Space Center Report

GENERAL FACTS ON THE SPACE CENTER

Celebrating 18 years of Space Education in the Alpine School District

General Information:

  • The Space Center was founded on November 8, 1990
  • The Space Center’s total attendance as of January 2008: 225,065
  • Total number of classes, workshops, and space simulations: 18,345
  • Simulators in use: 5 - Classrooms: 1 - Offices: 1
  • Planetariums: Two Starlab Inflatable Planetariums. One used for in-house field trips and the other is checked out to teachers after completing our inservice.
  • Field Trips are run daily from 9:30 A.M. to 1:30 P.M. The Center is visited by approximately four hundred students, teachers, and the general public weekly. Overnight Camps are run from Friday evenings to Saturday mornings throughout the year. Overnight Camps are open to students from 10 to 14 years of age. Super Saturday’s are run every other weekend offering students five hour experiences in our simulators.
  • Private Programs are offered to the public after school hours and on Saturdays. The Space Center is heavily used by the public. To accommodate the demand the Center is usually open until 9:00 P.M. on weekdays and 5:00 P.M. on Saturdays.
  • June and July are summer camp months. Over 2,200 students attend the summer camps of 2008. Summer camps last one to three days.
  • Wednesday and Thursday evenings are reserved for academic classes offered to the public. Each class lasts four weeks and runs for one and one half hours each session. Scout Merit Badges can be earned in the classes. This year’s courses are listed.
    1. General Astronomy
    2. Space Exploration
    3. Geology
    4. Aviation
    5. Atomic Energy
    The classes are taught by employees of the Alpine School District.
  • The Space Center sponsors an advanced math class for sixth graders at Central Elementary School. The class is taught daily from 9:00 - 10:00 A.M.
  • The Space Center is funded from the following sources:
    1. One FTP from the Alpine School District for the Center’s Director
    2. Grants and donations from businesses, corporations, and patrons.
    3. Tuition's from field trips and camps.
  • The Center believes students should be involved in all aspects of day to day operations and program development. Some examples:
    1. The Center’s computer simulator programs were authored by Alpine District students. Every year new students are taught our programming language in free Saturday classes taught at Central Elementary. The best are hired to write our programming code for new missions.
    2. Four of the simulators have high school flight directors.
    3. Many components of the simulators were designed by electrical engineering majors from BYU’s Electrical Engineering Department. This is an ongoing collaboration between the Center and BYU.
    4. The Center’s simulator ‘Magellan’ was redesigned and drafted by students from Lone Peak High School’s drafting and interior design classes. Major sections of the new simulator were built by Lone Peak High School’s construction class.
    5. Three high schools in the Alpine School District use the Center for work site internships.
    6. Pleasant Grove High School’s carpentry class built the furniture for the Phoenix simulator’s computer desks.

Staff:

  • Full time employees: 1
  • Part time hourly employees: 21
  • Non Central Elementary volunteers (working at least five hours monthly): 102
  • 92% of our volunteers are Alpine District students in grades seven through twelve. The volunteers come from many of the District’s secondary schools.
  • Central Elementary student volunteers (grades 5 and 6): 61

Participants:

  • All Alpine District elementary schools participate in Center field trips except Cedar Fort.
  • Three Alpine District junior high schools along with several high schools from the Jordan and Park City School Districts participate in field trips.
  • Ten classes attend the Center’s four hour field trips weekly.
  • 1,558 simulator programs were conducted during the year (2.5 to 5 hours long).
  • 16,501 students, teachers, and patrons of the Alpine School District attended the Center last school year. (classes, workshops, simulations, and planetarium shows).
  • Out of district participants: Park City, Jordan, Provo, Nebo, Granite, Davis, Weber, Salt Lake City, Murray, and Ogden School Districts.
  • Out of state participants: Idaho, Colorado, Nevada, California, Texas.
  • International participants: Japan, South Korea, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Bulgaria.
    • General Philosophy: The Space Center’s mission is to provide multidisciplinary field trips for students ranging in age from ten to fourteen. The field trips cover the following disciplines:
    1. Science: Students receive ninety minutes of space science lessons and activities in our Discovery Classroom and our Starlab Planetarium.
    2. Technology - Humanities - Leadership - Team Building - Music - Drama - Social Science: Students receive one hour and forty five minutes in one of our simulators. The simulated missions take the students hundreds of years into the future on great starships. These interactive dramas serve to enforce the science education received in the classroom along with the technology of the simulators themselves and the interactive dramas the missions are structured around. The humanities play a major role in the simulator activity. Each mission is structured around the social studies curriculum. The missions blend the social sciences with science and technology creating an experience children never forget.
    Students are encouraged to see space as the final frontier awaiting discovery. We teach that space isn’t just for astronomers and astronauts. Space is limitless in expanse therefore it is limitless in imagination. Space is for the musician, the artist, the writer, the engineer, the computer programmer, the actor, the brick layer, the custodian. We live on a great spaceship called Earth. We are traveling through the cosmos at unbelievable speeds. Our very atoms were created in the vacuum of space in fiery supernova explosions. We want students to leave thinking that space is the future. We want students to leave the Center thinking education is the key to that future. We are not in the business of creating astronauts although many students have expressed a desire to explore that profession after attending our programs. We are in the business of creating a space faring population that embraces the challenge of space and the risks; a population that will support the nation’s space programs. We teach the Discipline of What Could Be. We teach the Discipline of Wonder!