The Sally Ride EarthKAM website is a great website with amazing activities incorporating space science and the International Space Station (ISS)! Sally Ride was the first American woman in space and she has left a fabulous legacy with this NASA EarthKAM project. EarthKAM, which stands for Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students, allows students to learn about Earth from space. The most recent mission took place November 7 to the 10 and during a mission teachers can sign up their classes and each student will get mission operation codes. Each code can be used to request an image to be taken from the ISS of any location the ISS orbits the week of the mission!
I chose one of the activities from the website on scale and adapted it for my class by creating the following slides to be used with Pear Deck:
The week after we went back to the website to view the images we had requested. Our class got more than ten codes per student. A majority of students struggled with choosing a location and requesting an image so we did not use all of our codes. Then on top of that, most of our images did not get taken due to a camera malfunction during the last orbit!
Since we didn’t all get to request images and of those who requested images we didn’t get them all, I had students look through our school gallery and choose some of their favorites. Then I had them put their favorite images on their Google Site eportfolios and include an even farther out zoom of the area to see where on Earth the ISS took the pictures. I made a sample page on my test eportfolio site and included the Europa Clipper’s Message in Bottle project from NASA where anyone can submit their name. Names will be stenciled on a microchip at about 75 nanometers per name to go on the Europa Clipper mission leaving Earth on October 2024 to Jupiter’s Europa moon! So cool! And the clipper is scheduled to arrive a Europa in 2030 when this year’s 6th graders will be in 12th grade! What a graduation present. 🙂
Here’s a screenshot of my sample test page:
Here are the pages students added to their eportfolios sharing some of their favorite EarthKAM November 2023 images:
