Engaging Undergraduates in K-12 STEM Education Through High-Altitude Ballooning: The LIFT Project

Over the last 5+ years, the Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium (WSGC) has conducted a successful high-altitude ballooning program for K-12 teachers and students across Wyoming. Through this program, students develop their own scientific payloads – taking into account space, size, and weight limitations – and launch them to near space with high-altitude weather balloons. Onboard satellite communication units and meteorological sensors allow the participants to track the trajectory of their balloon and monitor atmospheric conditions (i.e., temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind) in real time. Following the launch, many teachers and students also participate in payload recovery. These launches are typically single, one-off events designed mainly to generate interest and excitement in STEM. Thus, while they provide great hands-on experiences for the K-12 participants, the science content is often rather limited.

To help address this, the WSGC recently embarked on a new multidisciplinary approach to its ballooning program. The NSF-funded LIFT Project (Learning to Integrate Fundamentals through Teaching) brings together University of Wyoming (UW) undergraduate students from physical science and STEM education backgrounds to devise new citizen science scientific payloads and curriculum for high-altitude ballooning. Once finished, these small-scale projects will be tested in K-12 classrooms and eventually be made available for K-12 teachers to use for their own launches. Although the primary objective of the LIFT Project is to provide the UW undergraduates with hands-on active learning experiences and authentic opportunities to build their skills and confidence in their chosen field, the K-12 participants also benefit from the improved science content and curriculum.

This presentation will specifically highlight the two ballooning projects that were developed at UW over the last year and tested in K-12 classrooms during the Fall 2019 semester. The projects focus on measuring changes in cosmic radiation and the speed of sound as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere to its typical burst altitude near 100,000 ft MSL. Both are accompanied by pre- and post-launch lessons and activities that emphasize the relevant scientific concepts and data analysis.