Space For Teachers

Our mission is to provide authentic, immersive microgravity research opportunities for teachers and students within a supportive network of active researchers, educators, and technologists.

In partnership with the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium, the UT Austin Center for Space Research, the ISS National Laboratory, and the ZERO-G Corporation, Space for Teachers operates the Embedded Teacher Program.

The program is a year-long classroom research project that begins in a two-day immersive workshop in microgravity sciences for middle school teachers. Participants learn from experts about research areas on the ISS and in the broader aerospace science community, develop small demonstrations to take back to their classrooms, and begin developing their flight projects with teacher mentors and industry partners.

After working with their students to develop workshop ideas into experiment proposals, participating classrooms align STEAM activities around the flight experience of the teacher. The SfT team provides guidance on working within state and national standards to integrate the space science experiment into existing curriculum and supports the experiment development with weekly project meetings.

Flight! The culminating experience of the year is a parabolic flight in which the teacher is supported by flight mentors and ZERO-G coaches to perform their experiments on a research flight. The teacher “embeds” with academic and industry researchers, learning from and sharing their own work in a valuable zero-g networking environment.

Finally, students collaborate across classrooms, states, and the international space education community, to analyze the data, review the flight video, and assess the status of their hypotheses.

Selected teachers can take next steps by adapting their projects for flight on the ISS through partners DreamUp and Nanoracks.