My NASA Data Milestones: Eclipsed by the Eclipse!

The My NASA Data (MND) project supports grades 3rd through 12th-grade students and teachers across the globe in analyzing and interpreting NASA mission data. MND provides student and teacher materials, including teacher-facing lesson plans, student-facing lessons and interactives, and NASA data via an easy-to-access interface.

Having recently celebrated over 1 million digital engagements in the 2023 fiscal year, MND was excited and amazed to experience a record-breaking 1 million visitors from March 10 - April 10, 2024 -– a single month! – due to interest in the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse, with increased traffic from states within the path of totality. Visitors to the website used search terms: eclipse, solar eclipse, and what is a solar eclipse. Web metrics show that visitors most frequently viewed lesson plans and what MND calls "mini-lessons", and the majority of views were from users in Texas, New York, and Illinois.

Check out the MND Featured Mini-Lessons related to the solar eclipse: https://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/phenomenon/solar-eclipse

There were over 32,000 views of story maps and interactives alone, which is double the number of views from the same time period the previous year. The “Learning from Stars and Solar Eclipses” story map accounted for over 10,000 of these views. Over 1,500 "teacher answer-key" requests were manually reviewed and approved from March 1, 2024 – April 16, 2024, with most requests from Texas, Indiana, and Ohio. In a normal month, MND receives ~100 of these kinds of requests.

Educators will be invited and encouraged to continue using My NASA Data, and a webinar will be offered on April 24, 2024 for new users. Information regarding the upcoming webinar can be found by creating an educator account on NASA CONNECTS, a forum for connecting the NASA network of educators for collaborating together in Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM). Learn more about the benefits of being a part of NASA CONNECTS: https://stemgateway.nasa.gov/connects/s/benefits-of-membership

The My NASA Data solar eclipse resources were developed through a collaboration with the NASA Heliophysics Education Activation Team (HEAT). Some of the resources were designed to prepare audiences for the 2023 and 2024 solar eclipses, but most can be used at any time to support instruction related to the Sun, Earth, Moon connection.

My NASA Data is part of the Global Learning & Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Mission Earth project, which is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AC54A and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio.