Somebody pinch me!

Somebody pinch me!  How did I get here?  What did I do?  I have students who are going to have their experiment flown on the International Space Station. Wow!  I feel so honored to be a part of this and to have had the opportunity to work with these students. I am just a humble Environmental Science teacher in the 4^th poorest county in Texas and yet I am mentoring a group of scientists (yes, they are scientists) who are a part of the Space Program.  Incredible!  Every day when I wake, I am energized and my enthusiasm for teaching renewed, because this project is fresh and exciting.

Copied and pasted from the SSEP website (click on the banner above for the link) is a brief summary about the program below.

The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP), launched June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC, is a remarkable U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that gives typically 300 to 1,000 students across a community the ability to design and propose real experiments to fly in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then on the International Space Station.

A reflection

Presidio ISD became involved in the program during the mission 2 phase. With only a couple of days to write a proposal for funding, the science departments of both the middle school and the high school began scrambling for information and the right words to describe our goals.  This was a time of chaos and frenzy as there was a deadline to meet in two days. (This was the first of many deadlines) Teacher meetings were held in hallways between classes, after school, late in the evening, Saturday and Sunday until midnight, it was a hubbub of activity.  We acquired some funding, I personally don’t know all the information but our co-directors do, and we were accepted to the program.

Students immediately began brainstorming ideas for their experiments and drawing mission patch designs. Almost 1000 students from Presidio were involved in this process.  Mission patch design winners were chosen and they will fly on The International Space Station along with the selected experiment.

 Mission patch design winner of the 3-6th grade category

 Mission patch design winner of the 7-12 grade category

3 experimental design proposals were selected from the 140+ submitted by PISD students to represent Presidio.  The 3 experiments and their summaries are found here: 

 http://ssep.ncesse.org/communities/experiments-selected-for-flight/selected-experiments-on-ssep-mission-2-to-iss/

One experimental design was chosen to fly on The Space Station in September 2012.  Selected was:

The Effect of Microgravity on the Growth and pH of Lactobacilli Acidophilus.

Grade 12, Presidio High School
Co-Principal Investigators: Alvaro Ali Romero and Illiana Fernandez
Collaborator: Rafael Sanchez
Teacher Facilitator: Melody Crowder, Science Teacher
Proposal Summary:
Lactobacillus acidophilus bacterium resides in the human intestines aiding in providing a healthy intestinal tract. L. acidophilus has been used as a healing agent for some gastrointestinal disorders. These microorganisms are also used as probiotics and are commonly found in fermented dairy and other food products. Microgravity has been shown to affect the bone-mineral density causing loss of calcium from bones due to absence of earth’s gravity. This disrupts the process of bone maintenance in its major function of supporting body weight. This is called disuse osteoporosis. Another effect of microgravity is the disuse muscle atrophy which occurs when astronauts lack the natural resistance of gravity which keeps the muscles in good shape and causes muscle loss. This experiment is designed to test how microgravity affects the growth of L. acidophilus bacteria in order to determine if astronauts should be given supplemental probiotics to help maintain normal digestion and prevent bone loss. Without proper digestion the muscular and skeletal systems will not function efficiently.

And now we are preparing to go to Washington DC to present our experiments at a National Conference. Somebody pinch me!