The Innovative Mars Exploration Education & Technology (IMEET) program is being developed with the goal of inspiring students, specifically students of underrepresented populations, to learn science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) content. IMEET is a 3-year project funded by NASA to develop and implement real-world informal STEM education content for high school students and teachers. The content is taught in science museums, planetariums or similar Informal Education Institutes (IEI) where participants collaborate on hands-on projects that engages them in engineering design and manufacturing processes. The curriculum teaches key principles of systems engineering, robotics, digital design and manufacturing, and social product-development using cloud-based infrastructure using Mars exploration as the central theme.
This paper briefly describes the IMEET Program including the first-year deployment of the curriculum in summer camps at four participating IEIs. The paper concludes with the preliminary results of the Year 1 evaluation and outlines the work to be done in Years 2 and 3.
Mr. Srujal Patel serves as the research faculty at Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering (AE) at Georgia Institute of Technology. Mr. Patel earned his dual M.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Applied Mathematics at Georgia Tech with specialization in Applied Numerical Analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics/Aerodynamics. After joining as the research faculty, Mr. Patel worked as project manager for the Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) program - an initiative aimed at introducing new design tools and collaborative practices of making to high school students across the United States - sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Mr. Patel has also served as Project Manager for DARPA's MENTOR2 program which involved developing project kits and curricula to train the U.S. armed forces to understand, troubleshoot, repair and adapt electromechanical systems. Mr. Patel also teaches courses in Systems Engineering, Aerodynamics and Digital Design & Manufacturing at School of AE at Georgia Tech. Currently, Mr. Patel is working as the Co-Investigator for Innovative Mars Exploration Education and Technology (IMEET) program - funded under NASA's CP4SMPVC+ grant – in which Georgia Tech is developing curriculum and project kits that will be used during the summer camps to be run at partnering Informal Education Institutes.
Maria-Isabel Carnasciali is the new founding Associate Dean of the School of Engineering and Computational Sciences at Merrimack College (MA). Previously, she spent 13 years at the University of New Haven (CT) where he last role included four years as Assistant Provost. She is Professor of Mechanical Engineering and enjoys teaching thermo/fluids/energy and design related courses.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Dr. Schrage is a professor in the School of AE at Georgia Tech and the Director of the Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence (VLRCOE). Over the past 30 years he has established the graduate program in Aerospace Systems Design and helped focus it for student lifelong learning which has included summer camps for middle school and high school applying a simple product development process of Co-Create, Design, Build and Operate (CDBO). In addition, working with Boeing he helped initial the multi-university undergraduate capstone design AeroPace Program.
Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.