It's back-to-school season in the United States- another year where we collectively throw teachers into the gauntlet with as few resources as possible! If you're a K-12 educator looking for an engaging NGSS-aligned curriculum, look no further, because here are 3 great programs you can use to build your lesson plans for the semester.
Growing Beyond Earth® (GBE) is a classroom-based citizen science project operated in partnership between Fairchild Garden and NASA, designed to advance NASA research on growing plants in space.
Over 40,000 middle and high school students and their teachers across the United States have generated valuable data for 180 varieties of edible plants for NASA through GBE’s programming. GBE’s special relationship with NASA, its efficiency, and its commitment to students and educators have set the bar for astrobotany citizen science projects worldwide. When it comes to astrobotany initiatives, GBE is one of the best NGSS curriculums for middle and high school educators to get involved with.
Magnitude.io will be sending model legume Medicago truncatula to the International Space Station in Q1 of 2024. Magnitude.io and astrobotany.com are proud to launch a citizen science curriculum for aspiring astrobotanists to follow along – all the way from pre-launch preparation to post-return transcriptomics. Additional support and post-flight analysis are provided by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Joint Genome Institute. To get started, click this link to create a free account on magnitude.io and get access to free NGSS-aligned lesson plans.
The Astrobotany International Research Initiative (AIRI) is an open-source astrobotany research platform that seeks to support ongoing space plant biology research through an interactive, collaborative space. The first stage, Microgreens in Microgravity, will have you and your classroom growing microgreens and recording experiment details that can help out astrobotany research. AIRI has NGSS-aligned lesson plans that your classroom can use to help grow microgreens in microgravity!
All three of these programs offer free lesson plans with NGSS alignment, and the best part is they’re all related to growing plants in space! To all our dedicated teachers out there, good luck this fall, and reach out if you have any questions for us.
Let’s grow plants in space!