by Dot Cannon

“Robots seem pretty…hard to make,” explained one robot creator.  “But when you connect (the wires), it just comes together.”

Next, she demonstrated how to assemble a robot.

Oh–and by the way?  The roboticist  is a freshman at Citrus Valley High School.  She was onsite, with a number of other students, on Monday, December 9th at the Anaheim Convention Center.

And all of them were participating in a new feature of the 2019 California STEAM Symposium.

The young roboticist was one of approximately 100 students, ranging in age from elementary to high school, displaying their work in the 2019 California STEAM Symposium’s “Student Showcase”.

Some students offered ten-minute breakout sessions, while others engaged bystanders in a discussion of their projects.

A look at STEAM in action

(“This is how the respiratory system works,”) explained a student from Franklin Elementary School, in Redlands.  Her multimedia project, when visitors interacted with it by touching different wires, played audio clips which she and her fellow students had recorded–about the ways various organs of the body work!

“This one’s my favorite,” said Rafael, who looked to be approximately eight years old.  And he played one of several videos he had researched, created and narrated, about “Tundra”.

His classmate, Nia, offered a similarly well-done video presentation on her computer, about killer whales!

Across the hall, Rialto High School students were demonstrating their Rube Goldberg Machine.

 

Based on favorite horror movies, this one’s designed to turn on the lights at the end!  Science and STEM teacher Mikal Thompson explained that Rialto High School will be hosting a “Rube Goldberg Machine contest” in February of 2020.  Students, ages 8 to 18, are welcome to register!

STEAM on the horizon

The California STEAM Symposium, co-sponsored by the Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation, California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls and CSU, brought together more than 2,500 attendees.  Education professionals, entrepreneurs and media from 31 states (besides California) and three Canadian provinces explored innovative ways of combining science, technology, engineering, art and math in education during the two-day conference.

Symposium themes included inclusion in STEAM and an emphasis on students taking ownership of their own educational journey.  And an exciting announcement led participants to one of the “supersessions”:

And attendees were exploring some exciting new directions.

In the “New Attendee Orientation Session”, at the beginning of the day, State of California Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction Khieem Jackson had announced the creation of a new STEAM unit, at the California Department of Public Education!

Midmorning, Deputy Superintendent Jackson co-hosted a super session, with Education Administrator Dr. Jacquelyn Ollison, from the California Department of Education Office of the Chief Deputy.  The session, which explored the work currently under way to transform STEAM education, was entitled “In Pursuit of True STEAM Experiences”.

Charting the course

Dressed in a flight suit, harking back to his service as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, Superintendent Jackson told attendees that the leadership principles he’d used, during his military experience, could be applied to California’s implementation of STEAM education.

“Where are you, where are you going, how are you going to get there, and what are you going to do when you get there?” he said, outlining a goal-setting strategy for adding STEAM to current curricula.

“Really, we need you,” said Dr. Ollison to the attendees, before requesting their input on numerous questions about implementing STEAM education.  She and Deputy Superintendent Jackson received those responses in a highly interactive way.

The session leaders put up Post-Its in four corners of the room.  On the sheets were “Agree”, “Strongly Agree”, “Disagree”, and “Strongly Disagree”.  Then, they told attendees they were going to read several statements.  They asked attendees to migrate to the corner of the room with the note most closely expressing their feelings about what they heard.

One statement, “STEAM education is just STEM with arts thrown in”, sent almost everyone to the “Strongly Disagree” corner!

Both Deputy Superintendent Jackson and Dr. Ollison encouraged attendees to contact them with input after the symposium.

“Not every student has the opportunity to engage in authentic STEAM experiences,” Deputy Superintendent Jackson said at the close of the session.

“How can we use STEAM as a driving force to close achievement and opportunity gaps?”

One woman’s journey

After lunch, another keynote speaker wowed everyone.

Former astronaut and Johnson Space Center Director Dr. Ellen Ochoa took the audience along on her journey.

“As people say, ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’,” she said, recalling her childhood at the time of Apollo 11.

“I’d never seen any women associated with NASA.”

However, both her parents obtained college degrees and encouraged her through their example.  Her mother, Dr. Ochoa said, especially inspired her.  “The entire time she was raising my brothers and sisters and me, she was taking one class a semester at our local university, San Diego State.  And after twenty years,…she graduated from college two years after I did.”

Despite her inspiration and capability, Dr. Ochoa recalled that one engineering professor was “the opposite of encouraging” when she looked into the possibility of majoring in engineering at SDSU.  She told the audience that he warned her the coursework was “very difficult”.  The professor also commented that, “We had a woman come through here–once.”

“Fortunately, I got quite a different reception when I went to a professor in the physics department,” Dr. Ochoa continued.

In addition to reacting positively to her math background, the professor talked with her about the types of careers to which a physics major could lead.  Physics became her major. (According to her LinkedIn profile, she graduated as valedictorian.)

Inspiration in a changing world

Along the way, Dr. Ochoa said, she was beginning to see space science change.

During her time as a graduate student at Stanford, the space shuttle flew for the first time.  Then, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.

“I (then began to realize) that this kind of career, and others like it, were open to me,” she continued.

After receiving her doctorate, she said, she applied to NASA.  But her first interview with Johnson Space Center did not result in her being selected.

“I did realize that there were things I could do, (that would) make me a better candidate,” she said.   Among the ways she upgraded her skills: obtaining her pilot’s license.

A path to space

Ultimately, her work paid off.  Her career with NASA started at NASA Ames Research Center in the Bay Area in 1988.  In 1990, she became NASA’s first Hispanic female astronaut.  She flew four shuttle missions, spending a total of 41 days in space.

“I was fortunate to be a crew member on two…assembly missions (for the International Space Station),” she told the audience.  Assembling the ISS, she said, required over 100 space flights.  Five different types of launch vehicles ferried the ISS components up to their destination, to orbit the earth.

“Today, the International Space Station is about the size of a football field, counting the end zones,” Dr. Ochoa explained.

In the course of her career, NASA recognized Dr. Ochoa with their highest award: the Distinguished Service Medal.  She also received the Presidential Distinguished Rank award, for senior executives in the federal government.  But another honor was the one about which she sounded most excited, during her presentation.

“For the last five and a half years I was at NASA, I got to be director of Johnson Space Center,” she told the audience.

And then, Dr. Ochoa shared–and narrated–a video.  It was a “road trip” of sorts.

However, the route was one with which most of us aren’t personally familiar.

An expedition in space

“This was my fourth and final mission,” she began.  “It took place in 2002, so this is my crew, which had six other people on the flight…”

“I’m the one in the center.  The flight engineer,” she said, showing a photograph of the cabin of the space shuttle after liftoff.

“…And in just eight-and-a-half minutes, we’ve gone from the launch pad to traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, and have gone into orbit around the earth.”

Dr. Ochoa took her audience through the experience of Mission STS-110, aboard the space shuttle Atlantis.  This particular mission’s primary objective was installation of an SO truss, atop the International Space Station’s Destiny Lab, according to NASA’s webpage.  This truss and its technology would allow for expansion of future laboratories, to be attached to the complex.

The rendezvous

“This is what the  station looked like from our point of view, as we’re getting close,” Dr. Ochoa said.

Bringing the two vehicles together for the rendezvous took about ten minutes.   Then, Dr. Ochoa said, after about two hours, she and her crew entered the International Space Station.

“There were two other people living onboard the Space Station.  They actually were members of my astronaut class.”

“I think (the ISS crew) were happy to see us, but equally happy…to see us leave.  Kind of like when your relatives visit,” she commented.

Dr. Ochoa stepped her audience through her subsequent spacewalks, in the process of installing the truss.

“Over the next week (as the truss structure is being attached), we did a series of four spacewalks,” she explained.

“The spacewalkers have cameras on their helmets… You can see them looking down at their hands.”

She also took her audience inside the Space Station’s daily operations–including mealtime.  “This particular meal is in the shuttle.  We invited the Space Station crew over; we actually had Texas barbecue for them.”

Back to Earth–literally

After their week on the ISS, Dr. Ochoa and her crew had completed their tasks.  It was “time to close the hatches and get ready to separate away”.

“Once we separate, we’re going to move about 400 feet away,  and then we’re going to do a complete flyaround of the station,” she said.

After the flyaround, the shuttle crew made preparations to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere.

One of the most dramatic photos Dr. Ochoa showed was of Atlantis coming in for landing, at 2,000 feet.  “We don’t have any engines running.  We’re really just a big heavy rock,” she said.

“So we are definitely going to land.”  The audience laughed.

Applause and whoops resounded through the auditorium at the end of this particular video.  But Dr. Ochoa had another perspective to share, as well.

Aboard the ISS in 2019

“This is an actual photograph of the Space Station today,” she said. “(It’s) orbiting overhead every hour and a half.”

Dr. Ochoa showed the audience the interior of the ISS’s newest laboratory.

“This is astronaut Peggy Whitson, and she’s  working with some stem cells, trying to understand…(how we can actually learn) to grow heart cells in space.

“(You can) actually see them start to beat together,” Dr. Ochoa said.  She also took the audience through a number of other types of experiments being conducted aboard the ISS.

…”This is an experiment…where students can write algorithms, send them up to space, and we can actually test them out,” she continued.

“…Here’s a 3D printer.  The very first 3D printer we had onboard.  We now have, I think, the third generation.”

“Of course, a lot of the work we do up there, is looking at the earth, and determining what’s going on.”

Dr. Ochoa showed the audience a slide of astronauts eating fresh food grown aboard the ISS.

She also referenced the CubeSats, or cube satellites, used for this observation–including the one built by students and launched earlier this year!

“…The astronauts themselves are experiments.  And so, they also need to keep in good health.  And they do a couple hours of exercise every day, as well as participate as test subjects, in a lot of physiology experiments.”

The next steps beyond

Dr. Ochoa also gave her audience a look at NASA’s work with several private companies.

“We’re working with…SpaceX and Northrop Grumman,” she said.  “And they have cargo vehicles that, for the last few years, have periodically launched…to the space station.”

Boeing, she added, had developed a vehicle called the Starliner, while SpaceX was in the process of creating one called the Crew Dragon.

“2020 is going to be an exciting year,” Dr. Ochoa said.  “Both of those plan to start flying astronauts to the space station.”

In addition, she said, Johnson Space Center was developing the Orion spacecraft.   The first planned mission for Orion: “to go to the far side of the moon and come back.”  The second mission will have crew members onboard.

“So it’s a very exciting time for…space exploration, and I’m so glad I got the opportunity to talk to you about it today, at the STEAM Symposium.”

The audience gave her a standing ovation.   And Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation CEO Jessica Howard summed up the past forty-five minutes:

“I think I have goosebumps still.”

 

The seventh annual California STEAM Symposium ran December 9th and 10th in the Anaheim Convention Center.  Dates for the 2020 California STEAM Symposium will be announced in the near future.

This is Part Three of our three-part series.  Here is a link to Parts One and Two.

 

 

 

 

 

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