Rice University's Office of STEM Engagement and Rice Athletics have been holding weeklong day camps for third, fourth and fifth grade students. Dubbed STEM-Letics and now in its seventh year, with Space Week in its second year, the day camps are designed to keep students both mentally and physically active during the summer break.
During the camps, students explore different forms of energy, physics, mathematics, computer science and engineering through active exploration activities in the classroom and on the playing field. The day is split between engineering challenges using sustainable and recyclable materials and sports activities that focus on teamwork and collaboration.
“STEM jobs represent the future, and fostering student engagement in these areas is paramount,” said Nancy Gealow, program administrator in the Office of STEM Engagement. “STEM-Letics offers a wide range of experiences, aiming to expose youth to diverse STEM opportunities, and I firmly believe in the importance of exposing young people to these possibilities.”
This summer, one of the groups was treated to a special visit by three-time Rice graduate and NASA astronaut Shannon Walker ’87, who shared her insights about space exploration and the training that went into her time in space to the room of inquisitive young minds, complete with photos and other visuals. Students in the group demonstrated exceptionally high levels of participation.
“It is immensely rewarding to witness students actively engaging in these educational activities and benefiting from them,” Gealow said.
During her presentation, Walker detailed how the astronauts train to enter the stratosphere. They start off in a controlled aquatic setting that resembles what they will eventually encounter once aboard the International Space Station.
“They put weights on our spacesuits so that we are not sinking all the way to the bottom, but we’re not floating all the way to the top,” she said. “We’re just hanging out in the middle, and we will spend about six hours underwater at a time practicing for spacewalks.”
She explained the intricacies of the two different rockets she has flown on, how crew members perform basic tasks like shampooing their hair or eating food, the other dynamics of living and sleeping in zero gravity, the STEM-centric experiments the crew performed while in orbit and answered questions the group of more than 50 elementary school students posed.
Walker has flown two missions aboard the space station. She spent six months aboard it in 2010 and returned in November 2020 as a member of the historic SpaceX Crew-1 mission, the first commercially crewed operational flight to the station. Walker and three crewmates spent 167 days aboard the station before returning May 2, 2021, in the first nighttime splashdown at sea since Apollo 8 in 1968.
Most recently, a Houston-area library opened that bears Walker’s name in honor of NASA’s first native Houstonian astronaut.
For more information about Rice summer camps, visit summer.rice.edu.
