Area charter schools flex their educational muscles

When it comes to using science to find technical solutions, students at two Kootenai County charter schools are among the cream of the crop.

School officials at North Idaho STEM Charter Academy in Rathdrum announced Monday that the school has been selected to participate in a NASA mission, while over the weekend, a team of Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy students won the regional competition of the National Science Bowl.

NASA selected North Idaho STEM Charter Academy to participate in its CubeSat Space Mission in June 2017. The school is the only high school to be selected, and one of 20 institutions nationwide that will get to design and construct a CubeSat — a class of research spacecraft also called nanosatellites — over the next three years.

“It’s fantastic,” said North Idaho STEM director Scott Thomson. “Producing real world solutions is what this school is about and it doesn’t get more real than this.”

Thomson said 10 student leaders will begin selecting teams of freshmen and sophomore students. Once selected, the teams will work together to ensure that they have each aspect of the upcoming mission planned and ready to go before the launch date.

Once launched, North Idaho STEM’s CubeSat will embark on an educational mission to teach countless students about radio waves, aeronautical engineering, space propulsion, and geography by sending a communication signal to schools around the world.

The cube-shaped satellites are approximately 4 inches long, have a volume of about one quart and weigh approximately 3 pounds. According to its website, NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative gives opportunities for these small satellite payloads to fly on rockets during upcoming launches.

The announcement of Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy’s success at the regional competition for the National Science Bowl was made by U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. The team will advance to compete at the national finals in Washington, D.C. in April.

“The National Science Bowl continues to be one of the premier academic competitions across the country, and prepares America’s students for future successes in some of the world’s fastest growing fields in research and engineering,” Moniz said. “I am honored to congratulate all of the competitors who are advancing to the national finals where they will continue to showcase their talents as top students in math and science.”

The National Science Bowl, in its 26th year, brings together thousands of middle and high school students from across the country to compete in a fast-paced question-and-answer format where they solve technical problems and answer questions on a range of science disciplines including biology, chemistry, Earth and space science, physics and math.

A series of 116 regional middle school and high school tournaments are being held across the country from January through March.

The top 16 high school teams and the top 16 middle school teams in the National Finals will win $1,000 for their schools’ science departments. Prizes for the top two high school teams for the 2016 NSB will be announced at a later date.

The high school team that won the 2015 NSB received a nine-day, all-expenses-paid science trip to Alaska, where they learned more about glaciology, marine and avian biology, geology and plate tectonics. The second-place high school team at the 2015 NSB won a five-day, fully guided adventure tour of several national parks, which included a whitewater rafting trip.

More than 250,000 students have participated in the National Science Bowl in its 25-year history, and it is one of the nation’s largest science competitions. More than 14,000 students compete in the NSB each year.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science manages the National Science Bowl finals competition.