A few months ago I was invited to travel with some teachers from Oklahoma down to the NASA Johnson Space Center. Since I had never been there before, I was excited to go even though it meant giving up a weekend, I didn’t care. And I wasn’t disappointed.

The teachers were going as part of the Oklahoma NASA Space Grant Consortium’s Mission to Planet Earth training that happens each summer. It’s an eleven day intense training to enable teachers to teach the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, math) in their every day classrooms. As part of that training, the teachers go to NASA Johnson Space Center to see how NASA does STEM. The teachers love it!

I wish that some of my teachers would have had the same opportunity when I was in school. Who knows, I may have gone into a different field of work. I’m not the greatest at math and only a little better at science but if I’d had hands-on training like these teachers are now doing, I may have understood it better and enjoyed it enough to maybe have made a career in one of the sciences. But while I may not be in a STEM field I can certainly showcase it.

In this week’s video blog, see how NASA is training teachers in the attempt to create a new NASA workforce.
Alisa Hines