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Students watch live as NASA scientists shares updates and details about the Perseverance rover landing.
EdSource
California students watch and learn through hands-on projects as Mars rover lands
Sydney Johnson
February 19, 2021
Science teacher Gay Young has followed just about every space
expedition in recent memory. This week, she’s taking her elementary
students on the journey with her, as NASA’s Perseverance rover touched
down on Mars after a seven-month flight from Earth.
California teachers have struggled with creating engaging, hands-on
learning activities for students during distance learning when supplies
and safe laboratory environments are scarce. But this week, students
around the state gathered virtually to watch as real rocket scientists
attempted to land NASA’s latest Red Planet rover.
“I like to tie what’s happening in the news to my lessons, and we
needed something positive that can give our students hope. Kids love
space, and I told them ‘You might be the first generation to send
humans to Mars!’” said Young, who teaches science for all grades at
Kumeyaay Elementary in San Diego County.
On Thursday, thousands of California students watched live as the
SUV-sized rover landed on the surface of Mars with a mission to help
scientists identify signs of past microbial life on Mars, collect rock
samples and pave the way for future human exploration.
For Young, lessons around the rover, named Perseverance, launched back
in August. Over the course of the school year, her students have
learned about Earth science and climate change by making a greenhouse
and coming up with ways to grow food on Mars. Other lessons included
magnetic fields, force and even the emotional hurdle of being alone in
space.
As part of the months-long build-up to the landing, Young also had her
students build a Mars colony using household products like toilet paper
rolls, cereal boxes and other scrap materials. Because students are
still in remote learning, she collected their models and combined them
all at the school site to share with students the space city they had
designed.
“I was playing with my Silly Putty because I was so nervous, but
I’m happy that it landed,” said Young’s student, Alexa Harrison, who
added that the most exciting part for her was learning about the GPS
technology the rover needs to land in the right spot. “I would want to
work at NASA to study the rock and dirt they bring back.”
Across California, teachers are bringing this week’s space exploration
to the classroom and aligning lessons with the state’s science
standards. In 2013, California adopted the Next Generation Science
Standards, which require more hands-on lessons that are centered around
real-life scientific experiences that students may encounter in their
lives and communities.
But many teachers have struggled with implementing the new standards,
either due to lack of updated textbooks or now the physical constraints
of online learning, which limit opportunities for hands-on experiments
and field trips.
Science teaching experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory created a
five-week curriculum called “Mission to Mars Student Challenge” that is
aligned with the state standards in engineering, Earth science and
other topics to cut down on teacher prep work. Nearly 163,000
California students signed up to follow along with the weekly updates
and lessons, which had students creating their own rover designs,
testing models and learning what it takes to travel in space.
Guadalupe De La O, a high school teacher at Alliance Renee & Meyer
Luskin Academy High School in Los Angeles, is hoping the landing
inspires some of her students to pursue careers in science, technology,
engineering and math, collectively known as STEM.
“We talk a lot about how this work involves a lot of testing and
revision, which requires patience and persistence to problem-solve,”
said De La O, who teaches STEM. “One of the most challenging activities
is they had to code a rover that would maneuver on Mars. For a lot of
my students, this was their first time coding. But every time they had
a little success they would want to try more and more.”
Diving deep into the space mission also provided students with an
uplifting current event to focus on as many continue to face trauma
brought on by the pandemic.
“This is an experience for everybody,” De La O said. “My students are
mostly Black and Latino and their community in South Central is being
really hit hard right now by the pandemic. So it was really important
for me to get them involved, so they know that they can pursue this if
they want, and give us a little hope this year.”
In San Francisco, astronomy students at Galileo Academy of Science and
Technology spent a month designing the ins and outs of their own Mars
rover mission last semester and on Thursday watched the live stream
together as a class.
“We watched it happen in real-time, which was a nice break from what we
usually do,” said Emily Stollmeyer, an astronomy and physics teacher at
Galileo, who added that many of her students are struggling with
distance learning during the pandemic. “Anything exciting is really
awesome and needed right now.”
Kimberly Franklin, a 5th-grade teacher at Bell Gardens Elementary
School in Montebello Unified, created a virtual “escape room” that
guides students through a series of questions and problems related to
the Mars expedition they must research online in order to unlock new
clues and successfully reach the end of the challenge.
While individual teachers like Franklin have made it a personal mission
to bring space to their classroom, other schools have crafted
interdisciplinary lessons around the Mars landing. At Mulholland Middle
School in Lake Balboa near Los Angeles, seventh-grade teachers across
subjects teamed up to create lessons through the lens of the Mars
expedition.
In history, students learned about rockets and how the first people to
come up with a multi-stage rocket were in China. In English, students
had to write an argumentative essay about the cost-effectiveness of
space travel. Students learn about force and gravity in their science
classes as well as the geology of both Earth and Mars. Calculations and
word problems in a math class then tie together the space-themed
lessons.
“We’re studying Mars this week, and next week we’ll examine rock
samples from our science kits. I’ll use my desk camera, so they can
view it up close,” said Laura Silverman, a teacher at Mulholland who is
known around campus for having a mural of a Mars rover in her classroom.
Now that the landing has been successful, students are looking forward
to what other space exploration might come next. “I’m really happy that
the Mars rover landed,” said Charles Bandy, a student in Young’s class.
“That makes history!”
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