Project SPARC at Northeast High - Two Decades of High School Space science

摘要

Precollege students rarely get intensive field experience in spacescience, since most teachers at the high school and junior highschool level have a difficult time even teaching basic physics andchemistry in the classroom. The pattern seen in the usual schoolis that science projects outside the classroom are limited andfollow the basic curriculum. The amateur radio space program canaugment classroom teaching of science by using the after schoolradio club as a window into low earth orbit and the basics oforbital mechanics, astronautics and electronics can be learnedeasily.This presentation will describe a different type of school - aschool where the after school club, although not a ham radio clubat first, produced a change in the science curriculum of theschool and brought about the founding of a "magnet" school conceptspecificly aimed at teaching space science with a hands onapproach. Northeast High School in Philadelphia, PA has, for 24years, had a space science program that teaches students the valueof science education by being involved in the actual constructionand operation of intricate spaceflight simulators. The aerospace. magnet school draws students from allover the city ofPhiladelphia to special sciece courses. Many of these coursesevolved into the classroom as a result of work on the variousspacecraft simulators. Project SPARC (for SPAce Research Capsule)has now, in the mid 1980's, taken a new direction. with theflight of the first shuttle amateur radio experiment (SAREX) theextracurricular direction of space science education has nowshifted from spaceflight simUlations to the tracking of actualmanned and unmanned spacecraft. The amateur radio club station atNortheast High, W3YC, has now become the central focus of projectSPARC.The use of the OSCAR satellites for communication andexperimentation has begun. FUture projects include thedevelopment of an experiment to fly as part of a NASA Get-Awayspecialon the space shuttle and subsystem development andbuilding of a transponder package for a future shuttle ejectablesatellite.