Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center

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This article is about the center in Utah. There is another 'Christa McAuliffe space education center' at Framingham State in New Hampshire.^[1]

The Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center, located in Pleasant Grove, Utah, is designed to teach school children about space and is visited by students from around the world.^{[citation needed]} It has a number of flight simulators.

1 History
2 Teaching method
3 Technology
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History

The center was started in 1990 by Victor Williamson, an educator at Central Elementary School.^[2]. It is a 4,000 square foot building added on to Central Elementary.^[3] It aimed to teach astronomy through the use of simulators; the first, Voyager, proved itself popular. As the years passed, the demand for flights expanded and new ships were commissioned. The simulators have included:

TheVoyager (1990)
The Odyssey (1995)
The Galileo (1998)
The Magellan (1999)
The Falcon (2000) (Decommissioned)
The Phoenix (2005)

The center, and its founder were honored in a ceremony in its 15th year by many individuals, including Gary Herbert, the Lieutenant Governor of Utah. At that time, with its five spaceship simulators, it was educating 16,000 students a year.^[4]

The center's mission statement is:

“

A Learning Community Practicing the Discipline of Wonder!

”

[edit] Teaching method

The center uses the simulators as a way of telling a story, usually applicable to recent historical events, in which the students are involved. When students participate in one of these stories, they are often debriefed at the end of a mission and the Flight Director (the staff member who tells the story and operates the mission) will show them how the story they just participated in has occurred in the world.

Students also learn and apply different aspects of astronomy and science in missions. They get the chance to learn about and interact with black holes, nebulae, asteroids, planets, planetary systems, moons, and a variety of other phenomena. ^[5]

Students learn about different technologies, both real and fictional. Many students who attended the Space Center 15 years ago are now pursuing fields in science, technology, space exploration, programming, and electrical engineering..^[6] Students at the local Brigham Young University have the opportunity to develop consoles and equipment for the Space Center; gadgets such as Tricorders, touch panel equipment, fiber optics systems, and digital/analog control interfaces all help to give a more realistic effect to the experience.

The center hopes that students who are involved with the Space Center will harness this knowledge and solve global problems. To help communities, cities, and nations through service rendered; design, build, and program new technologies to make the world a better place; and invent technology that makes space exploration a common concept. The center's staff hopes that its visitors are tomorrow's scientists.^[7] ^[8]^[9]

[edit] Technology

The Space Center employs a variety of different technologies and equipment to achieve its high quality of simulation. In each ship, there is a powerful sound system (including a powerful bass response to simulate the feeling of the reactor core) hooked up to an industry standard mixing board which combines input from a combination of video sources displayed on the main viewer, sound effects computers, CD players, tape decks, microphones, and voice distorters.

The video system is just as complex. Each mission available has a story DVD with clips compiled for specific scenes in a story. The video switcher has two sets of buttons on it; one set controls what video is displayed on the main view, the other set allows the control room of the simulator to preview different video inputs without the bridge seeing a change in video. All of the mission DVDs and tapes are made by local volunteers who regularly staff missions at the Space Center.

Each simulator is also equipped with a lighting system allowing both red and white lights to be displayed; red during alerts and white during normal alert levels. Each set of lights is attached to a dimmer in the control room allowing the lights to manually fluctuate in different events during a mission, such as a torpedo impact or power failure. The most advanced set of lights at the Space Center is installed in the Odyssey. It has the standard set of controls for dimming each set of lights as well as controls for flashing the lights and activating rotating red alert lights.

In order to ensure that campers are safe, a network of closed circuit cameras is also installed at key points on the set to monitor their positions. Each simulator has part of the bridge and connected areas of the set monitored at all times.

Finally, the most complex part of each simulator is the computer systems. Each ship has several computers installed. The smallest set, the Galileo, has seven, while the largest set, the Magellan, has 40. Each one of these computers (excluding sound effect computers and tactical [main viewer] computers) is connected to a network allowing communication between computers. In this way, the programs on each of the computers are also able to communicate with each other, allowing the control room to monitor the simulation and for computers on the bridge to update each other with information sent from the control room. The programming on each of the computers used to be programmed in HyperCard, but over time the Space Center is beginning to use Revolution Dreamcard by Runtime Revolution. All of the computer programs in use at the Space Center are designed, programmed, and maintained by a crew of volunteer students who want to learn how to program and who also enjoy programming. This same crew is also a part of the mission tapes and DVDs described above

Some missions and videos were taken from Star Trek stories, (such as the romulans) but still help educate students.

Private donations paid for the simulators, while the school district pays the salary of director Williamson. 181 volunteers and part-timers help to operate the simulators.^[10]