"Rip, Flip, and Stick"

Day 5 - Final day of space camp - gosh, I cannot believe it went so fast. Today was a fairly "low-key" day in terms of space activities, but fast paced in terms of lesson ideas and activities. The first session of the day was Martian Math. This session was full of ways to incorporate space themed math activities into the classroom with games, etc. One of my favorite games we played today was very interactive. Each person was given a nametag with a number on it. Then our

leader said a number and we had to create a way to get that number using the numbers - through addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, even including parenthesis... It was a very fun activity and being competitive, we tried to get large groups of people together. It would be a perfect get-to-know you activity for a math class or even for review.

We met with Stephanie Warren from NASA's Marshall Space Center who shared with us about the Lunar missions currently going on as well as provided some lesson ideas. We also learned about Space camps set up for students who are blind as well as students that are deaf.

A definite highly for me was viewing the IMAX movie Hubble. The Hubble Space Telescope One of the things that made this movie special for me was that I was in Houston at Johnson Space Center when this mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope was in space. I remember watching the EVA at Wyle Laboratory with our friends working on 21st Century Explorers. I got to see the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and the Hubble module that was used for training. It was an amazing IMAX to view, and I plan to see it again soon - as we arrived about 5-10

minutes late.

After lunch we learned about Mars... especially the Phoenix Mission. You can borrow sets of images taken from Phoenix from Arizona State and have students analyze them. We also built a egg drop lander after viewing 6 minutes of terror. Six minutes of terror is one of my favorite videos explaining how the rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars. Our egg survived the drop using balloon air bags and being cradled by a tetrahedron lined with card stock bumpers, cotton, and air inside a baggie.

We also completed an activity on Thermal protection. This was an engineering design challenge where we had to protect a brass screw from the heat of a propane flame using only a 6x6 sheet of aluminum foil and a 3x3 sheet of copper screen. The foil and screen could not be attached to the wooden dowel holding the screw or to the screw itself. The screw was attached to the wooden dowel with hot glue, and when it the heat built up, it would fall off. Our group worked together to design and build a thermal protection device, where we layered the copper screening with aluminum foil folded inside to insulate the screw. Unfortunately, our prototype wasn't very well suited for this experiment, although it did beat the control time of 5.6 seconds, making it 15.2 seconds before the screw fell off the dowel. It was a lot of fun and it made me really think about incorporating more engineering activities into my science class. One of the activities that NASA developed was building lunar growing containers. We will want to be able to grow our own food for long duration missions - how will that work in space? That would be a very fun way to liven up my plant unit, one that I normally dread. :-)

And the big moment - a rocket launch for our Estes rocket. We had about 30 minutes to complete this as they had to move up graduation ceremonies. We walked to Homer Hickum field to launch our rockets on the 16 person rocket launcher (pretty cool). My rocket sailed so brilliantly and high that it is now a permanent resident of a Huntsville grove of trees near the Space and Rocket Center.

It's official - I am a proud Honeywell Educator graduate of Space Camp! This experience was very much like my experience of receiving a green tie or a 10 or 15 year pin at CLC. I was very proud to complete this experience. We were able to receive our wings and turn our name badges from upside down to right-side up. In fact, the tradition is so important that we were scolded if our nametags were right-side up. So after our entire team graduated, we were able to "rip, flip, and stick" our name badges in the correct position. Tonight's ceremony was bittersweet - as much as I am looking forward to heading home, starting my children's lit class, seeing my buddies from Jefferson and CLC, I'm also going to miss Team Harmony terribly. This group of teachers is absolutely top-notch. They are all incredibly devoted, passionate, and fun. It is sad to think that the fun is over and that most will be headed home on flights tomorrow.

But for me... I get another day of fun... tomorrow is my Civil Air Patrol day. I joined the Civil Air Patrol as a result of Space Camp (before coming to Huntsville), and tomorrow I spend another day with activity training, and getting to fly in a Cessna. I am pretty excited! Another perk - we are supposedly done at 5 PM. Woot! It will be nice to get done earlier than 8:30, especially since I leave for the airport at 5 AM on Wednesday.

This camp has been one of the the best experiences of my life... I have met some of the most wonderful people, I now have people to visit across the US and world... I have learned so much about space, our history with space, and have many activities that I can take back to my classroom this fall and in the future. I would encourage every single teacher to consider applying for this awesome opportunity. Even though I came here not knowing a single person, I am leaving knowing over 100 of the friendliest, nicest people. It doesn't matter if you don't teach science, or even if you don't teach middle school. You just need to be passionate about encouraging students to dream, especially about STEM and space. This year over 1,100 teachers applied for the Honeywell camp, and they selected 220 participants from 47 states and 21 countries. I am so thankful to Honeywell who supported each teacher at this camp by providing the camp tuition as well as paying for transportation from our home destinations. I am re-energized and excited to incorporate so many new fun ideas into my classes this fall and beyond!