We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
Will Early chats with Meadowlark 1, Will Early chats with Meadowlark 2, Will Early chats with Meadowlark 3. Will Early, in NASA flight suit, talks with students at Meadowlark Elementary after he presented "Pluto and Beyond" at the school. Early is a student presenter with the Montana Space Grant Consortium. He is a physics major at MSU-Bozeman and said "Part of why I volunteered to do the presentations is to get younger students fired up about science."
Montana State University and the University of Montana collaborate in a program called the Montana Space Grant Consortium. The consortium member schools, researchers and educators do a number of activities to learn more about space and share what they learn with Montana's school children. Jon Martin, principal at Meadowlark Elementary in Chinook, learned of the presentations offered to schools and scheduled "Pluto and Beyond" at Meadowlark. The presentation occurred last week.
Pluto and Beyond
The public presentations sponsored by the space consortium are done by undergraduate students. The presenter at the program was Will Early, a freshman at MSU-Bozeman who is majoring in physics. Asked why he volunteered to be a presenter Early said, "I've always been very interested in space exploration and the activities that NASA is doing in exploration. A notice at MSU described the program and how it works and I signed up to be a presenter. It gives me a chance to practice my public presentation skills while sharing my passion about science and space exploration with elementary kids. I hope I can be an influence to get some of the elementary kids really fired up about science."
Early, coming up from Bozeman on a snowy day, got to the school just in time to begin the presentation. He said the roads were bad and it took longer than he had planned to get to Chinook. He quickly slipped in to his "NASA flight suit" and got in his "space mode" to talk to the kids about Pluto.
He began the presentation with a question: "Is Pluto a planet or not?" Readers may recall there was a bit of a controversy, back in 2006, when Pluto was scratched as a planet. According to some things Early shared, there are still some astronomers and scientists who think Pluto got a bum deal. And there are plenty of Meadowlark students who believe that Pluto is still a planet. But, the general consensus among scientists is that Pluto is a "dwarf planet."
Without putting too fine a point on it, Pluto (a dwarf planet) has a lot of characteristics of a planet but has enough differences that it really is not a planet. For example, a planet is always the same distance from the sun as it makes its orbit. Pluto orbits the sun with an elliptical orbit so Pluto's distance from the sun is not the same, and that makes it not a true planet.
Early shared a lot of information that has been discovered about Pluto through various NASA projects. And it was pretty obvious that Early's plan to get Meadowlark student excited about space exploration was working. From the nature of the questions it was clear that many of the students knew a good bit about space exploration and Pluto specifically.
Kids ask questions about Pluto
Finally it was the point in the program where students could ask Will Early questions about space exploration and specifically about Pluto. Kids were eager to get Early's attention and deal with their questions. Here's some things the elementary kids wondered about:
How long are the days on Pluto? Answer: Because of its distance from the sun, one day on Pluto would be as long as about six days on Earth-specifically a day on Pluto is 153 hours long. Early had mentioned how cold it was on Pluto and was asked "How cold is it on Pluto?" Early's answer: "Absolute zero is minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit, Pluto is just a little warmer than that." And my favorite question from the audience, "How old is the solar system?" It was refreshing to see just how serious students can be when they start dealing with the big questions. Early estimated the solar system was 4.6 billion years old...he didn't really explain how he got that estimate.
As teachers began to take classes out of the assembly, the questions still came rapidly from the students remaining. One of the goals of the assembly was to get students interested in science, it seemed not only were some students merely interested, they were passionate about science and wanted to learn even more. By the end of the presentation Early had moved into the audience and a group of students kept the questions going in a steady barrage. For his part, Early seemed to be loving it, he knew he had lit a fire about science for some of these kids. To borrow a phrase from NASA, "Mission accomplished."
