August 8, 2011 at 7:25 pm
Thursday during the day we worked on our experiment. We spent a long time today trying to melt the wax. We found that a major limitation is that we were not using enough voltage. Instead of using batteries we clipped the leads off some Arduino power supplies and put them in series to jury-rig a […]
August 8, 2011 at 7:25 pm
Wednesday morning, Lynn Harper from NASA Ames gave us a very interesting talk on microgravity research. She talked about some of the great NASA spinoffs, and the possible value of suborbital flights. I found it interesting that the telemetry for intensive care wards was developed for the Apollo program. One of her interests is that […]
August 8, 2011 at 7:24 pm
Tuesday morning we learned how to assemble an Arduino board and how to write some basic Arduino code. We made an LED flash and hooked up an accelerometer. We then learned more about the experiment we worked on this week. The main part of the experiment was a submission for the NASA-Make Challenge. This was […]
August 4, 2011 at 5:33 pm
So I have spent this week in Palmdale, CA at the NASA Aero Institute with the Teachers In Space Workshop. On Monday, Ed Wright, the Director of Teachers in Space gave us an introduction to the program and the goals for the week. We are building several component of an experiment to fly on the […]
Our last day of U Design turned out to be busier than I had anticipated. We spent the morning launching our water bottle rockets. We had two rocket launchers. One was a high end rocket launcher, the other a model built by professor Grace who lent it to us (again). Several years ago, launching soda […]
We started out the day making last minute revisions to our Estes rockets. We then walked across the river to Magazine beach to launch! We first tried a ½ A engine in each rocket. The 1/2 A6-2 engine was not quite powerful enough and the rockets did not go very high, but this allowed us […]
Today we finished work on all of our airplanes and put the finishing touches on our Cadet Planes. Students finished work on their Estes rockets and we will be launching the rockets in the morning. Again, many thanks to the New England AFCEA for donating the rockets! Students began to construct water bottle rockets and […]
Another great day at U Design. In the morning, students started by working on their Cadet Balsa planes. They needed to prepare their wings to and tail pieces to be glued together. I then gave a brief lecture on my NASA experiment. The following link will allow you to view the presentation which is a […]
We had a great day at the U Design Camp. A reminder of your homework assignment. Bring in a 2 liter soda bottle. The students built a Guillow Skystreak in the morning. Guillow sells a nice variety of balsa wood and foam airplanes. For lunch, the students (when not playing Ultimate Frisbee) played around with […]
On Friday morning we got a Director’s tour of Johnson Space Center Tour. This was a bit more involved than the Space Center Houston Tour which Catalina, Alejandro, and Leonardo went on the previous Friday. Although I never got to see Rocket Park. 🙁 The Space Exploration Vehicle. This is a prototype of the ‘car’ […]
