NASA eClips™ Participates in Yorktown Elementary Annual STEM Night

NASA eClips Educators participated in Yorktown Elementary School’s Annual STEM Night on April 19, 2022, engaging students and their families in actively building their understanding of the life cycle of a Sun-like star.

Over 200 families moved through the stages in the life cycle of a Sun-like star. Participants swirled to simulate the gas and dust of a star-forming nebula, compressed themselves to represent a protostar, pretended to emit heat as a main sequence star, expanded themselves to represent a cooling red giant, expanded themselves further to illustrate a planetary nebula, before finally collapsing into a white dwarf. At each stage, students collected a colored bead that represented the stage. The beads were added to a chenille stem to create a life cycle bracelet of a Sun-like star. Check out the activity, "Seeing Starlight with the James Webb Space Telescope": https://jwst.nasa.gov/education/SeeingStarlightMadScience.8.11.21.pdf

In addition, educators from the National Institute of Aerospace’s Center for Integrative STEM Education (NIA-CISE) shared the varied and highly adaptable educational resources found on the NASA eClips website, including Our World “The Sun, A Real Star” and Launchpad “Life Cycle of a Star.” The NASA eClips project is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AB91A and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Please visit https://nasaeclips.arc.nasa.gov/ to learn more.