"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."

Huntsville, Alabama. June 14-16, 2012

Awhile ago, on twitter and facebook, I noticed a post asking for class representatives for the 30th anniversary of space camp celebration. I applied, not thinking I would get in, but I did! Monday, June 11th was the last day of school, and my cousin and her friend arrived in Orlando on Sunday, June 10th for some harry potter/mickey mouse fun for the week, so needless to say, I probably should have checked the date before I applied. But, I'm so glad I did. After a tiring week of park hopping, Thursday morning I went to a rental car place, picked up a car, went to get @gabesalas then the two of us headed to Atlanta. We were picking up @glorialloyd, whom I had never met before, but I'm glad I did :) (if you're not a spacetweep, you may not understand road trips with people you don't know so much, but trust me, it's fun.)

We headed west, and made it Huntsville around 7pm. The 13 hour drive was not too bad, and we arrived at space camp in time to get our swag bags and see the retro fashion show in which @ssquire placed 3rd! I then headed to spend a few hours with my in laws in Birmingham (2 more hours in the car was not super fun, but I'm glad I got to see them!) before staying with them for the night.

we've arrived!

fashion show!

Got up bright and early to get back to Huntsville...and, I should mention that it got me excited to type 1 Tranquility Base into the GPS every time. (nerd.)

good morning from space camp!

The second day was full of fun! We had a happy group of 5 space tweeps, as @johnrsports had joined us and we went on a tour of space camp, a tour of aviation challenge, hung out under a SaturnV, I did an interview with a local TV channel, then ran to the hotel to change.

rode the Multi-Axis trainer first thing in the morning!

space tweeps and a SaturnV.

really excited to be moon base commander and orion commander

this means an IUP alum was a space camp counselor. yay!

thanks to John for this photo. me, in love with the moon base commander station.

tweeting from the moon base and the middeck.

I <3 SaturnVs.

at aviation challenge. I was not good at flying and/or landing

this is the news station I did a live interview with. it was fun. :)

We went back to the Davidson Center, was part of the 30th anniversary ceremony, ate dinner made a top chef contestant under a SaturnV, and got to hear some awesome stories about space camp. This year, space camp also combined the 30th anniversary with the hall of fame induction, so we saw 4 super cool people inducted.

spacetweeps, astronaut Bob Springer and Dr. Deborah Barnhart, the CEO of Space Camp

we dance with inflatable astronauts.

someone shot the saturnV. in case you didn't hear the story...

http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-050312a.html

the hall of fame inductees...

Stephanie Abrams from the Weather Channel, Astronaut Hoot Gibson, ISS operations lead Liz Warren and ISS Flight Director Ed Van Cise

Afterward, I met some astronauts. 2 shuttle astronauts and 1 Apollo astronaut... that's right, I met someone who WALKED ON THE MOON. I wish I had time to actually talk to him, but he was on his way out. Maybe next time :) I feel a little silly mentioning this, but I really didn't know that Werner VonBraun was such a big part of making space camp. Space Camp is awesome though, so I probably should have known. We then ended up at Otter's, the fine establishment at the hotel next to space camp, and I must say, I never thought I'd see some of the things I did... but space nerds are cool. Here's the link to the space camp website photo gallery, where I stole some of these from. http://www.spacecamp.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=235

me and Stephanie Abrams

gloria, Charlie Duke -Apollo 16, and me

Rhea Seddon and me

John, Gloria, Dale Levitski from Top Chef and me

me and Hoot Gibson

The last day we woke up early again, headed to see The Dream is Alive in IMAX (which I'm also ashamed to say that I had never seen before) and were told on the way into the theater that we were not allowed to tweet. We made a reputation for ourselves over the weekend, for sure. :) I then broke away from the group to geek out on my own roaming around the Dr. VonBraun exhibit and it was well worth it. We headed to Aviation Challenge for lunch and then it was time to head home.

cool posters outside the IMAX theater

paying my respects.

pretty sure i have a similar photo from when i attended space camp... I'll have to find it :)

and lastly, my space camp team photo...where it all started. August 2000.

It was a long drive and a whirlwind weekend, but so very worth it. There will always be a place in my heart for Space Camp.

Tweets:

This is how it all started...

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/

"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."

Friday, July 13, 2012

space camp 30th anniversary celebration

student astronaut challenge reflections

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