This year marks the 10-year anniversary of a partnership between Honeywell and NASA as the two have been bringing middle schools the FMA Live! Forces in Motion tour to encourage students’ interest in science.
The show — which combines hip-hop music, dancers, demonstrations and audience participation to engage middle school students and teach them the basic principles of physics — kicked off its fall tour at Rose Hill Middle School in Redmond as it is making its way down the West Coast. This year, the tour is celebrating reaching almost 400,000 students and 1,000 schools in the last decade.
Kerry Kennedy, director of Honeywell’s Hometown Solutions (the company’s corporate citizenship division), said physics can be difficult to teach and FMA Live! was created to help teachers make the subject relevant for students by applying the topics covered in the show to their lessons in class.
“It’s been extremely influential,” Kennedy said. “It’s very exciting.”
The 45-minute-long show begins with a video from Charles Bolden, administrator of NASA, discussing the importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education and what it could mean for students’ futures.
Following Bolden’s message is a high-energy show filled with music, dancing, videos and live demonstrations with student and teacher participation.
With students running and jumping onto a velcro wall, teachers wrestling in large padded sumo suits and more, the students learned about Sir Isaac Newton’s three laws of motions. The show’s title, FMA Live!, is even a nod to the physicist and mathematician’s second law — which states that the force (F) of an object is equal to its mass (M), multiplied by the acceleration vector (A) of the object.
For Rose Hill eighth-graders Samantha Johnson and Joel Gomez — both of whom participated in one of the demonstrations — the show helped them learn more about the concepts in a creative way.
Johnson said she knew a little bit about Newton’s three laws, but she learned about them more in-depth during the show.
“It was super fun,” she added about her participation as well as the show overall.
Both she and Gomez said having a show like FMA Live! is a good way to help get students interested in science — or any subject.
They both said while they have always found science interesting, the show has definitely encouraged them to take more science classes in the future.
Rose Hill Principal Erin Bowser agreed.
“Kids really engage in that way,” she said about the show using music to teach about the concepts, adding that the demonstrations will also help students remember the concepts.
Bowser said when they were first approached last spring about bringing the FMA Live! show to her school, she passed on the information to the Rose Hill science teachers. She said they approved of the materials.
Kennedy added that they have additional online resources available for teachers to utilize in the classroom, as well. In addition, she said, Honeywell offers a space academy teachers can attend so they can bring more concepts into their classrooms. There are also grants teachers can apply for to help them.
For more information, visit www.fmalive.honeywell.com.
