detail and consider every benefit. I have never witnessed children more intrigued in paper than them. Their rockets flew incredibly well. One rocket traveled a distance of almost 100 feet. Overall, this group's rockets flew so much better than the last group's. 

Mission Control

The Spacecraft

Outside of that, I redid all of the job cards, while learning how to use a laminator.

Position Cards