1. Alice Smith
  2. http://www.eng.auburn.edu/sites/personal/aesmith/
  3. Professor
  4. NASA Academy of Aerospace Quailty
  5. http://aaq.auburn.edu
  6. Auburn University
  1. Jeff Smith
  2. http://jsmith.co
  3. Professor
  4. NASA Academy of Aerospace Quailty
  5. http://aaq.auburn.edu
  6. Auburn University
Public Discussion

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  • Icon for: Alice Smith

    Alice Smith

    Lead Presenter
    Professor
    May 13, 2018 | 05:48 p.m.

    Hi friends, I am Alice Smith, professor at Auburn University and the principal investigator of NASA Academy of Aerospace Quality (NASA AAQ).  The NASA AAQ is an open access web training forum for all aspects of quality assurance related to academic led payload missions.  These include educators and students from K-12 through post-graduate work with interest in cube sats, small sats, high altitude balloons, rockets and more.  Our project is ongoing and we appreciate input and suggestions from everyone.  We also urge you to spread the word so more students and educators interested in space visit and use our NASA AAQ site! http://aaq.auburn.edu

  • Icon for: William Spitzer

    William Spitzer

    Facilitator
    Vice President
    May 14, 2018 | 09:55 a.m.

    This seems like such an interesting "open source" approach to engaging the public in designing science payloads for a wide range of airborne and satellite platforms.

     

    It sounds like you have developed a range of materials to support this. What you have so far in terms of who is being engaged in terms of age level, subject matter, and involvement of people in school vs. out of school?

  • Icon for: Alice Smith

    Alice Smith

    Lead Presenter
    Professor
    May 14, 2018 | 10:25 a.m.

    Thank you for your interest and comment. 

    Right now, our materials are not geared to specific education level although we plan in the future to customize a select group of educational classes specifically for (1) middle school and (2) high school.  Our main target audience currently is university level (that is what our educational classes are geared to) but we do have younger users especially those in high school.  

    We do not have reliable usage data because of the open access nature of the site.  Anecdotally, our users are broad and include those outside of space applications (such as medical researchers or defense contractors).  We also have quite a few users in other countries who are involved with space endeavors.

    Finally, we have recently migrated the site to a new software which will facilitate the gathering of reliable usage statistics so we hope to have that going forward.

  • Icon for: Joules Webb

    Joules Webb

    Researcher
    May 15, 2018 | 08:14 p.m.

    I would be interested in learning more about how you plan to customize for MS/HS. I'm wondering how we might use your resources for educators in our program, LCATS (I hope you'll checkout our video!, http://stemforall2018.videohall.com/presentatio...). I'll be sure to checkout your website this week. This year our students are designing experiments to launch via CanSats on a high altitude balloon.

  • Icon for: Alice Smith

    Alice Smith

    Lead Presenter
    Professor
    May 16, 2018 | 08:10 a.m.

    Thanks for the contact.  I would be happy to further discussions on how we might work together to benefit both projects. 

    For our planned customization we would take a small subset of the educational classes most likely to be used by pre-university project teams.  Currently, these would be the classes that best support high altitude balloons.  Then, modify the content of these classes so they are little less technical and perhaps a little less detailed.  We would have these classes in a special section of the NASA AAQ with a suggested course curriculum for balloon projects. 

    We are certainly open to other ideas about how to make our site more appealing and useful to the middle and high school users.

  • Icon for: Claire Pillsbury

    Claire Pillsbury

    Facilitator
    Program Director
    May 14, 2018 | 02:10 p.m.

    Interesting to learn that this is an online open to anyone training resource.  Do you also touch on the range of research questions that are currently being investigated with high altitude balloons and cube satellites?

  • Icon for: Alice Smith

    Alice Smith

    Lead Presenter
    Professor
    May 15, 2018 | 07:20 p.m.

    Thank you for your interest.  We are not research focused other than the payloads that are the subject of the space projects always have one or more research questions.  You can see this with the few case studies we have on the site and we do hope to have more of those in the future. 

    At our annual NASA AAQ Workshop, we do emphasize research being addressed by cube sat and balloon payloads.  There are poster sessions for the research and also some oral research presentations.  The materials from these (poster pdfs and presentation ppts) are posted from each past workshop to the AAQ website so everyone can access those.

  • Icon for: Julianne Mueller-Northcott

    Julianne Mueller-Northcott

    Facilitator
    Science Teacher
    May 15, 2018 | 12:09 p.m.

     This is an incredible resource! I was impressed by the diversity of courses/projects/curriculum that was listed on the website. What are the ways that you share this website with the appropriate people? How do you help make sure it gets to people who would most benefit from it?

  • Icon for: Alice Smith

    Alice Smith

    Lead Presenter
    Professor
    May 15, 2018 | 07:28 p.m.

    That is a great question and a current challenge.

    We have reached out to the NASA Space Grant organizations in all 50 states and in Puerto Rico and have spoken about the NASA AAQ at the annual Space Grant conference.

    We have given talks about the NASA AAQ at the annual Cube Sat Developer's conference in San Luis Obispo, California and will also present at this year's Small Sat conference in Logan, Utah.

    We host an annual NASA AAQ workshop. This has an open call for faculty and students to present their current projects and we have more than 25 institutions present at each workshop.

    Because the website is an ongoing effort we have gradually ramped up our user community through these activities and word of mouth.

    We also have an Expert User Group from different institutions and they serve as NASA AAQ ambassadors.

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