Proposal: AeroAstro Outreach Repository
To:
Prof. Jaime Peraire and Prof. Karen Willcox
From:
Women’s Graduate Association of Aeronautics & Astronautics (WGA^3)
Date:
November 4, 2011
Contact:
Chelsea He, Project Coordinator (qche@mit.edu)
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1. OBJECTIVE
We are seeking funding to consolidate, organize, and maintain the Department’s wealth of
outreach resources, with the objective of improving the Department’s outreach activities while
minimizing duplicated effort.
2. WHO ARE WE
We are a group of AeroAstro graduate students with a keen interest and experience in outreach.
Led by Chelsea He, our team includes Farah Alibay, Allie Anderson, Hemant Chaurasia, Emily
Clements, Raquel Galvan, Aaron Johnson, Whitney Lohmeyer, Sameera Ponda and Sunny Wicks.
3. BACKGROUND
Outreach materials are currently diverse in topic and dispersed throughout the department with
little coordination among users. Many members of the MIT AeroAstro community participate in
outreach covering a diverse spectrum of programs. These activities include instructional multiweek courses, day-long workshops, educational videos, and one-time talks. The focus of these
activities can be instructional, but is often geared toward inspiring interest and increasing
engagement in STEM subjects. Developing content for these programs requires a large amount of
effort, which is often a barrier to those who might otherwise wish to participate. Frequently, a
lack of communication also causes materials to be unnecessarily duplicated.
To facilitate coordination, we are collecting both physical and electronic content to create a
repository of existing outreach materials. Content will be organized by (1) topic, (2) age group,
and (3) medium. Content will also be identified with either engagement or instructional
purposes. This structure will minimize duplicated effort, lower the barrier of participation in
outreach, and facilitate development of new content.
4. PROPOSED BUDGET
An outline of our budget proposal is provided below, followed by detailed notes on each item.
Item
(a) Website development
(b) Physical materials for outreach kits
(c) Ongoing maintenance budget
TOTAL REQUESTED
Budget
$ 8,000
$ 2,100
$
900
$ 11,000
(a) Website development
The website is the major thrust of our effort and will serve as the central point to
upload/download content. Organization and usability are critical for the success of the project.
Figure 1 (below) shows a preliminary concept of the website. The primary purpose of the
homepage is to organize the content into a matrix by topic and age of the target audience. Once
the user selects their desired factors, for example, material on “airplanes” for “middle school”
students, a new page with relevant content filtered from the repository will appear. This page
will be organized into presentations, photos, videos, hardware, and external links for additional
information. A search feature and quick-links will also allow the user to view content by keyword
or media category. New content may be uploaded on a sub-page where the user will categorize
the material so it can be added to the database and be accessed in subsequent searches.
Figure 1. (left) Outreach Repository homepage. (right) Sub-page of filtered content for Middle School age
group and Airplanes as the topic.
These websites will be integrated to the AeroAstro website and will be developed by the same
company currently updating the Department’s website. This will ensure a consistent look and
navigation scheme, and save money on website development. A professionally-developed
website will also have fewer programming “bugs” and be easier to maintain and update in the
future. We are in the process of getting an exact estimate for the website and content storage, but
an initial meeting with Bill Litant provided the cost figures presented here.
(b) Physical materials for outreach kits
In addition to electronic materials, physical materials for the purposes of demonstrations,
experiments, or visual aids will also be consolidated, organized, and stored. These “kits” will be
topically focused, with corresponding electronic content. Anticipated hardware and materials
include a portable wind tunnel ($500), mock-up spacesuit ($1,000), craft supplies ($100),
portable projector ($300), and mini-quadrotor ($200).
(c) Ongoing maintenance budget
This budget item accounts for other resources needed during both the set-up and long-term
phases of the project. This includes online data storage, space to house the education kits within
the Department, materials to resupply kits after use, and overhead to maintain the quality of the
online resources and kits.
5. CLOSING REMARKS
With the requested funds, we can create a valuable resource to increase participation in
outreach in the Department and expand our impact. This effort can serve as a model to the
broader MIT community and eventually serve as a resource to the general public. It will help the
Department reach a greater audience with more coherent, better quality content.