How We Plan to Accomplish This Amazing Feat – Part 6
Assess & Iterate
We expect to spend a good part of the Summer and Fall of Year 2 on the evaluation and assessment of the new E80. We will have the results from the assessments conducted, as well as first-hand experience on the viability of the experiments and equipment. We expect that the assessment instruments will give us useful information on whether the educational objectives were satisfied. Based on these results, we may need to redesign some of our experiments in order to better meet our educational objectives. We have set aside the Summer and Fall of Year 2 for redesign effort. (This effort will of course include faculty- and student-testing of the new laboratory experiments, as well as the ordering of any new equipment needed for the redesigned experiments.)
Based on assessment results, and field experience, we may find that we need to modify some of our test equipment or instrumentation. It is possible that we may find that the equipment isn’t rugged enough for the field, or has reliability problems that didn’t surface during our initial testing. We have budgeted time during the Summer and Fall of Year 2 in order to make any changes to the equipment needs, to the experiments themselves, and to order and test any new equipment.
The Workshop
In the Summer of Year 2, we will offer the outreach workshop. This workshop will describe the course to interested non-HMC faculty, give detailed lesson plans, list equipment and instrumentation needs; basically give the faculty everything they need to duplicate the course at their institution. We plan on having them do some of the actual laboratory experiments and then launching instrumented rockets on the final day. We also intend to include a brainstorming session as part of the workshop, in case the faculty wants to adopt part, but not all of the course, as we may be able to give them ideas on how best to proceed. This session could perhaps be useful for giving feedback on implementing a similar-but-not-exactly-the-same course.
Starting in January of Year 2, we will offer E80 again, and will run the assessment as well. Both Principal Investigators will be instructors in the course.
