The Billings Career Center in Montana and NASA are collaborating to provide high school students with an opportunity to create projects that may end up helping out astronauts in space.
The collaboration with NASA started in 2015 allowing high school students from Montana and Wyoming to create engineering projects to help NASA’s astronauts. Students in this program are using project-based learning to design and fabricate real life products for NASA.
Students participating in this program are practicing 21st century skills and learning how to collaborate effectively with their team members. One of the students, Wolfgang Sandridge, created a lunar worktable with outlets to help NASA astronauts gear up for space missions. Sandridge explained that “the project is very simple and abstract in many ways”…but also “very specific in how things must be done. I think that this project will be very helpful for NASA engineers in terms of figuring out the form factor for the worktable.” Project teams that are selected will get an invitation to appear for final reviews before making it to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.