Mike Davis - STEM OUTREACH

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For three years, The City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) in partnership with DePaul University and the support of a generous grant from the Illinois Space Grant and NASA conducted High Altitude Balloon (HAB) projects.

CITY COLLEGES’ FIRST BALLOON LAUNCH! - On Tuesday, June 16th, 2015, undergraduate students from the City Colleges of Chicago participated in their first high altitude balloon launch.  This was supported by a grant from NASA and the Illinois Space Grant; the program is led by PIs Tom Higgins and Mike Davis.  With this award we supported students with scholarships and stipends as they design, build, and launch experiments to be conducted over 90,000 feet above the earth. 

The images and data in the block above were taken during this first launch, showing from the students prepping for launch, planning the flight path, launching, image data during ascent, balloon popping at apex of flight, and retrieval of the payload from a cornfield in rural Illinois.  Read and watch more about the first launch here! 

What do you need for your own High Altitude Balloon Launch?  Find out here!  

Presentations available - Mike presented "Pi in the Sky: Raspberry Pi and High Altitude Ballooning" at the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA); the presentation is available for download here. There are videos of the launches and tutorials - for more details, see Mike's Blog.

As a separate project for high school students, we conducted a tethered balloon launch as part of the STEM Bridges Program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under the Critical MASS grant which supports STEM education and service for college bound high school students.

Our goal was to have students build some simple sensors that they would put into a Styrofoam box that will be attached to a rubber balloon and flown at a height of about 100 feet.  .

Team leader, Heather Nelson, led a group of 8 students on the construction of the BMP180 pressure/temperature/altitude sensor.  Her goal was to get it connected to an Arduino, and have it log data on a microSD card that was connected using an Ethernet shield.  In about 2 hours, all of Heather’s students built their circuits, and were ready to fly them.

(Image above: Heather Nelson building pressure/temperature/altitude sensors. All of them worked!)

Every time we fly a balloon we we want to take advantage of the opportunity to take beautiful pictures.  Recent IIT graduate (and future physics teacher extraordinaire) Ryan Kamphuis led a group of 8 students on building Raspberry Pi cameras that would take pictures of the Chicago skyline.  He also worked on USB Infragram camera that would take pictures of plants, and give us information on their photosynthetic activity.  We had some issues with the cameras and Pi’s that were going to take some time and attention to resolve, so in the end we built one camera using the visible Pi Camera board, and it was ready to fly.

(Image above: Ryan working on getting the cameras up and running with students from Corliss.)

When we fly these sensors, they need to be secure and protected.  We also wanted to show the students how we built foam boxes using 1.5″ thick insulation from Home Depot.  Agu Uzoma from the City Colleges of Chicago lead a group of students who built a total of four pods.  These were hot glued together and reinforced with carbon fiber rods.  They would hold the sensors during the flight.

(Image above: Making pods out of foam, and measuring the lines (6 feet each).)

Flight 1: When the balloon got to a height of about 40 feet, the wind picked up, and the zip ties that were securing the payload and tethering lines to the balloon failed, and payload fell to the ground and the balloon went up in to the sky on its way to parts unknown.  Flight 2: We salvaged the working sensors and cameras from our previous pods and consolidated them down to one pod.  The zip ties were secure, and we had no problem flying at a height of about 100 feet.  You can see the pictures above from the balloon flying overhead at a height of about 100 feet. (-) Looking down on the Green Line at IIT. (-) Looking north to downtown from above IITs campus. Notice the tethering line. (-) Can’t quite tell what direction this is looking. I think its west or south.

This was a lot of fun, and we could see that the students were enjoying themselves.  Obviously it was embarrassing to have the first balloon fail, but it seemed to be part of the process.  We assessed our mistakes, regrouped and got a second balloon in the air.  There has got to be a lesson about resilience and perseverance in there somewhere. In the end, students were happy to see what they got, and were asking when they could try this again.

I have been a vocal proponent of the Raspberry Pi and Arduino and their use in education.  Programming a computer on the ground, and seeing that it worked in the air is the closest thing to magic that I have seen a long time.