1/27/2024 0 Comments The outreach team“There’s not a lot of time in our lessons for the ‘what ifs,’” she said. “In a few more years, these students will be making plans for their futures, and experiences like this one give them the confidence to pursue STEM careers, such as engineering.”Ĭaroline Suess, a fourth grade teacher at Highland Park Elementary School, said she was inspired by the creativity baked into the program and the way it was able to spark the students’ imaginations. “Educational engagement programs with our local schools are one way that we continue to fulfill the university’s land-grant mission,” Weimer said. Scott Weimer, executive director of Roanoke Regional Initiatives, said the Roanoke Center, part of Outreach and International Affairs, hopes to expand the program to include expertise from Virginia Tech faculty members. Through programs like this, they can see that we’re just like them and that they can be an engineer, too.” “Kids know engineers exist, but they don’t really know who they are. “I got to sit down with the students and talk about city planning and providing utilities and resources for this colony they are trying to create,” Fralin said. They also get advice from professional engineers, such as Daniel Fralin, a civil engineer with a consulting firm in Rocky Mount, Virginia. They grappled with problems such as traveling through space, growing food, fighting disease, and developing clean energy sources while building their own prototypes for devices that would help the fledgling colony survive.īut they don’t have to figure it out alone. The students are all part of Roanoke City’s PLATO program for gifted students. “They then use real data that NASA has collected about the exoplanet, TRAPPIST-1e, to identify opportunities and challenges and how they should proceed to colonize this new world.”ĪCE is one of several programs offered by the Roanoke Center that provide hands-on learning in science, technology, engineering, and math. “Students receive specialized mission parameters based on the engineering discipline that inspires them: aerospace, agricultural, biomedical, civil, electrical, or mechanical,” said Ashley Sloan, the center’s lead STEM instructor. The third, fourth, and fifth graders were all participating in the Roanoke Center’s ACE: Association for the Colonization of Exoplanets program, which challenges students to plan the settlement of a rocky, Earth-sized planet in another solar system. Some worried about taking up resources needed by other forms of life, others asked about the possibility of hostile neighbors, and some fretted about what the chickens aboard their spaceship would eat. Concerns were mixed among 150 Roanoke City elementary school students gathered at the Virginia Tech Roanoke Center as they pondered making a new home 240 trillion miles from Earth.
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