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How to Present the Videos

The following are suggestions to help you get started introducing this content into the curriculum.

Preparing the Lesson

  1. Watch the video you have selected.
  2. As you watch, make note of topics that raise questions for discussion with the class. The following examples will help you:
    • How Space Saves Lives – What do satellites have to do with food, weather or the internet? How do you think it would feel to work in a business that saved lives like this one?
    • The Road to Space – Why does a video about space start with a story four hundred years ago? What are examples of valuable things we do in space today?
    • Valuing What You Bring to the Table – When people were telling Sydney that she wasn’t “technical enough,” what do you think they really meant? Have you had an experience where somebody said you couldn’t do something and you did?
    • Satellite Keeps the Lights On – What does the video mean when it compares the electric grid to an acrobat on a high wire? How do satellites in space help keep the lights on here on Earth?

Teaching the Lesson

  1. If this is the first lesson you teach from the material, ask the class what a satellite is and what it does Help students pool the knowledge they already have (see Industry Background), then explain that you will be watching a video (or more than one, if preferred) about space, satellites and the businesses that operate in space today.
  2. A good introduction to the first lesson, for both younger and older students, is the video Is There a Satellite Inside? which is presented in quiz format. It asks a series of questions and provides time to pause the playback after each question to give students a chance to guess the answer.
  3. For other videos, show the video and ask the questions you have prepared to generate discussion.

Activities

  1. For younger students, drawing space scenes with satellites over Earth, or illustrating one of the satellite applications presented in the videos, can help them engage with the material. (It will be helpful if you display artwork from the web showing what Earth looks like from orbit and how satellites appear in space.) If time and workspace permit, groups can build their own satellites out of construction paper, cardboard, pipe cleaners and aluminum foil; the web provides many basic plans, including one from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
  2. Older students may also enjoy the satellite construction project as a way to engage with the material. The videos also suggest many topics for research papers if you wish to assign them, including:
    • Starlink and OneWeb low Earth orbit satellite constellations
    • How rockets work (SpaceX, RocketLabs, Arianespace)
    • Space debris as a threat to our future in space
    • Satellite internet
    • Satellite Internet of Things
    • Mobile phones and satellite, including early development of direct phone-to-satellite service