["During the weeks before, the students had built their own rockets with different designs to see which design would go the highest. The students had several opportunities to shoot off their creations into the clear blue sky."]

NOVAS (NASA Opportunities for Visualization, Art and Science) was a three year Multiverse program funded by NASA. The premise was to have students, primarily underrepresented groups in the STEM careers, learn about science and NASA missions through lectures, hands on activities and artistic projects. In the beginning, we conducted workshops, afterschool programs, outreach star parties, and during this time, we also started an internship program.

[Today we link to a fun and picture-filled blog entry from teacher Danielle Miller, who spent a week at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center participating in our professional development workshop with other "educator ambassadors" around  the topic of the planet Mars and its mysterious loss of atmosphere.]

I recently participated in some awesome professional development to become a Mars MAVEN Educator Ambassador. MAVEN is an acronym—of course it is, it's NASA—for  Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission, so I'm just going to call it MAVEN from here on out. It's not a rover, it's an orbiter and it doesn't have cameras so it's not quite as high profile as some other Mars missions *cough* Curiosity *cough* but it is really super cool.

The MAVEN Educator Ambassador workshop was a week in Greenbelt, Maryland - the home of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center—with some of the most amazing, inspiring, smart educators I've ever met. There are many times that I think that the best part of teacher workshops is meeting all of the other teachers... and this one was no exception.

Read more and see photos at Danielle's blog

[This week's guest blogger is one of our summer Space Sciences Lab research interns, Omar Alaryani, a student from United Arab Emirates.]

Upon receiving a call from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre learning of my acceptance into an undergraduate research program at the University of California Berkeley's Space Sciences Lab, called ASSURE, I felt ecstatic, to say the least. Not only have I never been abroad to perform academic research, but I had never been exposed to a professional scientific working environment like this one. The weeks passed in the blink of an eye and soon I found myself picking films to watch in my excruciatingly cramped plane seat. A couple of naps and meals later, I was alone on the other side of the globe, in the midst of the overwhelming crowds of San Francisco International Airport.

[This week's guest blogger is our own Nancy Ali, showing the strength of intergenerational mentors for girls in science.]

 Over the past three years, Multiverse collaborated with Girls Inc. to create and field-test space science resources with teenage girls in afterschool programs. Funded by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, the Five Stars Pathway project created two components which can be used together or separately – an electromagnetic spectrum curriculum for afterschool programs and an intergenerational model that connects university students as role models for middle school students, with a focus on girls.

[This week's blog post contributed by our own Ruth Paglierani, reporting on last month's workshop for informal educators.]

We held a very cool workshop for Informal Heliophysics Educator Ambassadors (IHEA) in early February, 2015. Nineteen informal educators from around the country met with us in chilly Chicago to practice using an exciting collection of NASA educational resources. They also had lots of time to talk with mission subject matter experts, peer through solar telescopes and experience the sky in a portable planetarium. Mission collaborators for the workshop included the ICON, IBEX, THEMIS, MMS, SDO, and Van Allen Probes missions, and cross-division collaborators, as well from Astrophysics. It was a full week indeed!