Purdue Zero Gravity Microcantilever Project

Outreach

  • We will develop a two prong outreach program that

    1. provides science fair mentors for middle school children in Indiana and
    2. promotes presentations and seminars by the Purdue undergraduate students involved in the NASA Reduced Flight program to a peer audience.

    A major and unifying theme of the entire outreach program will be NASA's need for advanced sensors.

  • Our objective in the mentoring component of this outreach proposal is to convey to middle school children the importance of sensors for space travel. In keeping with our broad theme of advanced sensors on future NASA space flights, we will develop and distribute fact sheets that outline viable science fair projects involving selected sensors commonly found around the home. The undergraduates involved in the Reduced Gravity experiments will serve as science fair consultants to middle school children who express an interest in performing experiments on sensing science.

  • Our objective for the peer outreach component of our program is to convey first hand to other undergraduates on Purdue's campus NASA's long-term goals and interests. Whenever possible, we will use our project in Reduced Gravity to illustrate NASA's interest in sensing science and to illustrate how interdisciplinary science is required to make progress on this important topic.

Audience

  • The audience for our mentoring outreach activities will focus on middle school children from the state of Indiana. There are a number of important reasons for this choice. First, this age group still has a broad-based interest in science. As they move through high school, their interests change and the number choosing science as a career diminishes precipitously. Secondly, as educators, parents and future scientists it is our responsibility to prepare children for a world vastly different from the one in which we were raised. Lastly, to maintain productivity in the foreseeable future, the US will need citizens with a better understanding of science and technology than most of us had when we attended middle school. Even children who do not choose science or engineering as a career will require knowledge of science to cope with their rapidly changing environment. It is for these three reasons that we choose to target the middle school age group.

  • The audience for our peer outreach will be fellow undergraduates at Purdue who we will inform about the opportunities available through NASA's Reduced Gravity program.