To Grade School Students
by Dr. Harvey Wichman
The role that I played in the Traveling Space Museum’s After School Academy was to teach Space Biology. Teaching kids about biology and how our bodies work in space can be fun and exciting. And there are many exciting ways in which biology is related to space, such as how does a space suit work? What does it do for an astronaut or cosmonaut?
The magic we had to perform was to find a way to do this that would be fun and also serious. The primary trick that we used was to have lots of interesting activities. We were often able to accomplish what might have been a very difficult academic exercise, such as having a student give a small talk before a group, by having them build or draw things that were relevant to what they just learned. Then I had them explain to others about their experience. Some of the best lessons we gave those young people were related to speaking in front of a group as well as their opportunities to create and explore.
Sometimes we did things that were dramatic. For example, on the morning when I was to do a presentation on the heart, I stopped at a meat packing plant and purchased a cow’s heart to bring to class. This served as a much better illustration than a frog’s heart or some smaller heart from another type of animal. The cow’s heart is much like a human heart — only on a grand scale.
Space Biology' class includes a close encounter with a cow's heart
Kids wore rubber gloves to get in to see where things like the aorta was, then stick a hand up in that aorta and see the way the vena cava brings blood back into the heart. When they were finished, they knew what a heart looked like and how it worked. The cadets learned about the heart’s one-way valves by building models using small paper tubes. These tubes had little one way flapper valves on one end to demonstrate how the heart, when it contracts, only pumps blood in the proper direction.
We discussed what happens to humans that are living in weightlessness. My students were very interested in what astronauts eat, how nutrition is maintained, and about exercising. But most of all, they were extremely interested in how astronauts go to the bathroom in space.
We not only explored what it was like for the human body being in Earth orbit but also about what it would be like on the Moon. All the cadets weighed themselves in normal Earth gravity, then I had them do the long division calculation to determine how much they would weigh on the Moon. I was delighted when a teacher told me, with glee in her eyes, that a student remarked how she now had a reason for using long division.
Our cadets also built models of the lungs, complete with plastic tubing to represent the trachea and bronchial tubes. These models could then be shown inflating and deflating just like a human diaphragm. It was such a vivid illustration that the kids were eager to take their models home to show their parents, and also to take to school the next day to show their classmates what they had learned. These also became wonderful souvenirs of the After School Academy. In addition, it really involved a lot of neuromuscular coordination with all the motor activities that it took for the students to make them.
We also had an anti-drug message. Several years ago a film company asked me to create a movie that would discourage children from using drugs. The reason they came to me was because I had an animal laboratory with rats and had developed a movie with a small black and white rat named Sam. It’s a very engaging movie. The kids love seeing Sam run a maze and being the winner of the maze running contests. Then Sam gets hooked on drugs in the laboratory and you see the consequences of drugs on Sam’s life. The film then shows events in a real child’s life in an elementary school before coming back to Sam where we see he is no longer on drugs. Sam is able to be revived and once again be effective and ingenious at running his mazes.
What I really felt was an obligation to teach these cadets some heavy duty stuff. The subjects were often abstract and involved a lot of creativity so things really got accomplished. We, the teachers, the parents, the school system that gave us the facilities, all expected these children to learn. And yet, somehow the kids had to have a sense that this wasn’t just school all over again. That was not as easy as one might expect. Oh, the magic that we did perform.
reprinted by permission of O. C. Space, Larry Evans, Publisher