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  Home > Events > Special events > Take your classroom into Space  

Take Your Classroom into Space – an education activity on the International Space Station

In September European students can follow an education activity carried out by ESA astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS). The ‘Take your classroom into space' activity is part of the education programme of ESA's Directorate of Human Spaceflight planned for ESA astronaut Frank De Winne's OasISS mission.

With the European Columbus laboratory attached to the International Space Station (ISS) in February 2008, educators throughout Europe were invited to propose new ideas for experiments that can be carried out on the ISS to demonstrate the effects of freefall to European students.

The two best experiment ideas (proposed independently by five teachers) 'Do objects have weight in space?' and 'Exploring capillarity' were selected to be performed by De Winne on the ISS.

The demonstration will be supported by a live inflight call, featuring De Winne carrying out the experiments and answering questions from students. The inflight call is currently scheduled for 21 September.

De Winne will use an Education Kit, which is now also available for order via the online order form:  http://esa-hme-education.org/. The kits will be distributed for free to European teachers on a first-come first-served basis.

The Education Kit contains all the elements needed to perform the same demonstrations on the ground and allows European secondary school students (14 to 18 years old) to compare their results with those obtained by De Winne on the ISS, thereby helping the students to learn about the conditions of freefall.

The Education Kit comes with a teaching guide written by European teachers and translated to Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish. The guide provides step-by-step instructions to help perform the demonstrations, exercises and questions, as well as an introduction to ESA, the ISS, and the freefall environment.

A video recording of the experiments performed on the ISS will be available from September 2009. The video is an essential part of the 'Take your classroom into space' activity.

Further information:
http://www.esa.int/esaHS/SEMNDV0OWUF_education_0.html

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