KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Three. Two. One.
Blastoff!
Students at Allen Village Charter School got a taste Tuesday of what it takes to work at NASA.
Two teachers at the school recently traveled to Huntsville, Alabama to learn from NASA scientists.
"We became part of a team from 35 different countries,” said Quinton Shaw, a science teacher at Allen Village. “We all worked together to accomplish different missions."
Shaw and math teacher Jessica Schauwecker are taking the lessons they learned in Huntsville and bringing them back to Kansas City.
Among the lessons? Launching an expedition to the red planet.
"We are doing a semester-long mission, where we are going to do our own mission to Mars,” Shaw said. “Students will be learning about resources, be learning about force, acceleration.”
Another lesson focuses on math in space.
"It was a mission that NASA did where they sent a ship to the moon and it had to crash into a creator and then they were gonna test the dust that came from that; We're kind of doing a miniature of that," Schauwecker said.
The teachers want to show students that learning can be fun.
"We can learn and have fun at the same time,” Schauwecker said. “I also want them to learn that it's important to work as a team and that it's important to persevere and keep working hard.”
And that they can be the next ones to go into space.
"I feel like it's something that is not pushed too much, especially in the math classroom,” Schauwecker said. “It kind of helps them realize that it is attainable and they can be the next generation going to Mars.”
