Hubble Images Inspire Student Creativity at Thurgood Marshall School

The entry from Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in Newark, Del. was selected as one of the best collages in an interdisciplinary Classroom Collage Activity sponsored by the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. The collage activity is one of many worldwide events celebrating the International Year of Astronomy (IYA), which commemorates the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's momentous achievement of pointing a telescope at the sky for the first time. The goal of IYA is to spark worldwide interest, especially among young people, in astronomy and science.

The Thurgood Marshall Elementary fourth- and fifth-graders participated in the interdisciplinary collage activity, which fused visual art, science, and language arts in creating the collage of their favorite Hubble images. Besides making their collage project, the students also participated in the Institute's "Hubble's Next Discovery: You Decide" event by selecting an object from a list of targets for the Hubble Space Telescope to observe and image. The winning object was a group of galaxies called Arp 274. The students submitted a PowerPoint presentation of their vote and built their own Hubble telescope out of recycled materials, including bubble wrap, soda bottles, and egg cartons. They then covered their three-dimensional Hubble model with many Hubble images, including those of galaxies, dying stars, and planets. These students were participants in Launching a Dream, an annual statewide aerospace education program in Delaware that gives children the chance to conduct the kind of scientific research that astronauts have been performing in space.