Increasing student learning through space life sciences education

Scientists and educators at Baylor College of Medicine are using space life sciences research areas as themes for middle school science and health instructional materials. This paper discusses study findings of the most recent unit, Food and Fitness, which teaches concepts related to energy and nutrition through guided inquiry. Results of a field test involving more than 750 students are reported. Use of the teaching materials resulted in significant knowledge gains by students as measured on a pre/post assessment administered by teachers. In addition, an analysis of the time spent by each teacher on each activity suggested that it is preferable to conduct all of the activities in the unit with students rather than allocating the same total amount of time on just a subset of the activities.     

Random Weighting Estimation Method for Dynamic Navigation Positioning

This paper presents a new random weighting estimation method for dynamic navigation positioning.This method adopts the concept of random weighting estimation to estimate the covariance matrices of system state noises and observation noises for controlling the disturbances of singular observations and the kinematic model errors.It satisfies the practical requirements of the residual vector and innovation vector to sufficiently utilize observation information,thus weakening the disturbing effect of the kinematic model error and observation model error on the state parameter estimation.Theories and algorithms of random weighting estimation are established for estimating the covariance matrices of observation residual vectors and innovation vectors.This random weighting estimation method provides an effective solution for improving the positioning accuracy in dynamic navigation.Experimental results show that compared with the Kalman filtering,the extended Kalman filtering and the adaptive windowing filtering,the proposed method can adaptively determine the covariance matrices of observation error and state error,effectively resist the disturbances caused by system error and observation error,and significantly improve the positioning accuracy for dynamic navigation.