Jennifer Small » Professional Portfolio

NASA Expeditionary Learning for San Francisco State Pre-Service Science & Mathematics Teachers

Each night, strong winds crashed against the loose window frames of an adobe-style dormitory building in a remote section of the Mojave Desert.  A series of Pacific storms pushed cold fronts across Southeastern California, reaching this desert setting as chilling, arid blasts. The Zzyzx Desert Studies Center, located 60 miles east from Barstow on a winding dirt road, is a field station of the California State University system that accommodates up to 75 individuals. It sits just west of a desolate lake bed called Soda Dry Lake, framed by flat terrain ringed by parched mountains that appear purple in the distance. This stark setting served as a backdrop for a lively field tip, the Spaceward Bound Mojave 2008 expedition, attended by the top planetary scientists, biologists, and geologists in the nation and by future science and math teachers from San Francisco State University. Their goal? To study life in extreme environments while inspiring better science education for California’s children.

By day 14 SFSU students—each working in a certificate or degree program to become a math or science teacher—met with a variety of specialized scientists whose work is supported by NASA. Dr. Chris McKay, for example, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames in Mountain View, lead the expedition. Dr. Penny Boston, a microbiologist from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, came to collect samples of microbial life living in extreme conditions. Together, the 33 Spaceward Bound members hiked up extinct volcanoes, explored a ‘field’ of ancient lava tubes, and collected samples of heat-seared crust from the desert floor. Both the researchers and their student counterparts were carrying out “Mars analog” research for our nation’s space agency. They used the extreme Mojave environment as an analog for extraterrestrial habitats and studied the adaptations of earthly microorganisms for clues as to how life may once have lived on Mars. Armed with such information about our planer’s toughest survivors, NASA scientists hope to design better remote experiments for their Mars missions.

On day two of the four-day expedition, April 7th, 2008, in the unforgiving midday sun, scientists and students sat at a crustal site on the desert floor trying to come up with a remedy for a malfunctioning device. Ashley Gam, a student in the science teacher credential program, recalls, “The device was supposed to measure the thickness of the crust, and to quantify that, it measured the amount of force necessary to break the crust.” Unfortunately, the device proved too weak for the task. In the spirit of ingenuity everyone tossed out ideas and searched around for makeshift materials to add weight to an attached bucket; sand, rock, even quarters from their own pockets. “The bucket they had wasn’t big enough,’ Gam continues, “so they tried using rocks, but they couldn’t fit them in the bucket. They partially solved this problem by using sand, which used all the space in the bucket. They then bagged the sand in zip lock bags and weighed it back at the camp.” (more…)