ExoLab Partner Teachers join us next Monday, April 30th at 16:00 PDT.

You and your students may be asking, “What now? The experiment failed.”

A failure is always an option, but it’s also an opportunity. It has been said that we learn significantly more when we fail and overcome the failure than when we succeed the first time.

So, it’s time to roll up our sleeves, head back to the drawing board and see what we can learn. That, is the theme of our webinar on Monday. We’ll cover:

• What happened to the plants?
• What can we learn from this?
• Can we change the conditions on orbit?
• Can we change the experiment?
• Are we asking the right questions?

To paraphrase Louis D. Friedman on the failure of the Cosmos-1 solar sail (Jun 2005):

“Space exploration is risky. It’s hard. But failures happen. They shouldn’t happen for stupid reasons. But if they happen when you were trying something risky, you learn. That teaches you something. At least it should. And you try harder next time.”

Michael Wilkinson, one of our ExoLab teachers and a member of the magnitude.io/ Advisory Board, will lead this webinar. Michael has three decades of classroom experience facilitating students in designing viable experiments and will guide us through the process of experiment ideation, defining experimental questions, and exploring ideas for engineering and constructing inexpensive lab apparatus utilizing recycled and repurposed materials. Knowing Michael, you’re guaranteed to come away with enough ideas to keep you and your students engaged in authentic research for a long time!