June 27th, 2012 - June 26th, 2014 | PROJECT
The Virginia Air & Space Center (VASC): Creating an Exciting NASA Inspired Education Program was a two-year project to develop and deliver teacher workshops, classroom outreach visits to students of those teachers, and on-site educational experiences for those students, which introduce and reinforce NASA STEM resources. These are followed up by surveys from the teachers and students for evaluation purposes. The VASC partnered with the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) and NASA Langley Research Center to develop and deliver 15 professional development workshops to a total of 185 formal and informal educators. NASA materials were aligned to the Virginia Standards of Learning guidelines (SOLs) for ease of integration into the teachers’ curricula. The goal was to provide six professional development workshops, but we delivered 15 workshops, 250% of our goal. Of the 185 educators who attended the workshops, 155 were formal classroom teachers, and 30 were informal educators. NASA STEM outreach programs were delivered to 8,437 students ranging from grades K-12. On-site NASA STEM programs were presented to 2,507 students at VASC. Pre-and post-program surveys were collected and evaluated from both outreaches and on-site programming. This informal education program helped to increase awareness of NASA's contributions to scientific knowledge and fulfill NASA's three major Education goals, namely: (1) strengthen NASA and the nation's workforce; (2) attract and retain students in STEM disciplines, and (3) engage Americans in NASA's mission, and VASC staff was able to build exciting new partnerships and programs with the different school systems in the Hampton Roads area.
Project Website(s)
(no project website provided)
Team Members
Brian DeProfio, Principal Investigator, Virginia Air & Space CenterDanielle Price, Co-Principal Investigator, Virginia Air & Space Center
Funders
Funding Source: NASA
Funding Program: CP4SMP
Award Number: NNX12AK98G
Funding Amount: 264500
Tags
Audience: Educators | Teachers | Elementary School Children (6-10) | Middle School Children (11-13) | Museum | ISE Professionals
Discipline: Physics | Space science
Resource Type: Project Descriptions
Environment Type: Museum and Science Center Programs | Professional Development | Conferences | Networks | Professional Development and Workshops | Public Programs