Students Teaching Students: Designing and Launching a Suborbital Experiment at a U.S. Montessori School

摘要

Starting in November 2016, a group of middle school students at DCS Montessori School in Castle Pines, Colorado, began working in partnership with DreamUp, a provider of space-based educational opportunities, to design a suborbital payload that would be launched into space on a Blue Origin New Shepard space vehicle in December 2017. While the act of students launching a suborbital experiment into space is not new, the approach taken by the students, teachers, and mentors to involve more than 500 students in the process was unique. DCS Montessori School is a public charter school that includes students from preschool through 8th grade and follows the Montessori philosophy of grouping and teaching students. This philosophy was critical to the success of the curriculum developed for creating the payload and involving all the students. DCS Montessori School contracted with DreamUp, NanoRacks, and Blue Origin to provide payload integration services for the future launch of the suborbital reusable launch vehicle known as New Shepard, which operates from Blue Origin's West Texas Launch Site. Once a contract was established, the middle school students were separated into four groups. Group 1 was responsible for designing and building the payload enclosure. Group 2 was responsible for developing and testing an experiment. Group 3 was responsible for generating and organizing a school-wide art project to enable all students at the school to create something that would be sent into space. Group 4 was responsible for conducting educational outreach and developing age-appropriate lessons to share with the preschool, lower elementary, and upper elementary students. By engaging the entire school in various aspects of the suborbital experiment, the project exposed students to real-world challenges that incorporated Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Math (STEAM) in a powerful and effective way. The STEAM approach uses these areas of learning to promote student inquiry,