Martin STEM students’ experiment blasts off Nov. 1
The movie “The Martian” may be science fiction, but one sceneis starting to play out like science fact thanks to some students from the STEM Academy at Martin High School.
In the movie, Matt Damon is stranded on Mars and must figure out how to grow plants in space to survive.
Five students at Martin are going to get to see something like that play out for real as their experiment is set to blast off for the International Space Station on Nov. 1 from Florida.
The students will be along for the ride, kind of. The five students, along with two other students who are part of the , are scheduled to head to Florida at the end of the month to watch the rocket launch to the ISS carrying their pea shoot experiment.
The plan is to see how microgravity affects the germination of pea shoots to help determine the viability of pea shoots as a fresh food source in space.
“To us, it was a research project,” said junior Grant Hester. “We were going out to see something we found interesting and seeing what we could do, how we could manipulate it to see how it would grow in zero gravity.”
Hester, along with fellow juniors Camilo Henao, Kaleb Kim, Sofia Ochoa and Ethan Chen, have spent more than a year working on the project. The SSEP project is part of the , and the district got involved two years ago.
Last year students took an Independent Studies in Emerging Technologies class to work on the project. Several Martin teams entered ideas for the project, and the school had three teams with ideas that made it to the finals. Last December, the team of five found out it was selected for the mission.
While getting their project on the space station was the goal, the students learned a lot of other skills along theway, like research, working with a team and building their communications skills.
“I like research, and I like teaching research because I’ve seen bad research and I’ve seen good research,” said Krassimira Hansard, who taught the class. “I like teaching presentation, I like teaching collaboration because when you see the output, it’s good. You watch them grow. I’ve had them since they were freshmen.”
Not all the experiments to get to this point worked for the team. They had to find the right environment to get pea shoots to grow. They had to find the right water. They also had to do it within the confines of a small tube that can travel on the ISS.
They found out a lot about pea shoots, too.
“It was interesting to find out that you can eat the whole plant,” Ochoa said. “You can eat the leaves of the shoot. The whole thing is edible.”
The class was just part of the process as the students have worked on the project on their own time, working around school, homework, jobs and internships. There has been testing, experimenting and figuring out what works and what doesn’t.
“This is a lot of very mature, adult scheduling,” Hansard said. “They showed a lot of skills to get to this point.”
Including patience. The students have known their project was going to space for nearly a year, but the mission to send it there has been postponed several times. They hope the Nov. 1 launch goes off. Once it does, they will conduct the same experiment here to see how different it is from the one on the ISS.
“We’re excited we get the opportunity,” Hester said. “We just hope it happens sooner than later.”