EAGER: Student Mission Control for the International Space Station

This EAGER award tests a bold concept, to engage high school students with direct access to data and experiments on the International Space Station, and to use these assets in computer science courses to help students develop skills of data inquiry, analysis and exploration. Results from this pilot project will lead to subsequent work to develop and integrate these resources and activities into widely used high school computer science courses.

This innovation confronts a real problem in computing education – how to have the data analysis components of computer science courses have richness, depth and engagement, so that students can develop and apply these essential skills. Taking advantage of the educational power and appeal of space exploration, and the many connections to key domains of computer science, the project will create and test an open-source Student Mission Control, providing high school students with centralized access to a wealth of data from on-orbit sensors, student experiments, science research and NASA’s own mission control.

They will also create and test a set of related learning activities with computer science applications, focusing specifically on data literacy, since this is of growing importance and a perennial challenge in computer science courses.

This EAGER project will design and implement a pilot curriculum to improve data literacy by engaging students with real data from the International Space Station. They will also design a Student Mission Control interface system that mimicks NASA’s own Mission Control. The team will address the technical challenges of accessing data from the ISS, manage it in a dynamic data engine and create an engaging and informative user interface and API.

They will also develop the related inquiry-based investigations and simulations that engage students’ curiosity and promote data literacy skills. This pilot will work initially with the co-PI’s computer science course for non-majors, and then deploy and test in high schools, with 20 teachers of computer science and their students. Lessons learned from this pilot project, if warranted, will in turn lead to a full proposal for large scale development, dissemination, training, and expansion of functions, learning activities and educational activities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.