WILMINGTON — A second grade teacher at Bradley Creek Elementary with a passion for STEM has entered the Teacher Astronaut Contest, where she could win a free weightless flight in zero gravity.
Christine Sawyer has been teaching at Bradley Creek for the last 15 years, 11 of those spent educating second graders. She came across the contest after seeing aerospace engineer and social media influencer Emily Calandrelli announce the contest online.
Last November, Calandrelli became the 100th woman in space and has partnered with Xploration Outer Space and Space for Humanity to fly one K-12 teacher out to Long Beach, CA, to experience zero gravity with Zero-G.
Zero Gravity Corporation, or Zero-G, was founded by entrepreneur Peter H. Diamandis, veteran astronaut Byron K. Lichtenberg and NASA engineer Ray Cronise. After 11 years of working to build a parabolic aircraft that would meet Federal Aviation Association requirements, they flew their first commercial parabolic flight in 2004.
“It flies like an 8,000-foot roller coaster in the sky in a parabolic flight path,” Calandrelli told Port City Daily. “When it goes over the top hump and starts to proceed downward, that’s when everything inside the plane is freefalling inside the plane. We feel this free-fall as weightlessness for about 20 to 25 seconds.”
When the plane accelerates back upward, passengers then feel a gravitational force double that of Earth’s. During the course of the flight, this cycle repeats about a dozen times, so passengers “experience repeated periods of weightlessness and hypergravity,” she said.
For the last four years, the contest to win a Zero-G flight has been offered to STEM students, but this year evolved into a Teacher Astronaut Contest.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring something like that back to my kids and to our district,” Sawyer said.
As a part of the NCHS Emerging Leaders program, Sawyer started creating videos where students could engage in STEM activities from home.
“I wanted to do something that could remove barriers to STEM for all kids,” she said. “That’s when I created ‘STEM with Mrs. Sawyer.’”
STEM with Mrs. Sawyer is a video web bank, where the teacher posts STEM challenges in both Spanish and English for students to experiment on with accessible and sustainable materials they can find at home. She hopes to add Arabic next, which is the third-most spoken language in Bradley Creek’s district.
In her challenge videos, she leads students through five steps to complete homemade projects including catapults, parachutes, bridges and more.
“The custodians here are amazing and they collect all the paper towel rolls and toilet paper rolls when they change them out in the bathroom,” Sawyer said, explaining that she collects these resources to give students to take home.
The rolls can then become supplies in the monthly activities that Sawyer shares online.
Her goal is to give back to both kids and community — “help them develop skills that are going to help them in their career,” she said.
Along with her website, Sawyer has grown her social media presence over the last two years, using Instagram and TikTok to reach a broader audience outside of Bradley Creek students. This, she said, has come in handy while competing in this contest.
To pick the winner, social media reach is a deciding factor along with creative presence. Applicants were asked to post a short, 90-second video responding to two questions: Why should they be chosen and what activity they want to try in weightlessness.
For Sawyer’s activity, she wants to create an unpoppable bubble by experimenting with corn syrup and glycerin and comparing the results between gravity and weightlessness. Her main goal is to experiment with her students so they can learn from the experience, too.
“That’s the whole point of the STEM that I do already, is reaching out to the community,” Sawyer said. “I can’t imagine a better way to show the kids to take risks and try for things they wouldn’t have thought that they could do.”
The contest winner will be announced on April 21 and the flight will take place on June 1.
To view Mrs. Sawyer’s application video, click here.
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