STEM education is sweeping the nation. From robotics competitions to coding games, school districts are scrambling to provide STEM programs while teachers sift through thousands of Pinterest pins in search of quality activities. We need further clarification to distinguish these levels in STEM education. To help guide educators and administrators, we propose the following 3 stages of STEM Education. 

Need a fun and hands-on Earth Day activity? Challenge your students to an oil spill clean-up! Read on for a STEM challenge that teaches environmental consciousness, problem solving, and team work along with extension math problems that use measurement, percentages, and volume calculations. Our students loved this activity, and we think yours will too! 

No FBI report or stolen data this time! My Space Club students successfully launched and recovered a weather balloon from 80,000 feet! Read to learn about our adventure and tips to complete your own balloon launch. 

I know you have been waiting on pins and needles on the update from the last balloon launch failure! The students were very disappointed in the lost data, but they learned a valuable lesson of engineering. Failure is an integral part of all engineering, and it provides an opportunity to learn and try again! 

After a successful launch, the balloon team was on fire! We had just successfully launched a balloon into the stratosphere, and everyone was jumping from excitement. But very quickly our enthusiasm turned to dread as we had yet to receive a GPS signal. We went from the high of releasing the balloon to a state of depression as we anxiously refreshed the webpage, hoping the GPS would come through. Without a signal, all hope was lost for recovering the balloon.

At 8:30 AM, after delicious breakfast tacos, the students and the high school film crew, drove to the launch site. We had a welcome party waiting at the park including teachers, school staff, media, and a local celebrity! Bill Taylor, weatherman of KENS5, brought his daughter to witness the launch and cheer us on. He even documented the event on his Facebook page, which garnered almost 20,000 views!

As the launch day approached, we started getting nervous! How were we going to pull this off? So many variables seemed to be out of our control so we focused on what we could control. Preparation is key! Here are some highlights as we prepared for the balloon launch:

As we continued in our adventure into HAB (High Altitude Ballooning), our main challenge was channeling 50 eager middle school students into productive work! We decided to tackle this by splitting students into 4 teams based on the main tasking involved. Each team was lead by a Director and Project Manager. Below is a description of each team.

The best approach to this project, especially for beginners, is to purchase a kit from several companies that are dedicated to weather ballooning. These companies provide you with most of the supplies required along with instructions on building, launch, and recovery. Two companies to check out are: High Altitude Science and Stratostar.

To begin our journey of launching a weather balloon, I started with a quick YouTube search of “weather balloon launch” leading to over 17,000 results. I was amazed at the incredible footage and especially by what people sent to the stratosphere: paint balls, marshmallows, action figures, bacon, crickets, beer, and even a hamburger! You can check out the footage of the “10 Weird Things Humans Have Sent to the Stratosphere” here.

What can be more exciting than launching a balloon into near-space and seeing footage of the Earth from above? In a series of posts, I will chronicle the adventures of 2 science teachers, 1 aerospace engineer (that's me!), and 50 middle school students in San Antonio attempting to launch a balloon and payload over 100,000 ft!  As a first time adventure for all involved, this has been an exciting, engaging, and frustrating experience managing the logistics of launching along with the attention span of middle-schoolers! Above all, it has been a worth-while journey for students to experience a real-world engineering project with all the design challenges and failures along the way. Read on for our adventure to the edge of space.

After years of STEM activities, including towers, bridges, race cars, and rockets, one of my favorites is the classic catapult challenge! It incorporates all aspects of a quality STEM activity: easy math connection, engineering design process, student-driven learning, and hands-on fun! Read on to see my ideas to incorporate into your classroom.