by Carol Sowers

In a single sentence, “I like robots,” 14-year-old Noe Valdez, an eighth grade student at Mesa’s Carson Junior High School, summed up his reason for joining 29 other students for a year-round informal learning odyssey into space exploration and other exploits focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The after- school and summer program, presented by Arizona State University (ASU) in collaboration with Mesa Public Schools and several community partners, introduces middle school students like Valdez and other youth to the demanding STEM disciplines, and the romantic pursuit of robotics, which fascinated philosophers and scientists even before Greek mathematician Archytas built a mechanical steam-powered bird in 350 B.C.

Ramping up for an all-important Parent Night, students spent more than a month carefully engineering their models of Mars’ surface.  About an hour before their parents filed into the Carson Junior High Media Center, the students polished up PowerPoint presentations, and unveiled breathtaking photos of the planet’s canals and mountains taken with ASU’s Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has funded the ASU Mars Education Program for a decade. However, the funding to engage these middle school students in the pursuit of STEM careers came from a three-year $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), awarded in 2007 to Tirupalavanam Ganesh, Assistant Dean for Information Systems with the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education.

The Innovative Technology Experiences for Teachers and Students (ITEST) grant is the NSF’s response to the growing concern about the limited number of information technology workers in the United States. The grant is funding the program at Carson and Powell junior high schools, where it was introduced in the fall of 2007 and at Mesa and Smith junior high schools, where the program was initiated in fall 2008. In all, there are between 20 and 32 students at each of the schools.

Observing the students polishing up their projects, Ganesh said, “These students represent our future scientists and engineers, they will engage with the grand challenges of our time, such as, making solar energy economical, preventing nuclear holocaust, providing clean water, and exploring the universe.”  His innovative program called “Learning through Engineering Design and Practice: STEM for an Equitable Future,” targets middle school youth, and engages them in a year-round, hands-on curriculum that encourages students to think creatively about technology. 

“Our program participants are challenged to engage with problem based projects that requires them to apply their knowledge of science, technology, and mathematics to solve the challenge that is posed,” Ganesh said.   “For instance, in a unit called ‘Imagine Mars,’ students studied Mars and learned to figure out what the planet is like in comparison to earth and what it would take for humans to colonize Mars, say fifty years from now.”

The hope is that these students are inspired “to go into education and career pathways in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics,” said Jessica Hunsdon, an instructional facilitator who joined Ganesh on the project to help design and implement the program’s demanding curriculum. She also is retooling the program curriculum for broad dissemination so even more teachers can expose students to the high-tech terrain of space exploration and spark an interest in concentrated study within the STEM disciplines.

Olivia Oliphant, a 13-year-old Carson eighth grader in the second year of the program, is contemplating a career in aerospace engineering.  “I really like math and science, and working with a lot of fun people who are interested in the same things I am,” she said. Olivia was among 125 students who applied to the program in Fall 2007.

Mars has a special allure for many students.  Fourteen-year-old Zach Cooper, for example, said: “I like Mars. It’s my favorite planet and I want to learn more about it.”

Students have learned plenty.

Khoi Nguyen, 14, applied for the program because he wanted to explore engineering, but was also surprised to learn that “Mars has carbon-dioxide clouds meaning there could be some kind of life.”

The Carson and Powell junior high students in this program had immersed themselves in the Red Planet at ASU’s highly regarded Mars Space Flight Facility. There, Wendy Taylor, ASU Mars Education Program Coordinator, facilitated their learning.

“Their first stage was to learn about Mars, its surface and features, and then figure out how we could explore the surface with robotics,” she said. At the space flight center, students, working in teams of eight, “targeted their very own images of Mars,” using ASU’s thermal imaging camera aboard NASA’s Odyssey space craft, Taylor said.

Many students turned their high-tech images of Mars into posters and displayed them at Parent’s Night.

“We looked at a really interesting area that was half white which was already explored, and half black with no photographic information,” said 13-year-old Alex Daniels, pointing to the subtle shadings on the team’s poster.

Melissa Brace, an eighth-grade science teacher, and Pamela Garland, a math teacher, both from Carson Junior High, are among eight teachers at the four schools trained and supported by the NSF grant as well as Mesa Public School funding to work with students in the after school program. Brace said the teachers are learning along with the students.

“It was really neat seeing the real thing,” she said, referring to the students’ other-worldly images of the landscape, canyons, canals and volcanoes on Mars.

The most exciting exercise for many students was working in teams of two to assemble Lego Mindstorm robotics kits, robot rovers that will comb their papier-mâché Mars surface, mimicking NASA’s rovers Spirit and Opportunity. NASA’s two solar-powered rovers have “climbed a mountain and descended into craters over the last five years, making  discoveries about historically wet and violent environments on ancient Mars, and relayed more than a quarter million pictures back to Earth,” according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In addition to teaming up with the Mars Education Program to design autonomous rovers capable of navigating Mars-like terrain, program participants, over the course of the two-year program, have had the opportunity to work with the Global Institute of Sustainability to research and develop designs to mitigate the urban heat island. In 2008, they also participated in “cognitive apprenticeships” with scientists and engineers from Microchip. ASU undergraduate students in Engineering and Science, some of whom are graduates of Mesa Public Schools, also provide cognitive apprenticeships to program participants throughout the program by interacting informally with participants sharing their interests and passion for their chosen career pathway while also helping facilitate this technologically rich extracurricular program.

Each eighth grade student who returns to the program this summer will attend an ASU Research Internship where they will build and program a robot using a graphic calculator. Tim Woolfenden, 14, was among the students enticed into the program by the prospect of building a robot.

“I like robotics,” he said. Ben and Mary Woolfenden, Tim’s parents, echoed others who said they were pleased with the program.

Ben Woolfenden said the Mars program awakened his son’s interest in school.

“Without a challenge,” Mary Woolfenden said, “very few students are going to rise to a higher level.”

Nancy Kircher, mother of 13-year-old Zachary, said she is as excited about the program as her son.  “He is in the second year of the program and he loves it,” she said. “I am so pleased.”

Ganesh, principal investigator of this NSF project said of the program’s impact, “We want children to be challenged so they can not only be creative in this after-school program, but also be challenged to explore their interests in science and mathematics in school and in college.”

Mesa Public Schools, ASU, and their collaborators will work together to sustain the efforts of this National Science Foundation sponsored effort beyond its funding cycle.

“We are so appreciative to be selected as a partner in this project,” said Carolyn O’Reilly, an administrator with the Mesa Public Schools Superintendent’s Office.  “We are working to develop follow-up activities so that we can capitalize on the excitement and curiosity this initiative has generated among our students and teachers.”