Mack Benn to get flag flown in space

When students at one Suffolk public elementary school learn about math or even marketing, their minds are likely far beyond the stratosphere.

Mack Benn Jr. Elementary has been one of only 12 NASA Explorer Schools nationwide since 2010, when gifted resource teacher Elizabeth Petry applied for the honor.

The designation allows the school to harness some impressive learning resources. Students, for example, videoconference with astronauts, were visited in the classroom by a Tuskegee Airman and scientists from Langley Research Center, and some of them spent a weekend at Kennedy Space Center.

Through the program, the school uses NASA lesson plans to create “problem-based learning,” Petry said. “We don’t just memorize information, but take information and apply it to real-world situations.”

This week, NASA announced that Explorer Schools including Mack Benn would receive a certificate of recognition that includes an American flag that traveled into space.

“They flew them routinely on the space shuttles,” said Petry, who is keenly anticipating the flag’s imminent touchdown in Suffolk.

While the otherworldly flags are often bestowed on presidents and meted out by the government as exclusive awards, “This is the first time they’ve presented them to NASA Explorer Schools that I’m aware of,” Petry said.

She expects the flag will be presented with a certificate authenticating which mission it traveled on.

Petry says the NASA program helps the school teach students to be “better critical thinkers and problem solvers.”

This year, for instance, a “lunar colony” project is challenging students in several ways, Petry said.

They investigated the cost and which materials would work best, what problems science might be able to help solve, and how they would market the concept to financial backers and colonists.

The project even has a social studies angle, Petry said, as students research how Europeans explored the strange lands that would become America.

“Right now, we are figuring how to get there,” she said. “We are working with propulsion and considering the safety aspect,” using Gemini, Apollo and other NASA missions as case studies.

Mack Benn is in its fourth year as an Explorer School. Petry said schools achieve the status by demonstrating effective use of resources available from NASA.

“In the spring, I get an invitation and explain what we are doing here in the building,” she explained. “They want to see it’s a school-wide effort, not just what I’m doing as an individual teacher.”

Petry believes the program is moving students beyond “memorizing facts and a multiple-choice world,” to analyzing, critiquing and applying information.

“We are training them to be productive citizens in a world where the jobs we are training them for probably don’t exist yet,” she said.