EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES THROUGH NASA STEM CONTENT ALLOWS GREATER GRASS ROOT-LEVEL UNDERSTANDING OF THE PRESENT DAY’S EXTREME CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIO

The NASA MAA (MUREP Aerospace Academy) project at York College has demonstrated a track record of providing experiential learning opportunities (ELO) to its participating students. ELOs associated with MAA are designed to increase learners’ involvement, knowledge, comprehension and application of learning in one or more STEM subjects/disciplines. They involve inquiry-and-activity-based learning approaches designed for the level of the learner to inspire, engage, and educate while progressively challenging each student. ELO activities enable learners to acquire knowledge, understand what they have learned, and apply that knowledge through inquiry-based tasks. Specifically, we are prepared to address the following priority: Encourage, increase, and sustain youth and public engagement in STEM—Expand the number of U.S. youth (especially those from traditionally underrepresented groups) who have an effective, authentic STEM experience each year prior to completing high school. Being in southeast Queens, York’s program is essentially playing a pivotal role to disseminate STEM resources to minority persons eagerly seeking content knowledge to further their education. Through MUREP, we are committed to advance understanding of the earth and develop technologies to improve the quality of life on our home planet. The introduction of a curriculum enhancement activity (CEA) to the K9-16 students is becoming a new initiative of our MAA project, as well as the formal addition of climate change curricula to the MAA 7-9^th grades, and supplying the oversight and resources to accomplish that goal. Numerous studies have shown that providing climate change curriculum to the middle to high school students can allow greater grass root-level understanding of the changing phenomena and scientific constraints associated with such dramatic changes we are now facing. NASA’s Science Directorate in conjunction with MAA will enable us to train MAA students and pre-service teachers in this endeavor and bring greater prominence of the MAA STEM contents to the participating students and disseminate real-time data for a realistic overview of the climate change scenario.

NASA MAA STEM Outreach Grant Funded This Project