Student, teacher gain scientific opportunity
A Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy student and his teacher have been selected to work side-by-side with some of the top minds from NASA and other leading scientists and engineers.
Science teacher Jean Robinson and Luke Iott are among four teachers and 12 students nationwide chosen as “Argonauts” for the JASON Project, which every year lets students and teachers work with scientists and share the experience with thousands of students nationwide through interactive technology.
The JASON Foundation for Education was started in 1989 by Robert Ballard, the deep-sea explorer who discovered the wreckage of the Titanic. It was Ballard’s answer to the thousands of letters he received from students wanting to know more about the discovery.
In the past week, Iott and Robinson have snorkeled in a Michigan quarry, canoed the Milwaukee River and searched for evidence of invasive species of mussels in Lake Michigan. They spent the week learning how to take proper samples and collect accurate data in preparation for an expedition this fall.
The fall research expedition will take Argonauts to one of four locations: Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Mono Lake in California, Meteor Crater in Arizona or NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. A second expedition beginning in late January will be filmed and broadcast live, with about 24,000 students in Idaho alone participating via technology.
The expedition is titled “Mysteries of Earth and Mars.” The Argonauts will be looking at life that’s able to exist in Earth’s extreme environments, including the deep-impact crater in Arizona and the salty lake in California, and how those environments compare to Mars.
One group of Argonauts will go the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and work with the team running Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
“I think it’s really cool to be able to study the extreme forms of life and watch how it’s going” as scientists look for extreme forms of life on Mars, Robinson said.
Though the students have yet to be assigned to their teams, Robinson will be going to Meteor Crater, what she describes as one of the “best-preserved impact sites.” She’ll be working with James Garvin, a chief scientist with NASA.
Iott, 14, said during a telephone interview from Milwaukee that he was enjoying his first JASON adventure.
“It’s been real, real busy, but it’s been a blast so far,” he said. When he was snorkeling in the quarry, Iott said, the water was so clear he could see 50 feet down to where a fish was sitting on eggs.
“You never get to see that normally,” he said.
As he enters his freshman year, Iott said it’s time to start thinking about what he wants to be when he grows up.
“I hope to kind of see what the scientific world is like and that area of a job,” he said. “This will really give me a chance to see if this is what I want to do with my life.”
Though he hasn’t picked out a career, Iott said he finds science interesting. “It’s the study of everything around you,” he said. “The world is such a big place. Every second there are more questions out there.”
Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy Principal Nels Pitotti said the school is very proud of Iott and Robinson, who has taught there for five years.
“They are self-starters,” he said. “Both of them show lots of initiative and are able to accomplish quite a bit on their own. They’re adventuresome and they have inquiring minds.”
Iott is the third Charter Academy student to be selected as an Argonaut in recent years. With only three kids in the state nominated each year and only a dozen nationwide picked for each expedition, that’s quite an honor, according to Jeff Benson, JASON coordinator for the Idaho National Laboratory.
The INL is sponsoring Iott and Robinson. “This is a fantastic opportunity for students in Idaho to see real-life scientists studying real-life issues,” Benson said.