Hawkeye Community College in Waterloo plans to build a space education center for Iowa middle-schoolers.
Bids are being taken on a project that will bring Iowa’s only Challenger Center to campus, honoring the seven astronauts killed in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
The 32 other centers nationwide are run by a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit and offer hands-on science-based learning.
Hawkeye Provost Lynn LaGrone says she visited a center in Illinois and saw the impact.
“Sometimes science does not feel like something a lot of students get excited about,” LaGrone says, “but in this case, there was not a single student who was not over the moon and talking to one another and talking to their teacher.”
LaGrone says the center will have a virtual reality room and a replica spacecraft. Middle schoolers will come to campus and learn through different scenarios.
“So when they arrive, they have duties that they’re assigned,” she says. “The astronauts obviously go into the shuttle itself. The mission control students then have also designated duties within mission control. Somebody is on coms. Somebody’s doing health.”
Hawkeye will partner with 25 school districts in northeast Iowa on the project. LaGrone says it could serve families from Davenport, Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, though classes would be open to students statewide.
Hawkeye plans to open the center next fall.
(By Gavin McGough, Iowa Public Radio)
Source: www.radioiowa.com
