Staten Island School Teachers Participate In HAM Radio STEM Training Event Presented by National Association For Amateur Radio

Radio is essential in exploration due to the fact that communication must be established and maintained. Even the Voyager 1 spacecraft is still transmitting data and being controlled though the use of radio, this at a whopping distance of over 15 billion miles. Amateur radio operators regularly communicate with each other through the use of amateur satellites. Additionally, the International Space Station has an amateur radio station on board. Using that station, students in schools are able to communicate with astronauts. If we think in terms of telephone, or even fiber internet, we know that we generally have reliable communications covering a lot of the planet. This is, in large part, due to physical cables and/or lines that connect various points to the network. Radio allows data to flow without there being a physical connection between sender and receiver.

Amateur Radio is a great platform upon which students can learn and experiment with STEM areas of instruction. It allows students to participate in hands-on activities that give meaningful connections to lessons that would normally be abstract in the classroom. There are careers in engineering in which being familiar with radio is an essential skill. Also, there are careers in fields such as biomedical engineering that benefit from understanding radio. An example of this would be devices that are attached to someone’s arm to track blood glucose levels. The device transmits the data to a bluetooth enabled device (radio). As this field continues to grow, the need for innovative solutions to problems such as getting data from medical implants, increases.

There were 9 teachers who attended the training from across Staten Island and NYC. This was a 4 day event in which teachers not only learned about radio and how to use it as a platform for STEM learning and earned their FCC Amateur Radio License, but they also received approximately $1300 in equipment to take back to their classrooms to engage students. This program is a donor-funded program offered by ARRL-The National Association for Amateur Radio. ARRL members donate to support the expansion of the Teachers Institute on Wireless Technology, allowing us to continue to offer teachers this incredible opportunity/professional development. Interested teachers can learn more at www.arrl.org/ti

If a school administrator is interested in hosting a Teachers Institute, they should reach out to Steve Goodgame K5ATA at sgoodgame@arrl.org

Course Instructors:

Wayne Greene KB4DSF ARRL Education Specialist

Everton Henriques KD2ZZT Staten Island Technical High School

The names and FCC callsigns of attendees:

Paul Kehoe KE2FAA                   Riverside School for Makers

Brooke Nixon-Friedheim KE2EZT             Talented Unlimited High School

James Lavan KE2FAN              Tottenville High School

Kenneth Chung KE2EZZ           Academy for Conservation and the Environment

Thoms Smolka KD2ZZY            Ralph R McKee Career and Technical Education High School

Nicholas Barresi KE2FAB        New Dorp High School

Amanda Beigelman  KE2FBE   Staten Island Technical High School

Jonathan Swotinsky KE2AO     Inwood Early College for Health and Information Technologies

Cristelita Naanos  KE2FAY      Leon M Goldstein High School for the Sciences