IT'S ROCKET SCIENCE

IT’S ROCKET Teachers get tips for hands-on learning at PSU

Anne Danahy

UNIVERSITY PARK — In a move many of his students could probably relate to, teacher Greg Sypa came up with a name for the rocket his team made from a two-liter soda bottle: “Please Work.”

CDT/Christopher Weddle

Jennifer Sykora, a teacher for Danville Area School District, and Scott Given, a teacher at Mount Nittany Middle School, use altimeters as a water-powered rocket blasts off during a workshop for science teachers at Penn State's Earth-Engineering Sciences Building on Wednesday, July 22, 2009. CDT/Christopher Weddle

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In the end, the team’s craftsmanship succeeded, and the handmade rocket shot through the air. The exercise that turned elementary and high school teachers into rockets scientists Wednesday afternoon was one part of “Lunar Exploration,” a weeklong class designed to help them teach their students — the astronauts and engineers of the future — about the moon and space.

“I’m always looking for hands-on ways to bring abstract concepts” to students, said Tina Grather, a fifth grade teacher at Kratzer Elementary School in Allentown.

Twenty teachers are in the class, which is one of six workshops NASA’s Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium is offering this summer with support from Penn State.

Heather Nelson, program coordinator at the consortium, said about 85 teachers are taking classes this summer — some more than one. Along with the moon, topics include black holes, robots and the earth’s history.

The idea isn’t just to educate the teachers about the latest findings and teaching methods, but to help them find ways to share the information with their students and, in doing so, spark their interest in science, technology, engineering and math.

“That’s really our goal — that they take what they learn here and implement it in their classrooms,” Nelson said.

She said the lunar exploration class is also designed to give the teachers practice with “inquiry-based teaching.” Teachers give students a question and guide them as the students figure out the answers themselves.

So on Wednesday, with direction from associate professor of electrical engineering Sven Bilen, the teachers designed their rockets and gathered data on how high they went in relation to how much water or “fuel” they contained and the thrust from the air compressor.

Judy Maccarone, seventh grade teacher at Strayer Middle School in Quakertown, said the workshop has given her background information on topics such as the geology of the moon and how orbits work that she can use in her classes.

Sypa, a sixth-grade teacher at Osceola Elementary School who also took the “Calculator-controlled robots” class the week before, said his students love learning about space.

“That’s their favorite unit every year,” he said.

He said he doesn’t think students always see careers in sciences as an option, but is hoping to change that by bringing in some of the experts he met in the workshop to talk with his students.

Scott Given, a sixth-grade teacher at Mount Nittany Middle School, said the speakers at the workshop said their interests in science and space developed when they were young. So, if teachers can help develop that interest in their students early, it may stay with them.

“We’re learning about cutting-edge science. We’re learning a great deal about the moon,” Given said.

Given, who has been to a number of workshops, said they’re also learning about inquiry science that poses a question to students and lets them wrestle with the question, experiment and come to conclusions.

“It’s really sound educational practice,” he said. “We’re learning by doing.”

Anne Danahy can be reached at 231-4648.