Landstown High School Governor’s STEM and Technology Academy students recently made one giant leap for their school district by competing in the NASA RealWorld-InWorld design competition. Team Bakuanwa, consisting of Landstown seniors Ben Thomas and Von Jamora and junior Gunther Gallagher, was one of only three teams in the nation to compete in the finals of the sun sheild design competition for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The RealWorld-InWorld program is an education initiative of NASA, the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), USA TODAY Education and LearniT-TeachiT and encourages students in grades seven–12 to explore and to build skills for STEM careers in science, technology, engineering and math. The project-based learning competition provides teams of students the opportunity to solve NASA-inspired engineering problems and to build solutions with engineering mentors in a virtual reality setting. This year, teams considered real-world questions related to the JWST and then worked to develop solutions to the problems that researchers and scientists are currenlty solving.