Greetings from Ames Research Center!  I am currently participating in NASA's Alumni program from the Pre-Service Teacher Institute, and even though I've only been here one day I've learned lots!

That's me with my head inside one of those cheesy cardboard cutouts at the Visitor Center...a great way to kick off my time here!

But before I got to Ames, I had to take two flights (that left way earlier than I wanted them to) in order to reach San Jose/Mountain View area.  And as someone who had never traveled further west than Lubbock, Texas, I was ready to see things.  I made sure when I booked my flight to get a window seat...and I'm sure glad I did!  The view was gorgeous!

It was interesting to see how quickly things changed, too.  In the first picture below, you see the mountains.  But if you look closely in the top right corner, just beneath the wing, you can see the farming areas start.  I wasn't expecting it to change quite to rapidly, but one second there were mountains, then there was a definitive border, and BAM - agriculture.  In the second picture you can see the border, then all the little plots of land for farming.

These last two pictures were from the Visitor Center at Ames.  It is of SOFIA, which stands for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.  Basically, it is a plane that they changed the insides so they could fly it around with a chunk missing from the side to stick out a big infrared camera.  The first picture is a model of the plane; you can see the chunk missing from the side with the infrared telescope.  The bottom picture shows a few things.  At the top are two TVs that were videotaping what was in front of them, so you can see me in the pink shirt taking a picture of the display on the left, and a infrered picture of my upper body on the right.  The bottom picture shows Jupiter how we can see it (higly magnified, of course) and how it is seen using infrared technology.

One of our leaders here made a video of what we did yesterday afternoon, which was lots of giggling as we did ice-breaker and get-to-know-you activities.  I'm pretty easy to spot...I'm the tall girl in the blue Dallas Mavs shirt :) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtZ2QeZoFjc&feature=youtu.be



I have a lot of travel time awaiting me this summer.  About 11 hours in plane rides, 45 hours in family road trips to visit family (I got out of 15 more hours because of a different trip I'll be on), 10 hours of driving by myself, and 12 hours of driving for a vacation with my friends.  That is a lot of travelling!  The thing is, to me it isn't that much.  Each year we drive to Illinois and back then to Georgia and back to visit family.  During that time I have to find ways to occupy myself.  My sister can read and sleep in the car without any problems, but I get carsick if I try to read and my long legs don't make it easy to get comfortable enough to sleep in the car.  So over the years, I've found something I love to do that keeps me entertained over the journey...PODCASTS!  But not just any podcasts, the best ones I have found are ones made by the awesome people at HowStuffWorks.com.  If you go to iTunes and search "howstuffworks.com" then use the filter on the left to just look at the podcasts, you can see each of the different types they have.  My favorites are the first two: "Stuff You Should Know" and "Stuff You Missed In History Class".  Some of their podcasts are just audio (which works perfectly fine in the car), but they have recently started making audio/video ones. 

Now as a teacher, I heard the question "Can we eat in the classroom?" too many times to remember over the past year.  One of our bilingual teachers was really great about having lunch in the classroom a couple times a week so they could watch videos from the History or Discovery Channel.  As a first year teacher, lunch was my downtime.  I could not see how he was able to relax enough during lunch when he had a class full of kids.  But when we took our district-mandated tests, his kids were always right up at the top with mine, often beating my kids out in math and science.  So towards the end of the year I started thinking of things I could do the next year that would allow me to keep my sanity during a lunch with 21 kids in my classroom.  Then I thought...Podcasts! 

Now just like anything else you use as an outside resource in the classroom, the audio or video podcasts from HowStuffWorks.com should be viewed or heard before being played in the classroom.  They don't really use fowl language, but some of the subjects they talk about are a little more mature than would be appropriate for my 4th graders.  But there is a wide variety of topics that you can choose from, and some of it even covered things that were covered in our curriculum!

Also, myself and some of the other teachers participating in this flight week opportunity are planning on making short video podcasts that can be shared with other educators for use in the classroom.  Since I am going to Ames Research Center on Sunday, I'm hoping to be able to make one within a week or two.  I will definitely be posting that on here as soon as possible, along with pictures of some cool things I see at Ames!

WOW!  This week has been a crazy week!  Thursday was the last day of school for my kiddos, and saying goodbye to them was so difficult.  I'm really going to miss all 21 of my babies this summer!  Thursday afternoon we had another video conference with our team for the Vomit Comet.  We discussed a little more about the experiements we will be doing. (That's me on the bottom...second from the left)  Also, please ignore the awkward white space around the pictures.  I wanted to get these up quickly, and later on will hopefully find out how to make them go away.

Friday was a work day for the teachers, which basically means we have to clean up a year's worth of school mess and move everything out of the way so the custodians can wax the floors.  In the morning, however, NASA set up a great DLN (Digital Learning Network) for us.  Those of us with kids still in school got to share that opportunity with students.  Even without students, though, it was fun.  And now, some pictures:

This is the guy that lead our DLN.  He answered all our questions and got us some cool pictures and videos to watch.  (Quick message for Piep's Peeps: 8 or 9)

In this picture, you can see the people in microgravity on the Vomit Comet.  In the lower left corner is a picture of what the plane is doing at that point in the flight.  That's angled pretty far down....

Going up!

Going down!

A flame in Earth gravity conditions

A flame in microgravity

This next part is something my kiddos should love.  After our state tests, we made film canister rockets with water and Alka Seltzer tablets.  Well in these next few pictures, they got a ball of water (because with microgravity, water just floats in a blob) a little bit bigger than the Alka Seltzer tablet they added and this is what happened:

All in all, I'd call it a successful few days!

I mentioned yesterday that although NASA refers to the plane as the Weightless Wonder, it is most commonly known as the Vomit Comet.  In our first video conference with our flight team, our flight mentor answered the question that we were all dying to know: How many people actually get sick on the flight?  His answer was that if three people were to board right now and fly, one would become violently sick, one would be mildly sick, and one would be fine.  My first thought is that I'm going to be in a lot of trouble.  Then he reassures us by saying that before we go they will give us medicine that reduces the likelihood of becoming sick.  So now if 10 people were to fly with the medication, only one would become mildly sick.  I think I can handle being mildly sick in zero gravity...
In order to help us prepare as a team, we have video conferences every two weeks since we are spread over different states.  I'll be honest with you, I do use my video conferences as a bragging point, but who wouldn't?  "Oh, sorry.  I have need to be on my way.  I have a video conference with NASA."  We have only had one so far, but we have another tag-up this Thursday.  We use these times to ask questions or talk about things that are pertinent to our assignments.  These past two weeks, our team had to edit some intense paperwork for approval to fly.  It is probably fairly easy for those who have done the paperwork before, but we had quite a few emails between the five of us trying to edit an existing copy.  This was the easy part to understand...there were pictures and simple words...

The cool part of our video conferences, though, is seeing what we'll be doing in less than two months:

Those boxes are what our experiments are going to be in.  They have little arm holes like they have for babies in NICU.  If our experiments weren't inside those clear boxes, then we would spend our entire flight time floating around trying to catch all the pieces.  This is what we'll be spending a lot of our parabolas doing.  The last few parabolas we spend testing an item of our choosing to see how it reacts in different gravities. 

This girl brought a pedometer to see how it would work.  So I've been thinking and asking my family, friends, and students to think of things that I could bring along with me on my flight that can fit inside my flight suit pocket on my leg.  We wear the green ones, instead of the cool blue ones just in case you were wondering.  And we checked, we don't get to keep the flight suit, but there is an aviation store across the road from Ellington Field (where our flight will depart and land) that we could probably find one at.  I think that greeting my kids in a flight suit would be a hysterical way to start off the school year. 

Howdy!  My name is Maggie Piepenbrink and I teach at Hanby Elementary in Mesquite, Texas.  I graduated from Texas A&M University in College Station in 2011 and was lucky enough to land the job of my dreams teaching 4th grade!  This was my first year of teaching and I can definitely say I have the best job in the world.  I get to work with amazing kiddos and teachers, and we always have a blast.  The reason for this blog, however, is not to describe my life as a teacher - that is a different blog entirely!  The reason I created this blog is to share my experience of working with NASA's Johnson Space Center (as in "Houston, we have a problem") for their Reduced Gravity Education Flight Week.  In other words...I'm going on the Vomit Comet!  Now NASA likes to call it the Weightless Wonder, which does give you a little more of a hint at what the reason for the plane ride is, however "Vomit Comet" lends more of an explanation of what I will most likely be doing on the plane. 

If you've never heard of the Vomit Comet / Weightless Wonder, it's basically like an empty plane that travels like a roller coaster in the air.  We'll be doing parabolas over the Gulf of Mexico....no big deal. :D  The parabolas will allow us to experience multiple Gs against us, as well as 0 gravity and possibly even negative gravity!  It's not all just fun and games, though.  While on board we will be conducting experiments we can bring back to the classroom. 

Now you're probably wondering who the other people are that make up the "we" in my previous statement.  The "we" is made up of myself and four other educators that were selected by NASA to participate in this amazing opportunity.  Two are fellow Texans, and one of those is actually a fellow Aggie!  Whoop!  We are all extremely excited and very ready for our flight week in mid-July.

Of course, the whole point of this experience is to help our students understand concepts regarding gravity and how it affects us.  When I first learned I was selected to participate in the flight week, I tried explaining what I would be doing to my students.  Fail.  I have a very visual group of kiddos, so I turn to the first thing I think of: You Tube.  Video in mind, I show my students the first minute of the following video:

Of course they are cracking up at the mental image of floating puke, so the first question I hear is, "Miss P, can you puke like that and show us a video next year?"  Once they got over the initial thrill of me puking my guts out, we watched a couple more short videos showing more of what I might be doing.  They are now convinced that all 21 of them can pile into my compact car and make the drive to Houston with me, then somehow sneak on the plane to experience weightlessness.  They'll have to be satisfied with the pictures and videos.

But for now, it's the waiting game.  We have preparations we are making to ready ourselves for our flight week, but nothing will compare to actually being there.  I have about 6-1/2 weeks until I leave on July 12th, with a  2-week trip to Ames Research Center in California wedged in between.  I'll be counting down the days and updating with progress along the way.  Don't forget to place your vote on the right side on whether or not you think I'll puke...I'll save the information about that for my next post...