How to Teach About Space in the Classroom with Mark Wagner

John: Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the…

Vicki Davis: John, we are not doing that.

John: Long ago, in the galaxy far, far away.

Vicki Davis: This is not the intro we’re supposed to be doing, John.

John: Luke, I am your father.

Vicki Davis: John, I am your mother. This is not going to be our intro.

John: I’m sorry, mother. I can’t do that.

Vicki Davis: Okay, so this is what happens when a mom and son work together. Sometimes it goes a little bit off the rails. This episode is about space. This is not sci-fi. Space is actually something that we can teach in every classroom. So, John, don’t you think that you’re taking this space thing just a little too fast?

John: No.

Vicki Davis: I don’t know what that was. But do or do not, there is no try. We are going to talk about space in any classroom. John is my son, and he and I create this show together. We love Star Wars, Star Trek, Guardians of the Galaxy, all these space things. And we just decided to have a little fun because, hey, the 10-minute teacher is back to five days a week and sometimes six. So we’re going to talk with my friend Mark Wagner about how to teach about space in any classroom.

Announcer: This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: Today, I’m talking with an old friend, Dr. Mark Wagner. He is CEO and co-founder of ARES Learning, president of the Space Prize Foundation, and author of Space Education, Preparing Students for Humanity’s Multi-Planet Future. Mark founded EdTech Team back in 2006 and helped shape how a whole generation of us learned to use technology in the classroom. But now he’s turned his attention to preparing students to the growing space economy and for a future that may include the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: When you reached out to me, you were talking about how excited everyone is about the Artemis mission. I am so excited to see it’s taken a hold of people’s imaginations in a much broader way than even the exciting headlines in the last couple of years.

Vicki Davis: So let’s talk about how space took a hold of your imagination. So you spent all this time in Web 2, and then you were like, space is going to be big. Why? What was the story?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: It makes my 20-year education technology career almost a side story. I went to space camp a couple times as a kid in sixth grade and again in 11th grade. I originally went to school to be an astronomical engineer, but I realized at the time that the science fiction stories that inspired me were really important, and I ended up jumping ship and studying literature and teaching high school English, which is what got me into ed tech to begin with. In 2020, right before the pandemic, I had the opportunity to start thinking about what’s next, bringing both those worlds full circle so that I could apply my ed tech career to what was happening in space. Between you and me, I saw a lot of parallels of how excited people were in 2006 about Google for Education and how little support there was for teachers. And if you look at 2019, there was starting to be some real excitement around SpaceX and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and everything that was hitting the headlines in terms of human spaceflight and commercial spaceflight, with very little support for it in schools. So literally right before COVID, some of my partners and I were talking about how to use space as an element to engage and motivate kids and teach just about anything, really.

Vicki Davis: So you talk a lot about the space economy. Interestingly, there’s an AP course where they had to talk about the issues of lower orbit satellites and the lack of regulation in that area for an AP lit class. That was one of the things they analyzed this year. And I was thinking, wow, people are starting to talk about space. I mean, is it just Artemis or is it the fact people realize, hey, this is part of who we are on this earth is space?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: Yeah, and it’s interesting. It’s not necessarily a funding priority for schools just yet, at least not at large scale. But absolutely over the last five, six years, I’ve seen that interest notching up in a growing community of educators. Some of them have been there for decades. The Space Exploration Educators Conference, or SEEK, hit its 30th year a couple of years ago. So there’s some people who have been doing this a really long time, and we’re seeing a rise in the number of people that are interested in it. And for me, especially coming out of tech and kids learning socially, no matter who you are, what your strengths are, what your interests are — and this goes for teachers and students — space can be that element of engaging, motivating, hooking, being the gateway to all kinds of learning. And you mentioned, this is kind of the other big hook, especially at a societal or policy level, is the growing space economy. A couple of years ago, we passed a milestone of about $400 billion a year. At the time, they were saying it would reach a trillion dollars by 2040. But those projections now look like a trillion dollars by 2030. And I think we’re still on track for that. Aerospace is growing for scientists, engineers, astronauts — there’s never been more opportunities to be a part of it. And there’s this growing space economy where whatever your strengths and interests are, they need you. A lot of people talk about the barista at Spaceport America where Virgin Galactic flies. But even more so, I play hockey with guys that never got a degree and they’re welders and machinists, and their biggest client is SpaceX in Hawthorne. I love telling the story of one of them telling me at hockey one Saturday morning, like, Mark, those guys are the dumbest smart people I know — I’ve got to teach them the most basic stuff. Whether you’re a welder or a barista or you’re in marketing — I know space marketers, I know people in HR and space finances. I’ve interviewed a space fashion designer and an interior designer who works on luxury spacecraft. These are all real jobs today. There’s a whole lot of opportunity in this wider space economy. I also like to joke that the opposite is true. Even if you’re not interested in space, you’d better understand the opportunities that are coming out of space. So the same way in the 90s we had to convince people that learning about the internet was maybe a good idea, and now it’s just a given, I like to joke: if you work for a shoe company, you’d better know the new materials coming out of micro-G environments. You’d better know what your shoe can do if it can talk to GPS and Starlink and be part of the Internet of Things. Already, satellites — particularly GPS, but also communication satellites and Earth observation satellites — impact every industry from agriculture to crime fighting. If you’re not up to speed with what’s happening with space technology, it’s pretty equivalent to not being up to speed with what’s happening with the internet. You’re missing out on big opportunities and you’re not really fully participating in today’s economy.

Vicki Davis: You know, folks who look at all this may say, why is everybody rushing to have these lower orbit satellites? But there really is a space race to cover the whole world with the internet, right?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: Over the last couple of years with SpaceX and Starlink, we’re already in a world where broadband access can happen regardless of borders and despots. They’ve used Starlink in emergency situations after hurricanes, after the fires in L.A. They put Starlink base stations out for first responders, behind enemy lines in Ukraine and elsewhere. Now you’re in a new position where, like, oh, this big company controls the internet. But we’re certainly in a position where you can sidestep borders. You don’t need the kind of infrastructure you needed in the past. Never mind copper lines — we don’t even need cell towers going forward.

Vicki Davis: What are the experts saying about how long it’s going to be to have global internet?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: You and I remember the time of OLPC, one laptop per child. It turns out even putting a billion dollars behind something like that doesn’t solve the problem. We’ve come a long way in narrowing the gap of who’s got access to broadband and basic computing, but there’s no easy solution. There’s still some room to grow. But it’s interesting to roll back 13 years or so. We had a guy named Rich Duvall keynote one of the Google for Education summits up in Silicon Valley, and he worked for the X Lab at the time, their moonshot factory. He had this great idea that he pitched to Larry and Sergey, as the story goes, and they said, that’s a great idea, but it’s going to benefit the next billion people to get online most — fix that problem first. And that’s when Project Loon was born. The idea at the time was to put balloons into the stratosphere with basically 5G cell technology on them to beam internet down to the planet. A great success story there, and a great failing-forward story there. But long story short, Project Loon’s gone, because somebody thought 10x that and thought even bigger. Now we’ve got thousands of satellites in orbit doing that job. Amazon’s coming in with competition, and last I heard, Rwanda wants to launch 300,000 satellites with a similar capacity. If you’ve got African countries launching their own constellations, I’d say that barrier to entry is coming down.

Vicki Davis: You talk about the skill sets and the mindsets that students need for the space economy.

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: The sort of mindsets that are good for, say, an astronaut or an engineer or a scientist turn out to also be good for an entrepreneur or a social change agent trying to solve big problems here on Earth. So I start with the explorer’s mindset. You’re talking about things like comfort with the unknown. It also tends to tap into the idea that people who are explorers develop a greater sense of stewardship for the environment and for the earth. I like to bring in moonshot thinking. That’s the idea that when we went to the moon the first time in the 60s, we didn’t know how we were going to do it when Kennedy said we’re going to do that in this decade. But we did it anyway — this idea that we were going to learn by failing forward. So moonshot thinking encourages kids and educators to think big, to think outside the box, to tackle problems bigger than they might have tackled otherwise. I mean, it was a 19-year-old that solved the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, right? Most people are capable of much more than they think possible. And to me, you’ve got to hit that moonshot thinking before getting into a system like design thinking, because that threatens to just be iterative and get people what they already think they want. To me, those are almost a trilogy: the explorer’s mindset, moonshot thinking, and design thinking. But my favorite one now is what astronaut Katie Coleman calls the operational mindset. In the business world that means something else, but to her it means it’s not all about you, but you are critically important to the mission. Like for any given kid, or the teacher for that matter, it’s not all about you, but you are critically important to the learning environment. Those are four that I think are really important to start with.

Vicki Davis: Where do you think that schools are falling short out of those four the most?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: You see a lot more project-based learning. You see a ton of design learning in schools — design thinking, design methodology. That was true a decade ago, too. I think moonshot thinking, or thinking big, is really hard, and I think giving kids the freedom to explore is really hard for schools. As a general rule, schools don’t allow kids to discover on their own and wander in the wilderness a little bit — metaphorically, or literally — to find their own way. Even something as simple as bringing a map into the classroom, you can tap into that element of exploration without giving a kid the answer, letting them discover the answers on their own. That could be physical problem solving in a maker space, or — I love databot or MaxIQ.space — they make sensors that kids can use to create their own classroom experiments. They can create their own high-altitude balloon payloads. They can even send them to space with various partners. So there’s this opportunity to let kids create the experiment, create the hypothesis, and figure out a way to get their hardware up into the stratosphere or up into space even. I think there’s very, very little of that happening. And there are opportunities for kids to actually get their experiments up to the ISS or into orbit on other vehicles. They’re not necessarily cheap, but there’s some great opportunities out there. There’s a book I’ll recommend, The Next 500 Years by Christopher Mason — he’s a microbiologist — and we’ve already put tardigrade DNA into human tissue to make it radiation resistant. We already know the 247 gene edits or whatever it is, something like that, to cause a human to create their own vitamin C. And if we’re going to survive the trip to Mars and back — literally a couple of years ago, we learned that our kidneys won’t make it. Just hands down, won’t make it. The radiation is going to kill us. So we either need much heavier ships with a lot more shielding, or we’re going to need to modify ourselves genetically.

Vicki Davis: Your book, Space Education, was written with Frank White, and he coined the term the overview effect. For teachers who want to dive deeper into this, what is the first chapter you would point them to in your book and why?

Mark Wagner, Ph.D.: One is he talks about the overview effect. In the book, he coined the term to capture the change in perspective that people tend to experience when they look down on the earth from space. They don’t see borders. They don’t see tribes. They don’t see our conflict. And they see the stark reality that the earth is a relatively small and fragile ball of life hanging in the forbidding black void of space, and that thin, thin blue line of atmosphere. Everybody I’ve spoken to about it says it’s thinner than you think. You can see the pictures of that thin blue line, and it’s thinner than you think. And you think about how every living thing, aside from maybe some things in the ocean, is in that blue line. That blue line is what’s protecting us. So people look down, they don’t see borders typically — although my interview with So-yeon Yi from South Korea was interesting because they see a border from space. But typically people don’t see borders, they don’t see conflicts, they don’t see our tribes. They see that we’re all in this together on spaceship Earth. And they tend to come to that realization: we are all crew, or we should be. Don’t be caught being a passenger on spaceship Earth. And they tend to come back more interested in diplomacy, more interested in protecting the environment. And that changes the way people interact down here. That’s why astronauts have said for years, if only we could pull the politicians up to orbit or up to the moon so that they could look back on the Earth.

Vicki Davis: We’ve been talking with Dr. Mark Wagner, CEO and co-founder of ARES Learning, president of the Space Prize Foundation, and author of Space Education, Preparing Students for Humanity’s Multi-Planet Future.

Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you. Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at coolcatteacher.com forward slash newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.