Challenger e-Mission Coming to Rwandan Refugee Camp
Tue Jul 19 2011
Children at a Rwandan refugee camp will soon be experiencing the excitement of NASA science through a distance learning mission being offered by the Challenger Learning Center.
On July 15 Challenger conducted teacher training for educators at the Kiziba refugee camp in Kibuye, Rwanda. The mission prepared the teachers to get their students ready for missions to be conducted later this year.
According to Erin McDonald, a Wheeling Jesuit University graduate who is now serving at the camp as part of the Jesuit Refugee Service, the camp is home to 6,000 youngsters, all refugees from eastern Congo. The camp has a nursery school, a primary school, and a secondary school, which is comparable to a grade 7-9 middle school in the United States. The camp has two computer labs, each with about 22 computers running on solar power and a weak wireless Internet connection.
The Moon, Mars, and Beyond e-Mission™ was conducted via Skype. In this mission students transform into an emergency response unit made up of planet teams to help NASA locate and rescue a lost spaceship, using math skills and their solar science facts to locate the ship and calculate the amount of food, water, and oxygen required for a round-trip rescue once the ship is found.
This mission marks the 15th country the Challenger Learning Center has delivered a mission to outside the United States.
