Announcements

On August 21, the Iowa Space Grant Consortium and Iowa 4-H will offer Solar Eclipse Day Camps throughout every county in Iowa. At 1:00 pm on the 21st, all of the students at the camps will experience the solar eclipse.

Students, grades 4-6 will participate in science activities, games, and curriculum in the morning in anticipation of the solar eclipse. It will be a great educational opportunity as students from all 99 counties learn about science and watch the eclipse together.

County youth coordinators can request information for Day-Kits for the camps here and learn more about the camp on the 4-H website.

 

The Iowa Space Grant Consortium has announced a new program called Collaborative Programs. Formerly known as “Iowa-Wide,” Collaborative Programs will create cooperative efforts that target one or more of these three focus areas: precollege, informal education, or higher education.

Projects can include one or more affiliates (https://www.iaspacegrant.org/affiliates) and must include at least one core institution as a partner: Drake, Iowa State, Iowa, and Northern Iowa.

Click here to learn more about Collaborative Programs.

Students at Pella Jefferson Intermediate School in Pella, Iowa took part in a water rocket launch during a study on the idea of forces affecting motion. The rocket launch that the 5th grade students participated in was an exercise adopted from an experience their teachers had at Marshall Space Flight Center, as a part of the ISGC Partner Schools Program. Josh Steenhoek and Jill Payne, who teach 5th grade in Pella, built water rockets and tested them while they were at MSFC, although with varied results.

“None of our rockets performed close to what the students are doing today,” Steenhoek said. “Over the years we have adapted the curriculum and found that it is the perfect STEM culminating event.”

As part of an additional science unit that takes place four days a week during the school day, students worked in the area of physics, asking questions and running investigations to test their hypotheses. In the spring, those studies transitioned to paper rockets which were much cheaper and easier to build.

“Additionally, we had some cross over time in math where students worked on ratio, rates, proportion, and probability,” Steenhoek said. “This time was not only a new area of math, but it also crossed over into our scaling up thinking for science.”

During the month of May, the students were presented with an engineering challenge: design a rocket to travel as far as possible. The students who had science expertise  merged with those who were out of the room for extension or support during this time.  Their science understanding was shared, lingering ideas were tested, and designs were explored.  Finally, the students scaled up their idea from paper rockets into a water rocket that was launched.

Despite facing a stiff wind, student’s from different 5th grade classes in Pella launched their water rockets in May, and then charted the results into box and whisker plots.

The Iowa Space Grant Consortium has announced two scholarship programs for undergraduate students for the 2017-2018 school year.

Applications are currently ongoing for the NASA Iowa Space Grant Scholarship Program and the Preservice Educator STEM Scholarship.

The NASA ISGC Scholarship Program awards scholarships to support undergraduate students pursuing research opportunities in STEM disciplines that support NASA’s mission. This scholarship supports the research projects of undergraduate students at ISGC Core Institutions. To learn more about the NASA ISGC Scholarship program, click here.

The Preservice Educator STEM Scholarship supports undergraduate students pursuing a degree in preservice education for STEM fields that support NASA’s mission. The $5,000 scholarship is available to students from Drake, Iowa State, University of Iowa, University of Northern Iowa, DMACC, or Loras College. To learn more about the Preservice Educator STEM Scholarship, click here.

Applications for both scholarship programs will close on June 30, 2017. For questions, please email isgc@iastate.edu.

 

 

The Iowa Space Grant Consortium announced the addition of Des Moines Area Community College and Loras College as academic affiliates. Dr. Kari Hensen, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences will represent DMACC, while Dr. Thomas Carstens, Assistant Professor of Engineering will serve as the contact for Loras College.

As the ISGC grows, the executive committee has renamed its four “Core Institutions” of Drake University, Iowa State University, The University of Iowa, and the University of Northern Iowa.

In addition to the new institutions, the ISGC announced new campus coordinators for Drake University and the University of Iowa. Department chair and professor of chemistry, Maria Bohorquez was named the new campus coordinator for Drake University, and associate professor of physics and astronomy, Dr. Cornelia Lang will represent the University of Iowa.

 

The University of Iowa announced Tuesday that Professor Cornelia C. Lang will serve as the University’s campus coordinator for the Iowa Space Grant Consortium. Professor Lang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Iowa.

Professor Lang’s research is focused on radio and X-ray observations of galactic nuclear regions, specifically, the center of the Milky Way. She was a collaborator in the first Hubble Space Telescope survey of the Central 75 pc of the Galaxy and makes observations of the Galactic center using a Very Large Array radio interferometer.

Professor Lang joined the faculty at Iowa in 2002 after earning her Ph.D from UCLA and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Massachusetts at Amherst.