Jon Kerr and Stephanie King

Kerr’s and King’s innovative teaching idea, “To Infinity & Beyond: Hands-On STEM,” is designed to encourage Granger High School students to collaborate with members of the community to learn about astronomy. As part of the project, students and community members will collaborate to build and install an astronomy observatory. With the help of the Voya Unsung Heroes grant, the school will be able to purchase a telescope and binoculars to use for instructional and extracurricular research. The project will incorporate CCD cameras for the telescope so students can observe and document deep space features. This will be paired with student research and partnerships with community organizations. Given the next level, the school science department will partner with our construction classes to build an observatory on campus. The final level will provide a full observatory dome in which students engage with the scientific process and the teacher moves to a facilitator of learning. The goal of the project is to encourage students to learn about careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).