Out of This World

As is usually the case in grade school field trips, the kids are restless, rambunctious, and probably more excited about getting out of class than about learning anything.

But once they step through the towering, glass double doors into the cavernous foyer at UT Chattanooga's Challenger Learning Center, they start to learn in spite of themselves.

Students work in teams to simulate a space flight.

They see the lights twinkle on a star chart in the mission control room. Maps of galaxies flash across the screens. Clocks above the computerized flight consoles mark the hour in the world's different time zones.

Then, a few children catch a glimpse of something--something big--in a sunken alcove to the left. They flock to the guardrail blocking the hangar and catch that first, incredulous glimpse of an enormous replica of the space shuttle Challenger.

Suddenly, this is no ordinary field trip.

It is a journey to the stars.

"Usually when we're going on field trips it's like, 'Oh, another boring field trip,' " said Rania Eltom, a sixth-grader at Chattanooga School for the Arts who was in the first group to go through the center. "But after this one, we were really excited, asking questions, and really inspired.

"I had always thought of space just as something that was way out there and not close to me. I didn't have anything to do with it. But after going to the Challenger Center, I realized it had a lot to do with subjects I like, like math and science."

The Challenger Center is a high-tech mission simulator for promoting hands-on learning experiences. It provides on-site missions, teacher in-service training, and pre- and post-visit curriculum kits for classroom use.

A mission specialist in the making.

Hands-on exercises get youngsters excited about the Challenger Center.

The center runs two missions a day Tuesday through Thursday, led by four educators who work as flight directors.

For the children, that means piloting an earth orbiting station to rendezvous with Halley's Comet in the year 2061, isolating a hazardous chemical simulation, or keeping the ship from being contaminated when an alien insect breaks loose on board.

Working as a team, children accept responsibility, earn trust, and build communication and problem solving skills, says Dr. June Scobee Rodgers, the center's founding chair.

"What's important is that children can accomplish the mission with their very own hands -- and that science, math, and technology can be fun,'' she said. Scobee Rodgers, who is the widow of Challenger shuttle commander Dick Scobee, said the center helps memorialize and continue the mission of the shuttle crew members killed when their craft exploded seconds after takeoff on January 28, 1986.

"The primary mission of the Challenger was an educational one," Scobee Rodgers said. "If Dick [Scobee] were here today, he would be very proud of what we have accomplished. It would have meant everything to him."

For some young visitors, a video that the center shows is their first factual account of the tragic accident.

"I was really young when it happened, so I didn't pay very much attention," Eltom said. "We didn't talk about it very much until I went to the Challenger Center. We watched a video and we saw it. I was like, 'Whoa! This really happened?'

"I had always thought of it like a movie. Then I realized that it was all true, and people saw their loved ones die just like that."

That disaster brought a sudden halt to the U.S. space program, but families of the Challenger astronauts were determined to see the educational mission of crew member Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, completed.

They initiated the Challenger Center concept, a nationwide network of 25 science centers where school children experience the exhilaration of scientific and personal discovery through simulated, two-hour missions.

The newest of the centers opened at UT Chattanooga in January. The $3 million facility will eventually host 30,000 school children a year in an adventure of space exploration.

But the Challenger learning experience isn't limited to children.

"The kids love it because it's hands on. They get to help each other. It's active and fun to do," Dr. Mary Tanner, acting dean of education at UT Chattanooga, said.

"I don't think there's any question that the Challenger experience is a success for children.

"But what I'm most interested in is the opportunity we have through the Challenger Center to provide a professional development experience for teachers. If they get excited about a new way of learning, then we have the opportunity to reshape what goes on back in their classrooms. That's a much broader influence than just the one day the children spend in the Challenger Center."

The teacher education mission is being pioneered by the UT Chattanooga Challenger Center, which is one of only two in the nation based at a university. The UT Chattanooga center is also one of the first to have a facility especially built for it, and the first to use college students studying to be teachers as assistants.

But it is the impact of the two-hour simulated space mission on children which remains the main theme of the program. Unlike her classmate Rania, Jenny Reed has been interested in space nearly all of her young life.

She says visits to the NASA Space Center at Huntsville, Alabama, sparked an early interest. She built an astronaut food exhibit last year at a regional history fair and wrote to astronaut Jan Davis for packets of astronaut food.

"When I lived in Huntsville, we would go to the space center, and my grandmother would buy me space ice cream," Reed fondly recalls. "But I got really interested in space in the fifth grade, when my teacher told me about the Challenger Center being built.

"I always wondered what it would be like working in space, and the Challenger Center gave me the perfect opportunity to find out."