Teachers take lead from Mars rover
January 8, 2004
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By MARY MacDONALD The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 
Sunny Sung / AJC Teacher Kati Searcy (on ladder) shows Mountain Park pupils a simulated Mars landing using an egg, a cereal box, newspapers and balloons. Helping out is Lauren Peterson, a visiting Wheaton College student. What comes down at 12,000 mph better have some protection. Understanding the sophisticated science of a safe landing on Mars boiled down to something that simple Wednesday for a small class of third-graders. A hard-boiled egg stood in for the now-famous rover, Spirit. A spent Raisin Bran box, cut up and folded into a pyramid, was the protective capsule. A newspaper served as parachute, and balloons as the air bags. Fulton County teacher Kati Searcy climbed up a few steps onto a ladder, held her arm up, and let go, setting off a low-tech experiment that revealed how rarely a landing goes as planned. The quick lesson is one Searcy hopes gives the kids a sense of the challenge overcome by NASA scientists, who successfully executed a safe landing of Spirit on Mars late Saturday. In her classroom at Mountain Park Elementary, the first of four capsules lost two balloons on the way down, banged into the ladder and hit the tile floor with a smack. The three students who assembled it took a peek. Inside, they found disappointment. "It's just a tiny crack," reported 8-year-old Ryan Whisenhunt. "The real rover could handle a crack like that." Schools were just getting back into session this week when the color pictures from Mars started popping up on computers and television screens. Some teachers took quick advantage. At South Atlanta High School, students of physics teacher Scott Painter will study the current mission, as well as earlier probes, then break into teams to plan a manned mission to the Red Planet. It's one thing to learn about physics concepts like momentum and impulse in the classroom, Painter said, but quite another when students have to use their knowledge to make a rocket ship launch. "It gives a real application -- a cutting-edge application -- to physics," Painter said. In Searcy's classroom, two of the four capsules dropped from the ladder kept their protective layers and fell softly on balloons, prompting a reaction in the kids that mimicked the NASA engineers late Saturday night. The final entry never had a chance. The boys who crafted it accidentally knocked off the balloons en route to the ladder when one of them hit a chair. Searcy dropped the capsule anyway. She held up the crushed egg, and asked the students what the NASA scientists would do next. Lauren Kew, 8, provided the answer the 17-year teacher was hoping for: "They keep trying." Staff writer Paul Donsky contributed to this article. Read orginal AJC Article here Return to main page. |