Do your students have what it takes to become cadets at SPACE ACADEMY?

In FINDING P.I.P.E.R. (grade 5+), students will train up for the big rescue out on the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b. In 10 fun-filled missions, they will:

  • Design a crew badge

  • Locate P.I.P.E.R.'s last known location

  • Build an Extraterrestrial Exploration Vehicle (E.E.V.)

  • Develop an informal method to predict their E.E.V.'s movement

  • Learn a standardized method to analyze their data

  • Plot their data on a graph

  • Conduct a practice rescue

  • Decipher a launch code

  • Reactivate P.I.P.E.R.'s transmitter

  • Organize an emergency evacuation

Along the way, students learn:

  • Coordinate plane
  • Ordered pairs
  • Patterns in the relationship between distance and time
  • How to use a graph to make a prediction
  • Classification of 2D shapes

In JOURNEY TO TITAN (grades 6+), it's time for a new, more challenging rescue: traveling to a moon of Saturn to save the exploration robot TYRO. In this project, students will:

  • Design a team flag and a scale-model flag
  • Build their E.E.V.
  • Conduct time trials and find a unit rate
  • Use graphs & equations to make a prediction
  • Calculate percent error to confirm they have a good prediction
  • Solve a complex puzzle to locate TYRO on a coordinate grid map
  • Create a flight plan for the journey to Titan
  • Decipher the launch code
  • Conduct the rescue
  • Organize the emergency evacuation

As they work through these challenges, students learn to:

  • Use reasoning about multiplication & division to solve ratio problems
  • Solve problems about scale drawings
  • Solve unit rate problems involving constant speed
  • Calculate percent increase and decrease and percent error by using proportional relationships
  • Write, read, and evaluate expressions in which letters stand for numbers