Traveling exhibit from the Cosmosphere makes a landing at Oregon Trail Middle School
July marked the 50th anniversary of NASA’s successful moon landing, and to celebrate, a traveling exhibit from the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson recently landed at Oregon Trail Middle School. The school hosted the exhibit for three weeks in January and February.
The exhibit features part of the original Mission Control console from the Apollo era, complete with a few working displays. It also features real notes showing calculations made by Mission Control staff and video interviews about their experiences.
Sixth-grade science teacher Jessica Sadler heard about the exhibit over the summer, when she was invited to take part in a summer program for 100 educators put on by NASA and the Kansas Department of Education.
Because of her involvement with that summer program, the school got the exhibit for free. Twelve copies of the exhibit are touring the state and the country now. Schools in Bonner Springs and Liberty also have hosted the exhibit.
Part of the exhibit was a set of lessons designed to help students understand some of the STEM-related thinking that went into designing the moon mission. One lesson has students building a marble track from paper towel tubes to simulate a landing on Mars.
“I’ve always been interested in outer space, so this is really fun to me, all the work Mission Control does,” said 11-year-old A Dawson.
Students had to figure out the angle to make the ramp to give the right entry speed. Another piece of their mission was using foil, double-sided tape and plastic wrap to make a heat shield that protected a piece of chocolate from the heat of a hair dryer for five minutes.
A different team of students worked on how to automate a camera to take a picture at the moment of landing without pressing a button.
“It’s hard and fun at the same time. We had a few bumps along the way, literally and figuratively. The marble kept falling out,” said Saoirse McCall, 12.
Sadler said the biggest lesson for her students has been the teamwork required to be successful in such an endeavor.
“I think, more and more, they struggle with collaborating with others, and so (it’s) really getting them to have this understanding — like there wasn’t one individual person or one partner group that was able to complete any of these missions we’ve done (alone),” Sadler said.
It can be an adjustment for some.
“The first day, you have kids who have their idea that this is the way it’s going to be, and then they realize that all of them are completing a part that comes back to make a whole track” and that encourages them to go talk with the other groups, Sadler said.
Students seemed to relish the tasks.
“I get to work with people I normally don’t work with, trying to figure out what to build and how to make it work,” said Jazmin Castellanos, 11.
The project was eye-opening for some students who hadn’t previously thought about space missions this way.
“If you messed up one little thing, everything could go wrong,” said Yoselin Delafuente Valenzuela, 12. “I want to see if it actually works. I have a feeling it is going to work, but I have a feeling the marble’s just going to fly off.”
This story was originally published February 19, 2020 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Traveling exhibit from the Cosmosphere makes a landing at Oregon Trail Middle School."