I read into the competition and it sounded REALLY cool.
So, right before Christmas break, I assigned the application as a class assignment. It required the students complete a proposal for an experiment to be done on the space station. I submitted the best one or two from each class, and shortly after that, I received this...
Immediately, I knew it would be a challenge, because the group that was chosen (one of only 8 in the entire state of Florida) is one that wasn't entirely made of my students. Turns out, they were awesome students, but I knew it would be an after school thing. I'll also admit I was a bit scared of my ability to help the students with their proposal, because it was all about the photoelectric effect, which I was definitely not an expert on. (I studied. A bunch.)
Even though I learned on 2/13 that we had earned a place in the competition, I had to be at a teacher training on 2/18, that Saturday, in Tallahassee. Kyle is wonderful and got up at 4 in the morning with me and drove me to Tallahassee. I spent the entire day in training and it was a TON of fun. It was my first time at a Challenger Learning Center, and the one in Tallahassee has an IMAX theater, planetarium, some cool space memorabilia, a few classrooms and some offices. We spent most of the day in the office. I learned that the person running the competition wrote a grant to build their simulator, and the competition came from that. I learned the competition consisted of 4 one hour parts. A mission in the sim, a test, an engineering design challenge in the style of apollo 13, and a presentation of the experiment proposal that got the team into the competition.
Here's me super excited to be co-pilot... I was not so excited to "land" the shuttle... did you know they bounce? (oops.)
So, I returned to UHS with a big old binder, made copies for the students, and we started practicing. We had to work around musical practice, clubs, sports, Science Olympiad, IB exams and all kinds of other things. The time between February and heading to the competition on May 18 went by WAY too fast.
After a rather noisy car ride, we arrived at FSU and the Challenger Center
and then hopped into the sim for practice.
Then we headed back to check into the residence hall, changed, and went right back to the welcome dinner.
The students practiced their presentation about a million times for me and the other chaperones (who are amazing, by the way). We all got very little sleep, but Karena and I got up super early because we wanted to make sure they got the full college experience while at FSU.
We got the early shift, along with 3 other schools. The 3 other schools got the afternoon rotation. (1 dropped out). Here's the team before the competition started.
We had the sim first (lucky for us, or unlucky maybe) and they were running about 30-40 minutes late. After us, it broke, so I guess first was ok. Then we rushed to the engineering challenge, which we couldn't watch them figure out, but we were allowed to watch the presentation. I thought it was great. :)
Then, the students ran right into the paper test and finished early. We thought we may have a few minutes to set up the presentation, but we didn't really. I think it flustered the students a bit, especially when we found out the computers there didn't have flash and wouldn't let us play our video. Also, the judges didn't really allow us to start how we wanted, so the presentation didn't quite go as well as the night before. We showed the video on a small screen, and got pretty good feedback from the judges, but I think if we had a few minutes, it may have gone a little better.
After we finished, we had to wait for 3pm or so for the awards because there were still 3 teams to do everything in the afternoon. We brought them to a pretty popular FSU eatery and 2 of the chaperones took them bowling because they're wonderful.
We headed into the award ceremony and were told that the judging was done out of 175 points, 25 for the sim, presentation and design challenge, then 100 for the test.They originally said we wouldn't know our scores, but I did receive an email a few days later. We did fantastic. Our score was 126.5, and the average was 112.42. We placed 3rd. :) We got medals, certificates, a dragon model that a man on the challenger learning center board picked up from KSC that day, and tickets to disney!
While we were at disney on June 13, we participated in the Science of Imagineering program, which was really cool. Did you know the screams you hear at tower of tower aren't always real? Did you know that there are over 140 different imagineer job titles? Here are the boys at disney, enjoying the Florida outdoors, but not so much the roller coaster :)
Over all, it was a great experience. Lots of work. Lots of fun. I'm not going to lie, putting together an overnight field trip, scrounging up the money, renting a car, training, etc, was very hectic. But the fact that the students are so much smarter than me totally helped when it came to them preparing for the competition.
They have a website started for next year, if you're interested :)
http://www.astronautchallenge.com/
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