- Alice Smith
- http://www.eng.auburn.edu/sites/personal/aesmith/
- Professor
- Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
- Auburn University
- Jeff Smith
- http://jsmith.co
- Professor
- Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
- Auburn University
NASA Academy of Aerospace Quailty
80NSSC18K0159
2018 (see original presentation & discussion)
Grades 9-12, Undergraduate, Graduate, Adult learners
The NASA Academy of Aerospace Quality (AAQ) serves as an internet based forum for providing quality assurance training to those involved or interested in aerospace research, technology development, and space payload design and development. The NASA AAQ curriculum includes 50 educational modules for all aspects of quality assurance necessary to ensure project success. The site also provides a virtual community for networking and sharing of lessons-learned among like-minded scholars. The NASA AAQ is totally open access with a target audience of university space student projects such as cube satellites and high altitude balloons. However the NASA AAQ is open to anyone and users have included high school student space teams, private industries involved with space, the U.S. military, medical researchers, and educational and governmental personnel located in foreign countries. While still under development, the NASA AAQ currently has 50 Technical Educational Modules, 121 Lessons Learned, 3 Case Studies, Acronyms, Links to Relevant Standards, and Definitions. Technical modules are diverse and include such topics as Systems Engineering, Electrostatic Discharge, Non-destructive Testing, Workmanship, Soldering, Quality Planning, Regression Analysis, Configuration Management, and Counterfeit Parts. Self testing on learning achievements is available and the virtual academy will soon allow the ability for individual users or teams to set their own curricula and track user progress through the learning modules. The NASA AAQ holds an annual workshop for users and prospective users at no registration cost to attendees.
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Alice Smith
Professor
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
William Spitzer
Vice President
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?
Alice Smith
Professor
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.
Joules Webb
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.
Alice Smith
Professor
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.
Claire Pillsbury
Program Director
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?
Alice Smith
Professor
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.
Julianne Mueller-Northcott
Science Teacher
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?
Alice Smith
Professor
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.
Further posting is closed as the event has ended.