ED022-12
NASA’s Lucy Student Pipeline Accelerator and Competency Enabler (L’SPACE) Program: Enabling Hands-on Workforce Preparation for Diverse Undergraduate STEM Students at Scale
Thursday, 10 December 2020: 07:44
Virtual
Sheri Klug Boonstra1, Dann Garcia2, Katherine Kretke3, Harold F Levison3, Catherine Olkin3, Martin Storksdieck4, Sanlyn Buxner5, Heather A Fischer6, Antonio Acuna7 and Hannah Stickel7, (1)Mars Space Flight Facility, ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration, Tempe, AZ, United States, (2)Arizona State University, School of Earth and Space Exploration, Tempe, AZ, United States, (3)Southwest Research Institute Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (4)SEAVIEW DOWNS, SEAVIEW DOWNS, Australia, (5)Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, AZ, United States, (6)Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, United States, (7)Arizona State University, School of Earth and Space Exploration, Tempe, United States
Abstract:
NASA’s Lucy Student Pipeline Accelerator and Competency Enabler (L’SPACE) Program is designed to provide rigorous virtual workforce development opportunities at scale and targets diverse, undergraduate STEM majors. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate subject matter experts (SMEs) who are engaged in the NASA’s exploration process bring first-hand and foundational knowledge of NASA processes, protocols, and practices as “just-in-time” learning to virtual teams of students who are participating in these free, online, 12-week academies which are offered three times a year (spring, summer, and fall). To date, the L’SPACE Program has reached students at 577 colleges and universities (170 of which are community colleges), served 2530 STEM students (40% underserved and 40% female) who are participating from all 50 states (in addition to Puerto Rico and Guam), and has a completion rate of 93%. The L’SPACE Program is an evolving workforce development model that uses evidence and research-based methodologies to continually improve ways to keep in step with changing workforce needs to help diverse students gain access to relevant skill sets and practices to enable a more diverse workforce.
In the L’SPACE Mission Concept Academy, students work on distributed teams to distill a compelling science question and then create a unique mission design to capture the science. They then mature their science/engineering design to be ready for a technical Preliminary Design Review, producing a industry-standard technical document of ~100 pages. In the NASA Proposal Writing and Evaluation Experience (NPWEE) Academy, students learn the fundamentals of innovating new ideas to meet a NASA exploration need through a NASA-led experience. This empowers students with specialized skills in the knowledge of how to drive their careers forward through problem solving and innovation prior to emerging into the workforce.
By utilizing the knowledge and expertise of NASA SMEs to help students navigate through real-world, authentic applications of their discipline course work and giving them actual experience on how to optimize projects while working in multi-disciplinary teams, the students gain valuable experiences needed to overcome barriers and gain traction towards internships and jobs within the exploration ecosystem.
