By
Sten Odenwald (IMAGE)
In
1996, IMAGE was the first MidEX mission to
specifically include in its budget an education program, which we called POETRY (Public Outreach, Education,
Teaching and Reaching Youth).
We took full advantage of NASA’s then-new
policy of letting missions propose up to 2% of their budget for EPO work. In
the ten
years
since then, the work that Pat Reiff (Rice
University), Bill Taylor (Deceased) and I did to make IMAGE a ‘player’ in K-12
education became a breath-taking
adventure. The loss of IMAGE last December allowed me to reminisce about where
our efforts had ultimately taken us, and what might be just up the road ahead.
I
think the thing that I am the most proud of is that, when we began the EPO
process for SEC, there were very few K-12 resources available for SEC education,
other than a few mission posters and some spiffy web sites. In fact, at solar
minimum in 1996, the entire concept of ‘space weather’ was not yet in the
public eye. That would, of course, change
in January 1997 when the Telstar 401 satellite
failed. I knew that space weather was a story to focus on, thanks to the
research I had done for my book ‘The 23rd Cycle’, and so IMAGE-POETRY took up
the challenges of bringing space weather into the classroom in as many ways as
we could figure out to do. We actually had to create an entire educational context
for our satellite’s research because there were no such resources available at
the time. Because math and science were so intimately connected, POETRY soon
focused all of its formal education resources on creating math-oriented
products for K-12 teachers.
We
created the first ‘cradle to grave’ lithograph series of space weather, and an
accompanying series of workbooks ‘Solar Storms and You!’ with the help of Ms.
Susan Higley, the Maryland Science Teacher of the
year for 2000. We also developed a hugely popular ‘Ask the Space Scientist’
resource, an annual Space Weather CD-ROM, and a steady stream of space math
products. Our two earliest ‘hands-on’ efforts were the ‘Soda Bottle Magnetometer’
and the ‘AM Radio Space Weather Monitor’… and don’t forget the Event-based Sciences
book ‘Blackout!’ with its very popular video. Tom Smith ,a middle school
science teacher, wrote the text for the Blackout! Video so that his students
could understand it...and this worked famously! It is still
available through NASA-CORE! IMAGE data, showing for the first time Earth’s ghostly plasmasphere
and ring current systems, found their way into many different NASA TV programs,
especially for NASA-CONNECT. We also developed and deployed planetarium
programs that let you fly-through our data.
Today,
in the declining months of IMAGE, we continue to put out the ‘IMAGE Problem of the
Week’, which thousands of teachers enjoy using. I have a tough time emotionally
disengaging from creating this problem every week during the school year; It
has become such a habit of my work every Monday during the school year! As for
our other resources, we will continue to maintain the POETRY web site at
Goddard, because it’s very hard to turn away the 650,000 visitors we get every
year. In fact, if we are truly dedicated to education, it would be unethical to
simply abandon our visitors just because our mission has failed. To that end,
we are conducting a ‘tag sale’ on our Ask the Space Scientist and Problem of
the Week activities, looking for other missions who may care to support them!!
IMAGE
spanned the formative and infancy years of the SEC Forum-Broker system, and we benefited
from a huge synergy between the goals of the Ecosystem and our own objectives
and strengths in education. Each year, IMAGE was proud to contribute a physical
resource to the annual Educator Packet, and to be active in suggesting new
ideas for SECEF to pursue. What a wonderful time this was!
The
future holds for us a constant reminders of what IMAGE accomplished
scientifically. As I watch the endless re-plays of ring current movies in the
months to come, and with a lump in my throat, I will hope that our efforts made
a difference somewhere in the vast sea of science education. It is comforting
to know that when I retire, the first new PhDs will be emerging from the
pipeline of students that we touched while they were middle schoolers!