Education Commons^™

Stem Education Research: Useful Ideas For College Instructors Using Ballooning, Stacy A. Wenzel

2017 Academic High Altitude Conference

Stratospheric ballooning is a tool of enormous promise to help STEM college faculty foster highly engaged learning of science for a wide range of students at a wide range of institutions. High altitude ballooning offers a platform for investigating science and engineering across many fields. Ballooning has been used in courses and experiences for not just undergraduate science majors, but also all undergraduates—including future teachers who, in turn, are the key to improving K-12 science education. Technological advances are lowering the cost of and expertise levels required to make launches and analyze data.

Ballooning offers a context within which faculty …

Building An Undergraduate Cohort In High Altitude Ballooning, Mike Davis

2017 Academic High Altitude Conference

City Colleges of Chicago (CCC), in partnership with DePaul University and the Illinois Space Grant Consortium, has recently been awarded a grant from NASA to develop a research and education program in high-altitude ballooning. The project builds on the Chicago Initiative for Research and Recruitment in the Undergraduate Sciences (CIRRUS) model of undergraduate research and community college/four year college collaborative projects, a successful NSF-funded collaboration between DePaul and CCC. The project has four goals: (1) initiate a year-round undergraduate research program to recruit promising community college students into the STEM disciplines, (2) provide tuition support and fellowships to support student …