NASA High School Student Opportunity - WEAR STEM Challenge

The Advanced Exploration Systems' RadWorks team and the Office of STEM Engagement are teaming up to offer the Wearable Equipment for Averting Radiation (WEAR) Challenge to middle and high school students and educators. The challenge tasks student teams to design wearable radiation countermeasures that have multiple functions to reduce parasitic mass, or to design headgear. In addition to designing garments, teams will participate in online webinars to learn about deep space exploration and the design process. Top teams will be invited to visit a NASA center and share their designs with NASA personnel.

To learn more about the WEAR Challenges, click here and please share this opportunity.

http://go.nasa.gov/NASA_WEAR

The WEAR STEM Challenge (aka WEAR) is an engineering design challenge where NASA presents problems about wearable technologies to middle and high school students seeking student contributions to the deep space exploration missions. WEAR focuses on wearable technologies that aid crewmembers and others in tasks such as monitoring conditions, protecting organs, and collecting data. Once astronauts venture into deep space beyond Earth's protective atmosphere, they may be exposed to the high-energy charged particles of galactic cosmic rays and solar particle events (SPE) as well as secondary protons and neutrons. Spacecraft design is one of many ‘sheltering’ techniques used to protect crewmembers, but the use of wearable technologies as physical countermeasures are also beneficial and are being heavily researched. The RadWorks team at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) and NASA Langley Research Center is a leader in this type of research as it employs a spiraling design method to incrementally decrease radiation exposure and increase flight time.



Challenging the Artemis Generation

The Advanced Exploration Systems' RadWorks team and the Office of STEM Engagement are teaming up to offer the Wearable Equipment for Averting Radiation (WEAR) Challenge to middle and high school students and educators. The challenge tasks student teams to design wearable radiation countermeasures that have multiple functions to reduce parasitic mass, or to design headgear. In addition to designing garments, teams will participate in online webinars to learn about deep space exploration and the design process. Top teams will be invited to visit a NASA center and share their designs with NASA personnel.

To learn more about the WEAR Challenges, click here and please share this opportunity.

Michael McGlone 281-792-7899 http://go.nasa.gov/NASA_WEAR

[top]In the WEAR STEM Challenge, teams of middle and high school students engineer wearable technologies solutions to problems presented by NASA. In the FY19 challenge, students designed vests to protect the blood forming organs during a solar particle event (space weather storm). The FY20 challenge gives teams two options. Option 1 is to design headgear to protect against high-energy radiation during a solar particle event. Option 2 is to design a multipurpose garment to help mitigate radiation exposure. The RadWorks team will identify the constraints for intravehicular wearables and student teams will design concepts and develop low fidelity prototypes that can be evaluated by NASA personnel. There will be one onsite culminating event at either JSC or LaRC.



Submissions

During the proposal period, students and educators will participate in webinars and badges provided by Educator Professional Development Collaborative (EPDC). Student design teams will submit a proposal via video for review by NASA personnel. Top teams will be selected to build a prototype of their low fidelity design using the engineering design process. Students will be required to prepare technical documentation the design process for NASA personnel review. In addition to the EPDC activities, NASA subject matter experts (SME’s) will be recruited to share information about deep space travel, radiation, the design process, and answer questions from teams during a series of online sessions scheduled throughout the prototype period.



Scoring

Submissions will be evaluated using a rubric by the WEAR and Radworks teams. Middle school design teams will compete against each other and the high school design teams will compete against each other. Among many incentives to be provided, teams with the top scoring designs will be invited to send a small traveling team to a NASA center. These small traveling teams (including educators) will travel to a NASA center for the WEAR Culminating Event. During this event, the small traveling team will tour NASA facilities and present their prototype to NASA personnel. NASA will cover the housing, transportation, and food expenses for the traveling teams.