Page 9 - Journal 2018A

I was able to meet and share ideas with other science educators and discuss the challenges of STEM and how they can be overcome, Joy
Boath, Blackwood High School.
In conjunction with the Congress, teacher and student sessions were run at the Convention Centre and the SA Museum. Mark Divito summarises their usefulness:
The teacher sessions were excellent with
a rich range of ready-to-use classroom resources. ‘Mission to Red Planet’ and ‘Back to the Moon’ were run in the State Library by Dr Jeanette Dixon. The activities included real rock samples from the moon that the students could touch and be photographed with. An additional teacher session was the STEM Snippets workshop, which was run by teacher presenters from DECD. I found this the most useful professional development of the week. It used the NASA Stomp Rocket activity and focussed my attention to other excellent resources on the same NASA site that the Stomp Rockets came from (www.jpl.nasa. gov). The State Library also had a Woomera exhibition, which I used as part of a student excursion.
Adelaide School of English student, Blessing, holding samples of moon rock
Joy Boath’s class became excited because of Joy’s inspiration at the Congress. She recounts:
I was inspired by the announcement by Elon Musk and was very happy to hear that my relief teacher decided to abandon the work I had set for Year 11 physics, and live-stream the announcement. We had just nished
a SACE task on rocket science, using the Kerbal Space Program (computer game) to
design and launch rockets, so they understood many of the challenges of launching a rocket into space. On my return we were able to discuss whether they believed Elon’s plan to be realistic, what the limitations were, what they thought of the additional application of using reusable rockets to travel anywhere
in the world, what different elds of science were involved and how collaboration across different disciplines was required – it was a great ad hoc Science as a Human Endeavour task.
Bene ts for students
Students will gain in many ways from the involvement of teachers in the IAC 2017.
Matt Jamieson, from Windsor Gardens School B-12, reported that when he sat through a large range of presentations he formulated the basic premise of at least 30 different student tasks that would be engaging, real-world and
contemporary. These include research tasks (e.g. what are the statistical characteristics of astronauts/cosmonauts in terms of average age height and mass); modelling tasks (e.g. design a successful aeroponics setup); problem-based learning tasks (e.g. determine how many satellites are currently orbiting Earth and how cluttered are Earth orbits) and practical task (e.g. test for optimum fuel mixes in any of Sodium bicarbonate/vinegar; ethanol and oxygen rockets or the optimum water load vs pressure in water rockets).
Joy Boath explains how the panel session of astronauts inspired some great learning in a Year 10 Science class:
One highlight was the astronaut panel, where the audience asked questions of a number
of astronauts about their experiences. One astronaut shared some of the experiments that she had been a part of and explained that one of these involved a student project looking at spider webs in space. She commented that the interesting part of the experiment was not the spider webs, or the spider but the fruit ies that were sent up with her to provide a source of food. The ies were chosen as they had a short life cycle and bred rapidly.
Over the duration of the experiment she
was able to observe them “evolve” as those that were better able to grip the walls of the container and crawl rather than y, were more likely to survive as they were better able to control their movement and avoid getting
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