UA Offered Three Summer Courses on Coronavirus Three courses offered this summer at The University of Alabama helped students understand issues stemming from the coronavirus pandemic and explored solutions to a shortage of personal protective equipment. Two courses focused on understanding and tackling challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic, one was offered during the May interim term on the shortage of PPE and the other during the summer semester on broader societal and organizational challenges. The two design courses employ customer discovery approaches and design thinking to solve issues not only with PPE, but other issues of the pandemic such as changes in supply chains, education, product innovation and domestic abuse. A third, seminar-style course over the summer term explored the pandemic through guest speakers with diverse expertise. The course provided students online lectures on topics surrounding the pandemic that ranged from health care to the economy to the design of public spaces. The three courses were offered in the College of Engineering, Culverhouse College of Business and Honors College, College of Human Environmental Sciences, the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Social Work. The classes were set up as part of an ongoing effort to address complex, far-reaching problems with innovative solutions formulated by students. By involving students from multiple areas of study from the partner colleges, faculty members hoped students could bring different perspectives to tackle challenges.
UA Satellite Team Offers Virtual Space Lessons Students at The University of Alabama building a small satellite as part of a NASA program continued their outreach efforts to state schools during the COVID-19 pandemic through online lessons. The students in the group UASpace created lessons using Alabama math and science standards that teach about space, satellites and space exploration. The lessons are available on an open Google Drive at uaspace.ua.edu/outreach, and are an extension of their efforts this past school year to bring spacecentered lessons into classrooms in rural areas of the state.
UASpace member Chet Wiltshire, from Virginia Beach, Virginia, works on components of the BAMA-1 CubeSat on campus in a photo taken before UA transitioned to limited business operations.
Piper Daniels, UASpace member from Grapevine, Texas, working on a Master of Business Administration after recently earning an aerospace engineering degree at UA, said reaching students is critical to the team’s mission. It’s just one way the students adjusted while the University was on limited business operations with remote instruction. They are continuing the process of readying a small satellite to be launched into space as part of a NASA program. The UA project is one of 18 small research satellites — called CubeSats — from 11 states selected by NASA to fly as auxiliary payloads aboard rockets launching in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Educational institutions, nonprofit organizations and NASA centers proposed the selected missions in response to NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative. UASpace, made up of nearly 50 students, calls their first mission BAMA-1. They aim to demonstrate an emerging technology to bring satellites out of orbit quicker. A launch date is not set, but the team requested a launch in the third quarter of 2021. The UA satellite will be taken to the International Space Station before deploying into orbit. They are continuing their project through online communication and video conferencing amongst themselves and NASA while conducting initial testing over software programs. Dr. John Baker, professor of aerospace engineering and mechanics, Dr. Rohan Sood, assistant professor of aerospace engineering and mechanics, and Michael Pope, instructor of marketing in the STEM Path to the MBA Program, are the team’s faculty advisers. UASpace has received support from UA, Lockheed Martin, Linc Research Inc. and the Alabama Space Grant Consortium.
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