"New Heights" in STEM Undergraduate Learning

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Interdisciplinary (99)Taylor University is promoting and disseminating high-quality STEM education using a novel and proven High-Altitude Research Platform (HARP) to develop faculty expertise, implement educational innovations, and assess learning.Students and faculty are engaged in state-of-the-art stratospheric balloon launch capability into the "unknown" with real-time data and command interaction. Students are gaining new awareness of the environment, atmosphere, space, and heavens by direct probing and remote sensing from "New Heights" (over 98% of atmosphere at 33 km altitude). This program is providing students access to near space and engaging them in creative problem solving, fun, and multidisciplinary hands-on team work in a relatively unexplored region of our atmosphere. This technology is being disseminated through four faculty workshops, compiling teaching materials, developing and maintaining a website network, assisting university HARP start-ups, and publishing initial workshop and student assessments. At least 20 universities will implement a HARP program into their curricula, and to achieve that goal we are establishing workshops which include DePauw University, University of Illinois, Cedarville University, Purdue, Stanford, Valparaiso, U.