By Tech Powered Dad | February 18, 2016
Tomorrow, Texas Instruments will add to mISSion imaginaTIon, their partnership with NASA, when they launch a new activity called “Fuel for the Fire.” TI was nice enough to give me an early preview of the Fuel for the Fire, including student and teacher handouts and the .tns file for the Nspire that makes up the bulk of the activity.
This is a really rich activity that will force students to think, and offers some interesting simulations. Along the way, students have to land a lunar module (it took me upwards of 20 attempts to do so without crashing, but I’m old and like a student, neglected to read the directions at first), fill fuel tanks with rocket fuel, and control fuel consumption during a space flight (you’ll see your ship go careening out of orbit if you make a mistake).
There are quite a few topics covered here, all in the interesting “real world” context of space flight. Among them are constant rate of change (i.e. slope), volume formulas, linear functions, and related rates with a linear function. My suggestion is when the Fuel for the Fire goes live, go ahead and download it for yourself, regardless of whether you are a math or a science teacher, as it could work well in either context. I’ve been told that teachers and TI fans can expect to find Fuel for the Fire on the mISSion imaginaTIon sometime tomorrow afternoon.