NASA’s Space Shuttle program may be ending, but astronauts still face the challenge of spending long periods in space on the International Space Station (ISS) and future planetary missions.
Astronaut Sandy Magnus knows the rigors of working and working out in space. A mission specialist on the final shuttle mission, she also spent more than four […]

Q: What started Jim Stofan on the path of science education that eventually landed him at the DC headquarters of the country’s premier space agency?
A: The story begins with a bang–and a tweet.
From a young age, Jim was fascinated with rockets. But it was a seed-eating songbird that first sparked his interest in science.
Now NASA’s […]

With free tools like Google Earth and mapbuilder so widely available, these days it seems that everyone’s a mapmaker.
But mapping data to location in an effort to reveal previously unseen connections—now that’s a taller order.
(To introduce learners to the concept, howtosmile.org’s data mapping activities are a good place to start.)
An excellent example of the power […]

On November 5, 2008, a few days after Barack Obama was elected president, Daniel Edelson wrote an open letter to the man who would soon occupy the White House.
Edelson, National Geographic’s Vice President of Education, delivered an eloquent plea, asking that the new administration “take up the cause of geographic education.”
“The U.S. has done a […]

Ask Suzy Gurton, Education Manager at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, about hands-on astronomy, and you’ll be disabused of any notion that studying the cosmos need be a solely intellectual pursuit.
She’ll remind you that building your own telescope is very hands-on, as is experimenting with colored filters and simple spectroscopes to understand how images […]

When astronomer Isabel Hawkins was growing up in Argentina, an encyclopedia salesman showed up at the door one day with an illustrated book about the planets.
“There was this one picture of Jupiter” says Isabel, “floating in the blackness of space. It was that image, of this mysterious planet, this exotic world surrounded in blackness, that […]

Educator Cheryl McCallum talks about one of her favorite SMILE outdoor activities, and how to make it work even if you don’t have “an outdoor space teeming with living things.”
These days, I work in a museum. But before that I was an “outdoor educator,” taking 5th graders on hikes through the East Texas Piney […]