Background

Background/Context
Over the past decade, I have been inspired by the amazing displays of teamwork in each of the more than 1000 hours of Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) required to build the International Space Station (ISS). I was particularly moved by the EVA from STS-135, the last EVA to be performed with shuttle support. I began to contemplate how might children experience this type of work. What struck me was how the two astronauts, Ron Garan (@Astro_Ron) and Mike Fossum (@Astro_Aggie) were only able to successfully complete their EVA through the support of an entire team of people, starting with Rex Waldheim (@Astro_Rex) and extending to Sandy Magnus (@Astro_Sandy) and Doug Hurley (@Astro_Doug) flying the robotic arms aboard the ISS and Atlantis, and the ISS and Shuttle Flight Crews at Mission Control Center (MCC) at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, TX.

 There are many team building activities and excises, such as "The Beast," which require participants to break down a task into separate pieces. The likes of communication in these activities are intentionally broken to force the participants to relay information from one stage to the next, and attempt to foster trust in ones teammates. If trust is not developed and if the communication is not clear, the teams will not be successful. While these are useful exercises, and one could make the connections to the work of an EVA, the activities that I am proposing would be more tech based, incorporate social media and other computer based remote communications applications, and the end product would be a real, functional outcome. Additionally, through the use of teleconferencing technologies, the simulation could be carried out through the collaboration between groups at different sites. Studies show that we learn less when we compete and more when we cooperate.


Rationale:
It is impossible to predict the specific technical skills that the children of today will need 10, 20, or 30 years from now. It is estimated that 65% of students in elementary school today will take a job that does not yet exist. In this fast-paced, ever changing, high tech world, we need to prepare them more for a way of thinking and working than for specific technologies and modalities. For certain, they will need to be able to be good problem-solvers. They will need to be facile in working with others in multiple-disciplinary teams, no longer limited by time and physical proximity.