Graduation

On Friday at 5 PM the NASA Simulation Internship program officially ended. We still have to submit final paperwork on our projects by August 5th and by the end of August we should know who won the $2500 prize. Our final project included measuring the height of the kite using math, dropping an object from the kite using a release mechanism and timing the fall to calculate the height. Another day we used the cell phone to do kite bombing. Students can either mount the phone on the kite and look for the target or put the phone on the ground at the target, looking upward to see the kite. Then they try to hit the target. Students would use an app like Qik to send video from one phone to another, so one phone is on the ground looking for the kite, and another phone is watching until the kite comes over the target. We bought some kites and tried the activities to make sure it would actually work. I had lots of fun flying kites outside the hotel and building the release mechanism from double sided tape. I said in our final video that I wanted to try out our lesson first so we were giving teachers a good lesson plan and good advice about a lesson that actually works, that won't strain their budget, and will not take away classroom time they need. We had lots of other great ideas from dad, ourselves, and our mentor, which we listed as extension activities. We didn't want to overwhelm the teachers with a 2-week lesson plan, so we kept it to 2-4 days..