Recently, I had the opportunity to visit NAVSEA Carderock division. This division is mainly civilian engineers working on research, development, test and evaluation, fleet support, an in-service engineering for surface and undersea vehicles. In order to conduct much of this work, the testing systems areas were amazing to see and a fantastic maker lab is available to staff and for training and research purposes. NASA has shared about the challenges with 3D printing in microgravity, but have you ever considered the challenges with printing on a ship with rolling seas? Apparently, 3D printers can be of use when out in the middle of the ocean, but may not function so well while in that location. While this could be an interesting challenge for students to ponder, NAVSEA Carderock offers K-16 STEM Outreach. Another opportunity that was shared was the use of TI-84 calculators for robots. NASA has an educator guide for using the robots with 6-9 grades but I think it would be amazing to use the calculator robots with elementary students and get them familiar with the graphing calculator and practice with computational thinking.
Sorry, no pictures were allowed at Carderock.
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