K-12 Education Outreach
BioServe’s vision does not just include producing the hardware and operations protocols needed to make ISS experimentation a reality today; it also strives to cultivate interest in human spaceflight and STEM in future generations.
To bring this vision to fruition, BioServe founded CGBA Science Insert (CSI), a K-12 educational outreach program. Through collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Education Outreach, the CSI program allows students to engage in real-time life science experiments conducted aboard the ISS.
Through CSI, participating classrooms are provided with organism habitats that are similar in size and functionality to those aboard the ISS. These habitats allow students to conduct “control” experiments on the ground, paralleling the procedures and analytic techniques of the astronauts in space. During the experiment, images are downlinked daily from the ISS that allow students to analyze and compare the results from space with their own.
“Ants in Space” (CSI-06), the most recent CSI mission to launch, sought to compare the behavior of ants on Earth to those in microgravity. Participating K-12 students observed the behavior of their classroom ant colonies, recording differences in behavior from colonies aboard the ISS. This experiment not only promoted the engagement of thousands of students in STEM; it also shed light on ant “swarm intelligence” that can be used to develop mathematical procedures for solving complex human problems (such as routing trucks and scheduling airlines).
Stefanie Countryman, BioServe K-12 Education Program Director, explains, “We want these experiments to have real scientific value. They aren’t canned.” She notes that some experiments have surprising results, such as when the painted lady butterflies of CSI-3 failed to pupate. “Rather than discouraging the student participants, this unexpected result got the students thinking of why it happened.”
In total, it is estimated that CSI has reached over 400,000 students across the world. While not all these students may enter careers in STEM, the feedback Countryman receives from participating teachers is consistent: “even the most hard to reach kids get excited about experiments in space.”
-Written By: Ari Sandberg, Intern
