Five teachers from Shamong will be heading to Houston for a week in July, but they won’t be sightseeing or even breathing in the humidity all too much.
Instead, they will be on a mission at NASA.
The team, organized by first-grade teacher at Indian Mills School, Linda Newman and seventh-grade science teacher at Indian Mills Memorial School, Steve Shultz, has been working on their project since November.
Indian Mills School’s Principal Nicole Moore originally brought the project to the teachers’ attention earlier in the school year.
The other teachers involved are Jen Wilson, fourth-grade teacher at Indian Mills School; Brian Davis, a math teacher for grades five through eigh at Indian Mills Memorial School; and Dan Giordano, who teaches eighth-grade special education at Indian Mills Memorial School.
“Our team was actually working at my house on a Saturday and we kept going back and forth with different ideas, but our main focus was making the experiment as visual as possible and something that obviously is affected by zero gravity,” said Shultz. “So as a group, we decided to look at fluid dynamics and work with water.”
The district-wide goal is to have all students take the program one day, he said.
Much work has and will continue to go into preparation for the trip to Texas, he explained.
“Linda and I were the pioneers. We had to hand in a proposal to the PPPL (Princeton Plasma Physics Lab) and had to be accepted. After a month, we found out we were one of only six teams accepted to the program and three of the six being colleges: Auburn, Princeton and Seton Hall,” Shultz said. “We have been working individually every day, as a group about once a week to test and built our experiment and we have dates we have to meet to get work done in anticipation for Houston.”
All five teachers will travel to Houston from Thursday, July 12 to Thursday, July 19.
According to Shultz, the day after arrival, they will go through initiation, safety and experiment preparation.
The next day, they will undergo professional development.
On Monday, July 16, they will test for readiness review and experiment preparation. Tuesday July 17 and Wednesday, July 18 are flight days, with Thursday, July 19 being the closing-session tours.
“While we are there, we are going to be running a live blog so students can log in and see our process at some point,” he said. They will have a time for students to go on Skype to see their progression and answer any questions.
“Parents are encouraged to work with their students to log in the blog and view us on Skype,” he explained.
This is a great way for students to interact on a school-based level over the summer, he said.
“Most students have little, if any, interaction with the school once they leave in June over the summer,” he said. “Students have already shown a great deal on interest in this project and we hope to keep that level up so students log on in July.”
The Shamong Foundation for Excellence, led by president Nancy Thomas, was critical in the success of this project, he said.
The foundation granted the teachers $17,000 for the project, deeming the project a positive endeavor for the district.
“The $17,000 is actually for the flight program through NASA to send five teachers. Flight, hotel and expenses are paid for by the PPPL.
PPPL also has an agreement with NASA that they pay one-third of the flight, so the $17,000 is actually two-thirds of the flight cost,” Shultz said.
While at NASA, the team will focus on Torricelli’s law, he said.
“Torricelli’s law is important to fluid dynamics. We really tried to make our experiment as practical as possible and we tried to think of something that everyone uses and thought of a toilet and plumbing,” he said. “This law says that the height of a fluid will be proportional to the velocity of the water due to gravity. Plumbing goes down and not up because we can use gravity to help it go where it has to go.”
According to a press release, this is not an experiment that can be done just anywhere. It has to be done at NASA, “because there is no way to realistically replicate a condition of zero and partial gravity.”
While experiments will be done in July, the team will carry on through to September.
Life could be completely different 100 years from now, Shultz explained.
“Gravity affects everything around us — and life would surely change if gravity decreased or even increased,” he said.
