IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2016 - 54

Pipelining
Attractive Programs for Women

Citizen Scientists
Bringing NASA to the school yard

w

Where can teachers bring students for
age-appropriate hands-on activities that
will introduce them to the science that
makes up our world? Since the launch of
The Global Learning and Observations
to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE)
Program 20 years ago, the answer, simply, is outside.
GLOBE is jointly sponsored by NASA,
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Through
GLOBE, citizen scientists study the
environment at the most local level.
They step out into their school yards
and collect data on the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and pedosphere.
They then share this data and watch as
their local observations become part of
a much larger, worldwide analysis effort.
The majority of citizen scientists are
school children.
In this way, NASA scientists have
access to data collected from over
20,000 schools in 117 countries, a
symbiotic relationship that results in
300,000 measurements a month across
a number of protocols. The oldest of
these, CloudSat, has been collecting
citizen data for a decade.
GLOBE's mission is to promote
the teaching and learning of science,
enhance environmental literacy and
stewardship, and promote scientific dis-

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2016.2603760
Date of publication: 9 November 2016

54

IEEE women in engineering magazine

covery. Thanks to GLOBE, children from
Alaska to South Africa find themselves
equal partners. A rural village is just as
important as a large city. In the study
of the Earth, no single school is more
important than another.

Many Options
The GLOBE Implementation team has
a number of full-time employees as well
as a number of partners from NASA
headquarters, NASA Goddard, and NASA
Langley who all work together to keep
GLOBE running smoothly. Peter Falcon
is one of these partners. Falcon is the
earth science outreach coordinator at

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
in Pasadena, California, where he can
often be found taking groups of Girls
Scouts on tours of the lab as they work
toward earning their Weather Watcher
badges. He grew up on the older side of
a set of about 50 cousins, so it's no surprise he's so good with kids. Falcon has
a knack for making shy or timid children
comfortable and for explaining difficult
topics in kid-friendly terms.
He will tell you that he is not a scientist, not technically, anyhow. He came to
JPL as a summer intern and impressed
everyone enough that he was invited
to stick around. He asked a lot of questions-he picked up instrument models
and asked questions about engineering,
he looked through pages of science
data and asked questions about why it
is important to study Earth from space.
He learned so much on the job that he
made the natural segue into communication and outreach.
Today, Falcon's job involves conducting virtual webinars and teacher

Learning and having fun go hand in hand. Girl Scout troops from Southern
California visit JPL to learn about Earth system science and earn their Weather
Watcher badge.

december 2016	



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2016

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