[Maggie's blog] Virtual Worlds for Learning Real World Engineering

This is the James Webb Space Telescope’s second year participating with the RealWorld/InWorld Engineering Design challenge. We interviewed the teacher behind the program, Sharon Bowers, last year, so we thought we’d do a little follow-up.

Here are last year’s winners and participants talking about their experience:

This winter we have started having guest speakers from the JWST project talk to the students InWorld about the satellite and how it works, as well as the science it will do.

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[Try It At Home] Cosmic Distance Scale

Have you ever wondering why we aren’t visiting the nearest stars? Or why there are no photos of our galaxy from the outside? The short answer is that the Universe is really big. So big that even the things closest to us are really far away.

Here is a little web activity you can try if you want to explore just how big the Universe is by traveling virtually outward. Instead of using scientific notation, we’ll just keep adding on more zeros to the number of kilometers we are traveling. You can see they will really start to add up!

-> Visit the Cosmic Distance Scale! <-

Here is a screencap of your first stop, Earth!

[Maggie's blog] Solving Real World Problems Virtually!

Those of us who work on education and outreach for the James Webb Space Telescope have wanted to do an engineering design challenge for a long time. The chance finally presented itself in the form of a teacher from Virginia – and a project where students get to solve real world problems in the classroom, and in a virtual world.

This is such a novel concept we thought we’d share a chat we did with Sharon Bowers, the teacher Webb is collaborating with, about the project, and how it came to be.

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