Aug. 31, 2015

In eastern Montana, more than 250 miles from the nearest research-oriented four-year college, students on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Nation reservation are deeply entrenched in real-world scientific research.
A school of only about 150 students, Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer, Montana, receives funding from several government agencies, including NASA, to bolster its science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula. The students engage in many projects, such as studying West Nile virus and alternative energy, and imaging forest fire recovery from above using a tethered blimp: great feats for a school without any pre-engineering or technological curriculum and limited staff. In fact, only seven faculty members and chief information officer Jeff Hooker, also the primary grant proposal writer, pull together to accomplish this.
He said sometimes they wonder if they’re getting in over their heads, like when they received funding this year to send 24 students and staff to NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia, to build a payload for a sounding rocket as part of the RockOn! challenge.

Participants put together tiny Arduino type circuit boards, about the size of a credit card, and coded software to operate sensors and instruments, almost like a grown-up version of Legos. Except these went to space.
"We’re a two-year college with no engineering courses, really, with no idea what soldering and coding are," Hooker said. "Our computer science area is more like office suite. If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have said an Arduino might be an interesting kind of Italian sandwich."
None of the Chief Dull Knife participants had ever used Arduino boards before, but they were determined to be ready for the RockOn! workshop. Prior to the event, the school set up a three-day camp to learn to use a soldering iron and review some code. Hooker had a little bit of the programing language Visual Basic in his background. Everyone else was in the dark, but they soon learned that wasn’t a deal breaker. The Internet provided open source code for just about everything they needed.
The event at Wallops put their new skills to the test. The contingent worked alongside students from national four-year universities, like Pennsylvania State University and the University of Maryland, to put together payloads for sounding rockets: small, low-speed vehicles launched from Wallops with brief in-air times of five to 20 minutes, just long enough to carry out their scientific missions. Sounding rockets reach altitudes of about 62 to 900 miles above Earth’s surface.

To Hooker’s surprise and pride, his team kept up with the other students while learning entirely new concepts. The facility the teams used at Wallops contains a projection board which the teams, who were divided into cohorts of three, used to indicate completion of a project, and Hooker said his teams never lagged behind.
"We went there thinking we were so outgunned," he said. "It was exciting to see that we weren’t always the first ones done, but we were never the last ones done. I watched the board consistently, knowing we were up against the likes of the University of Colorado, University of Maryland, New Mexico State and all these larger schools."
All of the Chief Dull Knife teams’ payloads flew successfully.
The experience affected students and faculty alike, Hooker said. It raised students’ self-esteem as they saw they could keep up with students at larger schools that had undergone much more in-depth coursework. But even more important to Hooker was that the workshop intrigued the faculty attending.
"Engaging faculty is what really builds momentum for us," Hooker said. "In a school like ours, if you’ve got a science program, it’s because you have a science person on the faculty."

In this environment, keeping faculty is critical. Empowering them goes a long way toward that. When teachers come back from experiences like RockOn!, Hooker said it changes the way they teach. The faculty viewed student capabilities differently after sitting alongside them to complete an experiment during RockOn!, leading to a more collaborative system of inquiry into science, which is more engaging to students.
The new view of learning was not isolated to the faculty. Coming back from RockOn! in June, students expressed interest in creating a coding curriculum, and participating in another challenge called Rocksat-C, in which a team of students has a year to put together their own experiment and payload to launch in a sounding rocket.
Hooker is working with NASA to develop a pre-engineering program to put in place at the school. He said he was surprised by some of the outcomes of the workshop that can’t be quantified.
"That wasn’t something we said, that we’re going to go there to build self-esteem and confidence," he said. "No, we were going to go to build a payload for a sounding rocket. But coming out of that, because of the process itself, it was very empowering to the participants. I would love now to take the model and apply it in other situations."

Image:
(Left) Student Marty Seymour prepares to launch a tethered balloon. Chief Dull Knife College’s tethered balloon is funded by the Montana Space Grant Consortium, established in 1991 as a component of NASA’s National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program. The Northern Cheyenne word for balloon is printed below the Chief Dull Knife College logo.
(Middle) Freshman Scott Shoulderblade solders components onto a circuit board at the RockOn! workshop at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in June 2015.
(Right) Mathematics faculty members Dianna Hooker and Gary Ramsey at Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer, Montana, get hands-on experience with sounding rocket payload components.