Abstract

High-altitude ballooning activities, both extra-curricular and in the form of a freshman seminar class, have been going on at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities for several years, funded in part by the Minnesota Space Grant Consortium. In line with recent NASA encouragement to engage more middle school teachers and students in Space Grant activities, we have expanded our ballooning activities to involve middle school teachers and provide them with flight opportunities for student-built payloads. This program offers training to middle school teachers in curriculum and techniques associated with high-altitude ballooning, plus follow-on flight opportunities over two academic years for student-built payloads. We use internet streaming to deliver video coverage of launches and in-flight data transmissions. We also provide post-flight data analysis support. During the summer of 2010, we offered a workshop to science and technology teachers from nine Twin Cities middle schools. We subsequently, increased the number to twelve schools, several of which served under-represented student populations. Workshop attendees successfully designed, built, tested, flew, and analyzed data from balloon payloads during the four day workshop. Their payloads contained cameras (still and video) as well as sensors to measure temperature, relative humidity, pressure, radiation levels, solar panel output, and acceleration. The participants also spent time discussing standards-alignment of ballooning activities, planning ways to implement aspects of high-altitude ballooning at their schools, and generated curriculum to use with their students and to share with other participants. This is an on-going project and results from this initiative are preliminary at this time. The first round of student-payload-building occurred in the spring of 2011, with the first set of middle school payload flights in May of 2011.

How to Cite:

Hladun, M. V., (2011) “Expanding High-Altitude Ballooning to Middle Schools (A Space Grant Precollege Project)”, Academic High Altitude Conference 2011(1). doi: https://doi.org//ahac.8136