​For Teachers » ​Travel Insights » ​A Guide for a school trip on an American STEM tour

​A Guide for a school trip on an American STEM tour

Over a chilly January weekend, VIE’s new Sales Manager, Niall Abbott, travelled to Houston, Texas, accompanying over 100 students and teachers from Skinners School and TWGS to NASA’s Johnson Space Center.  

This was an ideal opportunity for Niall to see NASA’s education team in action.  

• A 45-minute coach transfer took us to the Marriott Springhill Suites Hotel which is conveniently located just 10 minutes from Space Center, Houston. The hotel is equipped with a breakfast room, small gymnasium and a meeting room which we used for our welcome and safety briefing as well as our pizza and quiz night. All rooms are equipped with a refrigerator, microwave and coffee machine.

This unique itinerary includes 7 hours of guided behind the scenes tours, activities, simulations and workshops each day all operated by NASA’s Space University team.

• Our days would start with exclusive behind the scenes of tours of NASA’s Rocket Park, Vehicle Mock-up facility, Independence Plaza and the actual Mission Control that landed the Apollo Missions on the Moon! Often, we would tour these facilities before the center had opened to the public.

  Our workshops included building a 2-stage rocket, a cryogenics challenge, building a thermal heat shield and designing a habitat on Mars. The highlights of the week were undoubtedly scuba diving in the same pool as astronauts complete their basic training, the robotics and coding challenge and being able to launch our rockets in the Space Center car park.

• At the end of the week the groups were captivated with presentations by a NASA engineer and at graduation all students were presented with their awards by a NASA astronaut.

  Each day we were transferred to and from our hotel by our friendly coach drivers who very much became part of the tour so much that the girls school wanted to take one of them home with them.

  And every evening we would set off from the hotel for evening meals and entertainment at the nearby Main Event Entertainment Centre (Ten Pin Bowling, mini golf, laser quest) and on the final night the brilliant Bubba Gump’s at Kemah Boardwalk. Students then enjoyed experiencing weightlessness for themselves on the roller coasters.

The STEM Discovery tour to NASA’s Johnson Space Center is the ultimate school trip for students to explore possibilities in science, technology, engineering, design, maths and physics – the perfect cross-curricular tour. 

With a target of returning to the Moon in 2025 and a landing on Mars scheduled for 2030, now could not be a better time to launch a school STEM tour to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.