By Ms Costello’s 5/6 class at R.Tait McKenzie
The grade 5/6 students at R.Tait McKenzie are participating in something amazing! The students are competing in the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) Mission 21 to the International Space Station (ISS) — a community-wide STEM education program that includes a microgravity experiment design and proposal writing competition where the winning experiment will be sent to the ISS. Once on the ISS, the astronauts will conduct the experiment following the students’ instructions. Upon return to Earth, students will analyze and compare the experiment conducted on ISS to one conducted on Earth.
R.T.M. is one of three local schools participating in SSEP Mission 21. Grade 5 and 6 students from Naismith and Pakenham P.S. are also developing experiment proposals.
In our class student groups have researched and planted various seeds to test growth rates on Earth. Students are also testing different growth mediums as well.
Stay tuned for more updates from other participating schools and classes!
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in the U.S. and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education internationally. It is enabled through a strategic collaboration with Rhodium
Scientific, America’s first commercial space biotech. SSEP is the first pre-college STEM education program that is both a U.S. national initiative and implemented as an on-orbit commercial space endeavour.
Research reported herein was supported by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, Inc. and NASA under agreement number 80JSC018M0005 and with Rhodium Scientific under agreement number UA-2021-8282.
