The Aerospace Education Services Project employs 19 Education Specialists at NASA centers around the country. The specialists develop and maintain working relationships with K-12 schools, provide professional support for educators, and deliver NASA educational services to schools in all 50 states and U.S. territories. Education Specialists also serve as links between AESP and other organizations. In 2008-08, a small number of Traveling Education Specialists will begin criss-crossing the country in Airstream RVs, delivering a short-format program, Robots on the Road.
From June 2-6, 2008 the first AESP Sandbox meeting was held at Penn State University as a collaboration between scientists and educators to generate ideas, materials, and plans related to K-12 education on topics related to lunar exploration. This toolkit is one of the products of this meeting.
The toolkit is designed to be a resource for eligible Space Grant Universities who are interested in the 2008 AESP CAN Mini-grants to help construct and implement professional development courses related to lunar exploration for K-12 pre-service and in-service teachers. For more information on the AESP CAN Mini-grants please see http://www.spacegrant.org/aesp/.
Our goal is to provide sustainable support in the form of professional development to pre-service and in-service K-12 educators that is customized to the state standards and needs of the recipient.
CSATS
The Center for Science and the Schools is a Penn State University initiative to support and sustaining collaborations between K-12 schools and university scientists and engineers.