BEDA 11 - The Blooming of Ideas

While I was thinking of something quick and painless to blog about today, an organic piece of learning happened.

First, I decided to first look at the History Channel web page, http://www.historychannel.com. I like this site because there is a lot of cool multimedia sources and I personally like learning about the past. I clicked on the "This Day in History" link and by watching a short video clip learned that on April 11 1970 (today in history), NASA launched Apollo 13. A couple days after the launch, the crew had to return due to an explosion on board.

Here is the seal for that mission.

A month or two ago, my husband, my 11 year old son, and I watched Ron Howard's 1995 movie named after the mission. This movie starred Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and some other guys. My son kept asking me through the movie, "do they live? do they make it back?" It was a really good movie based on a very emotional and excited true story. It always makes me cry. I couldn't remember if this movie won any awards, so I looked on the wikipedia page for the movie - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13_(film). It was nominated for a gazillion Oscars and took home two; one for film editing and one for sound mixing.

Here is one of the movie poster pics:

I remembered that NASA had a really good missions page at http://www.nasa.gov/missions/. I explored this page with students earlier in the year. They were learning about manned and unmanned space exploration. This is a difficult concept for some young people because NASA missions are not a much in the spot light as they once were back in the space race/cold war period. Even those awesome pics of MARS escaped notice by many teens.

The NASA missions page is a great place to explore past missions like Apollo 13, current missions like the the Voyager, Interstella Mission, and future missions of the International Space Station. I was amazed at all that NASA is up too on a day to day basis.

Here is a very nice photo collage of Apollo 13 crew and craft from the NASA mission page.

It is interesting how ideas bloom into inquiry. This short, impromptu brainstorming session of mine mimics, I think, real life patters or learning. I learned quite a bit in a few minutes about history, science, and pop culture by connecting new information to previous experiences. I think I have heard about this type of learning somewhere before...

Houston, it is time for bed!