What happens when you bring together 9th graders from four high schools, mix up the school groups, give them permission to take risks, and ask them to become designers?
On September 18, the second cohort of Aerospace Academy of the Eastern Shore 9th graders came together at Eastern Shore Community College for their first shared Experiential Learning Day.
Students arrived from Arcadia, Chincoteague, Nandua, and Northampton—but throughout the morning, the boundaries between schools began to disappear.
They laughed together. They took risks together. They listened to one another. And, most importantly, they began to see themselves as one AAES cohort.
The day began by connecting students to the aerospace community through Philip Smith of NASA Wallops Flight Facility before shifting into an immersive design experience. Through improv, students explored three deceptively simple principles that would shape the rest of their day:
Yes, and.
Make your fellow designer look good.
Listen to your fellow designer.
Those principles became the foundation for engineering collaboration. Students were then challenged to solve a very real problem of living and working in space: How might we design a package that makes eating M&Ms in microgravity easy and fast for astronauts?
Working in teams, students considered the astronaut experience, generated possibilities, created physical prototypes, demonstrated their solutions, and participated in structured design critiques grounded in both Design Thinking and the Engineering Design Process.
The critique asked students not simply what they built, but why they made particular decisions, how they could test their ideas in microgravity, and what they would change based on feedback.
The Magic Was in the Community
The most powerful outcome was not a prototype. It was watching students from Arcadia, Chincoteague, Nandua, and Northampton begin to see one another as teammates, collaborators, and fellow members of the Aerospace Academy of the Eastern Shore.
This is the power of experiential learning in AAES: creating opportunities for students to experience aerospace, practice the habits of engineers and designers, build relationships across school communities, and imagine what is possible together.
Four schools. One cohort. One AAES.
Thank you to Eastern Shore Community College, Dr. John Baaki (ODU), The Push Comedy Club, NASA Wallops Flight Facility, our AAES educators and partners, and everyone who helped create a space where our students could explore, design, connect, and belong.
About the Aerospace Academy of the Eastern Shore
The Aerospace Academy of the Eastern Shore (AAES) represents an innovative collaboration among Accomack County Public Schools, Northampton County Public Schools, Eastern Shore Community College, and Old Dominion University.
Through this partnership, AAES provides high school and dual-enrollment coursework as part of the Eastern Shore Lab School. Courses are delivered through a blend of synchronous and asynchronous virtual learning, enabling students across the Eastern Shore to participate while remaining enrolled in their home schools.