Iditarod Elementary takes part in NASA program

WASILLA — Iditarod Elementary and Wasilla Middle School students spent the last quarter of the school year — nine weeks, in all — participating in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Engineering Design Challenge. Students were asked to share their ideas on space-related topics such as constructing a parachuting system that would safely deploy a robot such as the Martian Rover, or how to improve space suits.

Iditarod Elementary Principal Scott Nelson said the NASA program ties in with another national program STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics ). Monday afternoon, Valley students hooked up with other participating schools from Fairbanks to the Kenai to share their ideas, thoughts and findings. All students were linked live with NASA officials at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. There, engineers listened and watched as each school's teams gave an up to five-minute-long online presentation and answered questions posed by NASA officials live.

NASA officials stated its programs are intended to present real-world challenges in a collaborative, team-based environment, applying learned lessons to technical problems of the workplace. Another aspect is to share unique challenges faced by NASA scientists and engineers as they design the next generation of space vehicles, habitats, and technology. Each challenge incorporates a problem currently under study that NASA scientists and researchers.

Both Mat-Su schools worked on the "Parachuting Onto Mars". Students were asked to come up with ways of slowing down payloads entering the Red Planet's atmosphere and minimal gravitational field. NASA provided online assistance, but the students had to use trial and error methods to first construct and then improve their designs.

Wasilla Middle School had three teams on the live-feed and Iditarod Elementary two. When asked what was one of the more difficult things about the project, Iditarod six-grader Liam Brown said team work. He said that at first, everyone came into the task with their own ideas about what would work best.

"We tried mashing designs together and make a good design," Brown told NASA engineers in Cleveland.

Brown said it took little time to realize that all the ideas couldn't be incorporated into the project and that through teamwork and compromise, the overall project was revamped several times as improvements were made.

Fellow Iditarod student Gideon Selman said the key to his team's overall success was the ability to pull everyone together to reach a common goal.

NASA engineers noted that both boys' observations were similar to that in the real world. They told the students that aspect of the job is just as important at NASA as its engineering teams struggle to reach the best common solution to their goals.

NASA officials complimented the students and their efforts at helping tackle real-world issues NASA faces on a daily basis.