Maki Hattori, co-sponsored by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory

Many students in middle and high school lose interest in science and math because they do not feel that the subject matter is relevant to their lives and studies. Due to this failure to connect science and math to topics of relevance and/or high interest, such as the space sciences, the natural pedagogical progression toward the learning of content and understanding of scientific methods of observation and analysis is disrupted. This problem is perpetuated as these children grow up and become parents and teachers. Their continued disinterest and fear of science and math discourages the next generation from pursuing scientific interests.

As part of my project I have developed the science content for the Juno website, attempting to phrase the important issues that the mission will try to answer in a series of basic questions, covering information about what we know, and why we would like to know more. I am also developing curriculum materials specifically targeting Jupiter and the Juno mission, which is expected to launch in 2011. The curriculum material is intended for use for middle school students distributed from the Juno website.

Fall 2007 Update

In 2006-2007 I helped develop science content for the Juno Mission, expected to launch in 2011, http://juno.wisc.edu/. We have also started development of educational material, affiliated with the Juno mission, both to help increase general interest and as part of the mission itself. One of the cameras equipped on the spacecraft is intended to be used as part of the outreach program by having most of the resulting images analyzed by students. So the goal of the educational material is to interest current students and to serve as preparation material for those students who will be doing some of these analyses starting in 2016 after the spacecraft arrives at Jupiter. We are currently producing the material for middle school level students with some of the easier materials being approachable by lower grades, and some of the more difficult materials having additional components addressing the high school level.