Met with a neat group of high schoolers today.

[FaithManor]

Dh and I took the rocket team to watch a launch of an 11 ft. 27 lb. high powered rocket launched by a high school TARC team that chose to participate in the Student Launch Initiative through NASA. I can't discuss the payload/science research focus of the rocket itself because that's a little hush, hush...suffice it to say that this is a junior/senior college level aerospace engineering project pushed down into high school and then mentored by NAR officials, Tripoli mentors with level 3 rocketry certifications, and NASA engineers (Skype is used so the kids can have direct conversations with the engineers). It's a truly amazing program.

 

These kids hail from one of the rural, PS districts about 30 min. from us in which not much of anything happens and the kids have very few options. But, this particular band of go-getters, lead by their truly inspirational physics teacher, is making waves.

 

Though we all froze - 19 degrees, 8 mph winds gusting to 13, and a chill factor that made it feel more like 3 degrees - it was a wonderful day. Sad to say, they had a bad launch and will have to rebuild by March 8th.

 

The team manager is a senior and is entering U of M's aerospace engineering program. The assistant team manager is a senior who will be majoring in Agricultural Science Research at MSU. Other team members include a student accepted into Kettering University's automotive engineering department, another accepted into Kettering as a math major, another majoring in Forensic Science at U of M next fall, and one still waiting on scholarship awards so she can choose which aerospace engineering department she will join. Not bad from the anti-intellectual, "Why do our kids have to learn any math or science" county where we reside.

 

Lovely bunch of kids....good hearted and extra motivated.

 

There is hope out there. I've decided to try extra hard this year to be the perveyor of good news in education since so much of the time, we only here the bleak,

 

Faith

[swimmermom3]

Faith, thank you for sharing the good news. They do sound like an inspiring group of young people.

[Grantmom]

Wow, that is super cool! When I hear that kind of stuff, it makes me wonder if I am doing the right thing by homeschooling for high school. There are some pretty cool STEM things happening at our high school too.

 

Can you give me any more info on what that program is? Maybe I could do it with a group of homeschoolers!

[Grantmom]

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/descriptions/Student_Launch_Projects.html

[Grantmom]

http://www.rocketcontest.org/

[FaithManor]

Wow, that is super cool! When I hear that kind of stuff, it makes me wonder if I am doing the right thing by homeschooling for high school. There are some pretty cool STEM things happening at our high school too.

 

Can you give me any more info on what that program is? Maybe I could do it with a group of homeschoolers!

 

Hi,

 

This is not a program you can do with a group of homeschoolers unless you are a 501 or 503 c educational program. There are a couple of very, very large homeschool groups in the US. who have been organized to that degree and then have entered a team in the contest. Our boys are in the contest because of our 4-H science club. There are a few other 4-H groups, Bond County, Hart County, etc. that participate. On our team, the kids members are from our STEM club and represent a private school, two different public schools, and of course our homeschooled boys. The vast majority of participants hail from public and private middle/high schools.

 

One must compete in the Team America Rocketry Challenge and place in the top 24 out of the 100 that are invited to the national finals. This year's challenge is to design, build, and successfully fly a rocket that carries a payload of one raw eggs weighing between 57 and 63 grams - carried horizontally (this is new, previous years they road vertically which is more stable - horizontally puts all of the pressure at landing on the most fragile part of the shell) without causing any visible damage to the egg (not so much as the teeniest hairline crack) to an altitude of 750 feet carrying an approved altimeter to record the height at apogee, with a total flight time (movement on the stand which, with most rocket motors, is less than a second from ignition so for qualification purposes, NAR officials usually record time from the first sound of motor ignition) of 48-50 seconds. Every foot above or below 750 is a one point penalty. Every second or portion thereof above or below the flight window is multiplied by 4 and the penalty is added to the altitude penalty to determine the flight score. Low score wins. Also, this year the only recovery device allowed for the payload section or any section tethered to the payload for descent, must be a 15" parachute which means lot of tweaking in order to get that fall time just right. The rocket, fully loaded (including the weight of the motor) must not be more than 650 grams. Last year there were 673 teams in the competition and more than 5500 students. The cut-off was 13.2 because 100 teams scored at or below that. We qualified to get in with a 3.0. We flew a 1.26 on our first flight at Finals and after the first round of flying were in the top 24 who then fly a second time for "all the chips" as the saying goes. We caught a terrible thermal - so did 14 other teams and it's unfortunately quite common at that flying field in Virginia by 3:00 p.m. - and had a much larger score for the afternoon flight due to falling too slowly. (Oh, time is recorded according to the touch down of the payload section. Some rockets come down with all three pieces tethered together, while others come apart with different recovery devices and in that case, timers watch the payload section...however, Range Safety Officers watch any other sections as they descend to make sure their recovery devices deployed properly, otherwise the team is disqualified for an unsafe flight). However, we still ended in the top 10 so the team won a beautiful trophy, some program money to keep the team going, and some scholarship money for each team member. It is an amazing event.

 

The top 20-24 teams (depends on the funding....some years NASA has been able to afford grants to bring down all 24 mentors for training in Huntsville, other years they've had to limit it to 18-20....last year I think it may have only been 20) are invited to attempt an SLI challenge. Our boys really wanted to do SLI this year, but none of the other team members felt they could manage it. I worried also about how we would get them all together so often. As it is during the TARC season, they meet about 23 times for anywhere from 1-4 hours. It is a HUGE committment for dh and of course the third Saturday of the month, 10 months of the year, we have 20 kids together for the regular club meeting so that we can do STEM projects with them. Dh and I are very busy with that.

 

However, we also know that this is a biggie - the kind of thing that makes college admission's people sit up and take notice. U of M has a USLI team - college team doing the same type of thing, but the stakes are bigger - and opens it's arms wide to students who have completed the initiative. Since MSU and MTU compete with U of M for STEM students, they also roll out the red carpet for SLI kids. U of Alabama, U of Ohio, MIT, CalTech, Georgia Tech, Penn State, Florida A & M, Vanderbilt, Virginia Tech....the list is big...the merit aid can be substantial. But, our boys are currently the only ones on the team willing to put in that level of committment. It's tough...the boys that play basketball at school would have to give up the sport for the year. The two girls in volleyball - they'd have to give it up too. The team we watched on Sunday is pretty spent. The CATO just about put them over the edge. They only have 3 weeks to be back in the air or they flunk the challenge...the worst thing is if you could see the level of engineering they have aspired to, if you could see what they built, if you could understand the intricacies of the electrical engineering they have had to learn, then you would understand that "flunk" is pretty darn harsh. What they've learned is extraordinary! However, as NASA sees it, the brute reality of aerospace engineering, and well, all forms of engineering, is success because failure means someone was hurt or died. One of the boys is taking all of the only 3 AP's his school offers. He cannot manage the SLI and the homework so his GPA has dropped.

 

I talked with the wife of the physics teacher. She told me that the kids see her husband more than she does. I can easily imagine that. Hours after school working in the labs on this, hours on skype with the NASA engineers, hours at the NAR level 3 official overseeing their design for NASA - this guy lives 1.5 hrs. from the team so there is a lot of travel involved - Saturdays with the team at his house - Sunday afternoons with the team at his house - I get it. Last year, prepping the kids for the presentation and team building competitions. rocketry trivia (there are mini-competitions at TARC Finals in between the flight windows), the congressional breakfast (we won't have that this year - it was in honor of the competition's 10th anniversary last season and was an amazing opportunity for the teams), organizing dress clothes for some boys whose families could not afford to buy clothes for them, fundraisers to get us there, flying every.single.time. we could get them into the air so they could hone their skills.... Dh works a lot of hours per week for his job, so much of that fell on me and I struggle mightily with the desire to get these kids motivated to participate in SLI challenge if they have another top 20 finish this year vs. what it will do to me to assist DH in mentoring an SLI team. GAH!

 

Anyway, it is not like a science fair or other extra-curricular though some of the kids say, "I play a sport and TARC." That's pretty accurate...it's easily the same time committment as playing a sport from August - May. It is also a competition that cannot be entered by a homeschool group unless they've gone to the level of being an organized, educational, non-profit with EIN number, 501C status etc. Now that said, I have heard of two Baptist Churches that have entered with members of their youth groups. Apparently, churches can participate if they have an educational program designed specifically for students 7th-12th grade. There are a couple of Boy Scout Troops that have also entered as they meet the requirements too. So, with 4-H, Boy Scouts, Girls Scouts, and the like, one can get your homeschooler involved if you can get them on a team from those organizations.

 

Plan that the team will need a minimum of $1000.00 to get started.

 

Faith

[Grantmom]

Thanks for all of that info! However, I did some reading on the TARC website, and I don't see why you couldn't do it with a group of homeschoolers. The website just said you needed to be affiliated with an organization, and specifically said for homeschoolers, as long as one person is part of a homeschool organization, that counts as the "non-profit".

 

From the TARC website FAQs:

 

"Can a group other than a middle or high school (CAP, 4-H, Scouts, etc.) enter the contest? How do homeschoolers enter this contest?

Yes, members of the same chapter or unit of a U.S. incorporated non-profit youth organization can form teams and enter the contest, as long as they are all students in 7th through 12th grades.

Homeschoolers can enter as part of a school team with permission of that school's principal, or they can enter by being part of a local chapter of a non-profit organization (Scouts, etc. but not an NAR or TRA club) outside of the school context. If there is a local organization specifically for homeschoolers and at least one of the students is a member of this, this counts as a "non-profit organization" as well."

 

I was just looking at the TARC, not the next level of the Student Launch Initiative. I think it would be very doable. It sounds exciting! Thanks for letting us know about this!

[WTMCassandra]

TARC is good stuff. We had a couple of young men doing TARC attempts at our launch this past Saturday. They had to travel an hour to get to us. They did a good job!

[Grantmom]

That's cool! Are you part of a NAR club?

[FaithManor]

That's cool! Are you part of a NAR club?

 

No. We'd love to, but the nearest NAR field is a 3 hr. drive - one way. It took two vans to carry the team and their stuff and cost us $100.00 in gas to make the trip. It's not doable.

 

Dh, however, is a level 1 certified NAR member, a dear friend in the area is also a NAR member and is the official who certifies the team's qualification flights, and there are a couple of other NAR members in the area. Given the sheer size of agricultural fields in the area, it's usually pretty easy to find farmer's willing to let you fly there. Our kids fly in a 40 acre sheep/llama pasture. They have a launch checklist that goes like this: 1. Put away both dogs. 2. secure the llama gate.

 

So, we do not live close enough to be part of a club and fly regularly at an NAR/TRIPOLI field, dh is the only one that flies high powered on the rare occasion we make it to the NAR field. However, one of the team members custom built a very small, non-lethal, unique rocket for maximum altitude that she flew on a G motor and she hit 5,185 ft. She was shooting for a mile and was disappointed to come up short, but we were all pretty impressed. Of course, even in a 40 acre field with a HUGE delay on the ejection charge, and small mylar parachute so it would come down fast, it still drifted out of field and it took 1.5 hours of hunting in the woods to find her. The mylar chute helped so much because it glistened in the summer sun and since we had 10 spotters on the ground, we had a good idea where it entered the woods.

 

Faith

[FaithManor]

Thanks for all of that info! However, I did some reading on the TARC website, and I don't see why you couldn't do it with a group of homeschoolers. The website just said you needed to be affiliated with an organization, and specifically said for homeschoolers, as long as one person is part of a homeschool organization, that counts as the "non-profit".

 

From the TARC website FAQs:

 

"Can a group other than a middle or high school (CAP, 4-H, Scouts, etc.) enter the contest? How do homeschoolers enter this contest?

Yes, members of the same chapter or unit of a U.S. incorporated non-profit youth organization can form teams and enter the contest, as long as they are all students in 7th through 12th grades.

Homeschoolers can enter as part of a school team with permission of that school's principal, or they can enter by being part of a local chapter of a non-profit organization (Scouts, etc. but not an NAR or TRA club) outside of the school context. If there is a local organization specifically for homeschoolers and at least one of the students is a member of this, this counts as a "non-profit organization" as well."

 

I was just looking at the TARC, not the next level of the Student Launch Initiative. I think it would be very doable. It sounds exciting! Thanks for letting us know about this!

 

That's a nice change to policy. When we first entered TARC, we were told the team had to be sponsored by a registered non-profit. That was a no-brainer since we were entering as a 4-H team, but a small, local homeschool group wanted to participate, but were not registered.

 

Faith