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Vinemont High School physics students have had the opportunity this semester to participate in a project created by two engineering professors, Dr. Matt Turner and Dr. P.J. Benfield. This project is funded by NASA and the professors are from UAH. This year teams are designing a payload that will travel into space to the planet Venus. Twenty two teams are competing this fall. The NASA review will be December 13th in Huntsville, Alabama. Winning teams will be rewarded with an all expense paid trip to Washington D.C. to meet and speak with prominent persons at NASA headquarters.
The following students below presented to the Cullman County Board of Education during the October 17th meeting. The students gave an overview of their project design and answered questions from the board members.
Team SHIELD is investigating the composition of the cold layer that is trapped between two extremely hot layers on Venus. What is in this layer? How can a layer such as this exist on one of the hottest planets in our system? These are a few of the questions that intrigued Team SHIELD to create this payload design. There will be multiple probes launched into the Venusian atmosphere to collect data as they make their way through this extremely cold layer. (Pictured front row left to right—Dewey Bateman, Tyler Boland, Nathan Persall, Dalton Harbison; back row left to right—Kendra Pearson, Julia Laningham and Kasey Pair)
CCBOE article for the Connection
Beginning this year, a new component to the InSPIRESS program is involvement in the community. InSPIRESS stands for Innovated System Project for the Increased Recruitment of STEM Students. This new aspect to the program is called the Community Engagement Activity (CEA) which is an opportunity for InSPIRESS teams to showcase their work to the local community. In summary, the CEA allows teams to use their imagination and creativity to show within their own local community what they have learned and developed this semester through the InSPIRESS program. CEA dates and locations are determined collaboratively by the team, the sponsor and the recipient. Qualifying CEAs must (1) have visitors who complete a survey, (2) relate to the mission and/or payload concept, and (3) must be at least 30 minutes in length. At the end of each CEA, the team must collect the surveys and then analyze them (as seen in Appendix A). The two fold purpose for the CEA survey is to count the CEA visitors accurately and to gauge the general public’s knowledge of NASA. We received a total of 234 surveys.
This school year the Vinemont High School Physics class has 3 teams who are partaking in the InSPIRESS project. Each team has a total of 7 members. The teams of Vinemont High School are as follows: Team S.H.I.E.L.D, Team T.W.I.S.T.E.R, and Team S.T.A.R. A few of the earliest CEAs were joint presentations by all 3 teams.
The CEA’s have turned out to be a positive way to ensure that our school and our community know what the InSPIRESS program is doing for students at our school. An overall summary of Team S.H.I.E.L.D.’s community engagement includes presentations to 9th and the 11th grade classes and mission related experiments with the 2nd, 4th, and the 6th grade classes of other Vinemont schools. In Team S.H.I.E.L.D’s opinion, the addition of community engagement in Cullman County has been a good idea for a few reasons. First, it was nice to receive many positive comments that Team S.H.I.E.L.D was doing something really great and interesting. Secondly, if NASA is really interested in promoting itself—then this is the best idea ever. Finally, Team S.H.I.E.L.D has learned that tackling challenging work can be very stressful, but is preparing team members for the world of work ahead of them.
CEA Infromation
