Students Chart a Voyage of Discovery

At first Derrick Morgan, 13, couldn’t find the insects that threatened his simulated garden in space.

At his post in the new mock space station, Morgan jammed his hands into rubber arms and gloves and reached inside a containment cabinet to unscrew a sample container. As the clumsy rubber fingers flapped against the jar, he shook out the pile of leaves and found the culprits.

Grinning, he showed the brown bugs to his partner and drafted a message to mission control: Hazardous insect control is under way.

The space station is at the Challenger Learning Center, which opens next week at Cal State Dominguez Hills, complete with robots, sound effects and high-tech equipment.

The realistic facility is designed to capture children’s imaginations and encourage them to study science by showing them what it would be like to undertake a space shuttle mission.

Before coming to the center, middle school students watch videos, study special materials and conduct experiments to familiarize themselves with the science skills they will need to participate in the program. Materials for the missions vary each trip, to accommodate different ages and interest levels.

Once they arrive on campus, half of the students run the mission control center while the other half conduct experiments. The success of the mission depends on cooperation between the two groups.

Teachers Lisa Usher and Michele Levin of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Audubon Middle School and Magnet Center brought their students to Dominguez Hills Tuesday for a trial Challenger Center mission.

Usher said students from her elective class, called Adventures in Problem Solving, studied thrust, gravity and density for about three weeks. They take their Challenger Center responsibilities very seriously, she said.

“This has really turned them on to science,” Usher said, “but at first I think they were a little awed by what they have to do.”

The students’ mission is a simulated space expedition to study Halley’s comet.

Leontyne Daughtry, 12, ran the communications center for the mission. Without a trace of teen-age rambunctiousness, she read messages from her team to students staffing mission control.

Later, when data came back from a probe launched into the tail of the comet, the whole group donned special glasses to analyze the color spectrum and determine what type gas was in the sample.

“Mission control, we have spectrum knowledge, over,” Daughtry said. Mission control students analyzed the colors and determined the gas was carbon dioxide.

Other teams took blood pressure and radiation readings, assembled equipment, and watched the air and water quality on the station.

When it opens officially on Jan. 26, the site at Dominguez Hills will be the 25th Challenger center in the nation. The centers are sponsored by the nonprofit Challenger Center for Space Science Education, which was formed by the families of the seven Challenger astronauts who died in 1986.

Programs at all 25 centers focus on giving at-risk children, girls and minorities a chance to develop math and science skills. The Challenger Center at Dominguez Hills also will be open to community groups that complete the study materials provided by the center.

The Dominguez Hills center cost about $1 million to build and took a year to construct. The start-up funds came from private donations, and the center has been named the AlliedSignal Challenger Center in recognition of the aerospace company’s $375,000 contribution to the project. Only two other centers are located on the West Coast, one in San Diego and the other in Seattle.

The center will charge $400 to admit each class of about 32 students, and for training their teachers. Officials say the tuition charge and sales of souvenirs should pay for maintenance of the center.

More than 15,000 middle school students are expected to visit the facility each year. Usher said she thought the program would help open students’ eyes: “If our kids don’t have the opportunity to see what real life science and math is, they can’t dream about doing it themselves.”