Purpose

The Mission to Mars prototype learning environment is designed to lead students to generate problems about the scientific challenge of planning a Mars mission. It further supports student inquiry into solving these problems. We feel that the Mars mission is an excellent problem space because it lends itself to subproblems from every academic domain, thus making it inherently cross-curricula. In addition, by arriving at a number of common themes, we believe we are developing a curriculum that is fully integrated. The truly powerful ideas used by scientists are not the intellectual property of any one field or discipline. Ideas about systems, scale, change and constancy, and models have applications in business, law, education, and politics, as well as in mathematics, technology and science. These common themes are, in essence, ways of thinking rather than theories or discoveries. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in their 1993 publication, Benchmarks:

Some important themes pervade science, mathematics, and technology and appear over and over again, whether we are looking at an ancient civilization, the human body, or a comet. They are ideas that transcend disciplinary boundaries and prove fruitful in explanation, in theory, in observation, and in design.

We have attempted to keep these common themes in mind as the driving force of our unit (see Unifying Themes section below). By doing so, we have begun to develop a curriculum that is intellectually honest and that bridges the gap between real-world knowledge and problem-solving ability and the students' classroom activities. As the students come to a deeper conceptual understanding of these common themes, we feel confident that we will be facilitating the acquisition of the lifelong learning skills that employers demand and workers will need in the global marketplace of the 21st century.

Curriculum Philosophy

This document attempts to describe a curriculum rather than a content area. In differentiating the two, it is helpful to realize that content is what students should know while curriculum is the way content is organized and emphasized. The curriculum includes structure, organization, and presentation of the content in the classroom.

To facilitate problem generation, the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt University has developed a seven-minute video using existing NASA footage. The Mars Mission Challenge video visually suggests the wide variety of factors involved in planning and carrying out a human mission to the planet Mars. The video narration explicitly challenges students to pose problems within the domain of planning a mission. However, the video does not limit the students to generating specific problems.

This unit spanned a total of 3 - 5 months in two Nashville 6th grade classrooms. After the initial showing of the Mission to Mars video (dilemma lesson), students were asked to generate an exhaustive list of potential problems to research in order to actually plan and complete a manned mission to the planet Mars. Once this step was completed, the students, with guidance from the teacher, sorted the questions into categories, one for each research group. Prior to the categorization activity, the teacher and Mars expert determined optimal categories to closely mirror the various disciplines that students in the sixth grade encounter. Thus, the groups formed were 1) Medical Officer (Human Factors), 2) Supply Officers (Equipment/Food), 3) Engineering (Navigation/Propulsion), 4) Environmental Preservation Team (Spacecraft Environment), 5) Spacecraft Design, and 6) Away Team (Surface Exploration). The student-generated categories closely resembled these optimal categories. In addition to being familiar to the students, these categories were relatively exhaustive, covering major areas of concern for space travel.

Students were asked to list in order of preference the specific research group that most appealed to them. Unless specific social conflicts were of concern to the teacher, every effort was made to match the students with one of the specific research groups of their choosing. The day after the dilemma lesson, research groups were formed and the students were handed the entire list of the questions the class had generated for their category. This provided the group with a reasonable start for their research and helped each team prioritize the research goals.

Over the course of the next 2 months, these research groups spent a great amount of time attempting to become classroom experts in their own specific content area. They used trade books, news articles, authentic materials from NASA, CD-ROM materials, and library books to thoroughly research their area. After summarizing their findings, the specific category groups broke apart into jigsaw groups, where each individual shared the information researched by the whole group. Each new group now had an "expert" from each of the initial content-specific groups. These new groups had to plan a full mission to the planet Mars.

While complete details of the activities and resources used by the students would be almost impossible, what follows is a specific guideline that was employed throughout the 3 months by the resident expert on the Mars Unit. Attention will be played to the role of "benchmark" lessons, identification of initial conceptions, unifying themes emphasized throughout the unit, resources which proved to be particularly helpful, examples of e-mail correspondences with the students, and difficulties and recommendations for the evolution of this unit.