[This is one of a series of blog posts about our six-year involvement leading the NASA Heliophysics Science Education and Public Outreach Forum. ]

After you’ve done your fantastic work educating students and teachers, after you’ve inspired the public about the exciting science that NASA is doing, it’s time to tell people what you have accomplished. The NASA Science Mission Directorate science education and public outreach forums have been there to help projects tell their stories of success. There are many ways that education and public outreach (E/PO) project managers have been requested and required to report on their activities to NASA. Here are some example and how the forums helped.

[This is one of a series of blog posts about our six-year involvement leading the NASA Heliophysics Science Education and Public Outreach Forum. ]

For the past six years, I have been a part of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Education and Public Outreach (EPO) Forums. These forums were created to support NASA mission education teams in producing effective and efficient programs and materials for their audiences. In order to help NASA’s SMD EPO professionals develop the most effective programs possible, the Informal Education Working Group, which I chair, convened a literature review to gather the best practices from research, and to point our community members to professional organizations and resources that can guide their development of programs and activities for informal audiences.  We also conducted a national survey of informal educators to determine their needs for professional development sessions and materials.

[This is one of a series of  blog posts about our six-year involvement leading the NASA Heliophysics Science Education and Public Outreach Forum. ]

Evaluation for the NASA Science Mission Directorate Heliophysics Forum focused on the three main goals: 1) Engage and develop the education and public outreach (EPO) community,  2) Analyze heliophysics EPO products and projects, and 3) Coordinate communication about EPO work. Through multiple evaluation activities over multiple years, we found the Forum was able to support the EPO community with professional development, an online community of practice, collaborative projects, and a database of resources. Community members became more engaged over time with each other and with the forum’s activities. They asked for, and received professional development on topics such as social media, scientist engagement, misconceptions, evaluation, NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards), product review, 508 compliance (accessibility), and storytelling.  They met monthly online, and yearly face-to-face, and collaborative projects grew out of that to co-host events, develop new initiatives, and share audiences.

[This is one of a series of blog posts about our six-year involvement leading the NASA Heliophysics Science Education and Public Outreach Forum. ]

Only three weeks into my new job at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab, I was invited to attend the NASA Science Mission Directorate Education/Public Outreach (SMD EPO) Forum retreat. This gathering, which was held in Colorado in conjunction with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific conference in 2010, brought together top heliophysics scientists and educators from around the United States.

As it turned out, this retreat not only initiated me into the heliophysics community, it also set the stage for my work collaborating with NASA scientists and educators for the next five years. The community of practice that was forged at this retreat provided the basis for learning about heliophysics content, getting connected into the latest NASA mission news and events, and sharing of ideas, best practices and research regarding educating students, teachers and the public about the wonders of NASA heliophysics science.

["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! 

Join us for Cal Day, Saturday, April 18th, from 11am-5pm, the one day each year that UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Lab opens its doors to the public. Shuttles will be transporting the public every 20 minutes from Hearst Mining Circle on campus to SSL.  Activities include walking tours of UC Berkeley’s cutting-edge space science research lab, as well as talks on topics such as space weather, teens doing art-science mashups, a career panel on cool jobs in space science, and hands-on activities for all ages!