Everything starts with one small step. For Holly Pond High senior Tyler Chambers, the first step toward a county school engineering program starts with figuring out how methane reacts on Titan, the largest moon orbiting the planet Saturn.

“What and how are components going to react with methane in those conditions?” Chambers asked, discussing his school project. “The temperature will also be an issue, because it’s so cold.”

Chambers is one of several county students working on more than a dozen teams tackling hypothetical space missions with the help of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the University of Alabama-Huntsville. The projects focus on Titan, and students are proposing ways to study everything from rainfall to weather.

The Cullman County Board of Education is among a handful of regional school systems participating in NASA’s InSPIRESS program, meant to encourage high school students to tackle math and science with a real world approach.

“My team has been working on this thing all week and late into the night,” Chambers said last week, following his mid-semester project update. “We get to apply these things to reality. It’s not just theory.”

Fellow senior Kourtney Turnbough, member of a rival team, said her group is mimicking a previously used NASA satellite mission to plan their hypothetical launch. After being quizzed by UAH engineering professors on everything from potential heat shielding to launch payloads, Turnbough said she learned one thing quickly: The devil is in the details.

“We’re applying what we learned in physics, then putting it into use on our projects,” she said. “My dad is actually an engineer, so this has really shown me the types of things he deals with. Like, whenever we have problems with our designs, we have to go back and rework and try to figure it out.”

The first steps

Though officials believe the InSPIRESS program itself is a great tool for students, Superintendent Billy Coleman said he sees the grant-funded project as the first step toward a larger goal: the founding of an engineering academy for county students.

“I think people saw that we had a really strong commitment to moving in that direction, and we were looking across the state at all the different options to see what we might be able to do,” Coleman said. “The professors at UAH actually got in touch with us about this program and said they had been looking for a system they’d like to try this out, so that was us. Their plan was to introduce engineering into two schools in physics classes, but we talked it out and won them over into giving all seven high schools the option, and they were very receptive of that.”

With funding tight, Coleman said the NASA/UAH program served as the perfect launching point for the proposed engineering academy.

“Once a week professors come into our physics classes, teach engineering, and they talk about the projects,” he said. “It’s a great way of introducing engineering into the curriculum at no cost to our system, and in the meantime, it gives us our first step as we continue to move in that direction. Of course, we didn’t have the funds to really do a whole lot, so this is just incredible.”

The county system’s ambitions couldn’t come at a better time, UAH industrial and systems engineer Phil Farrington said, as local universities are not producing enough engineering graduates to fill available jobs. Farrington noted that firms in and around Huntsville are desperate for qualified employees in the field.

“We’re trying to get a new generation of students interested in NASA and engineering, by engaging them in an exciting program,” he said. “We’re showing them what engineers do, so when they get to college they’ll have a base and be prepared for the field.”

Looking at the long-term, Coleman said he would eventually like to see a full-fledged engineering program made available for county high school students. But, funding continues to be the largest road block.

“Our ultimate goal is to have an engineering academy, probably hosted at our career center, where students can go and take actual engineering courses,” he said. “It’s hard to know right now what our next step will be, but we’re exploring all our options, and we understand this is a commitment that will take some time to put together, but we’re working toward it. A lot may depend on what type of resources we have to do it.”

A proposed countywide half-cent sales tax for the school system on the March 13, 2012 ballot could provide the necessary backing for the academy, Coleman said, and the timeline could move up considerably if the vote passes.

“One of the things we feel like we want to do is let people know where the money is going to be spent,” he said. “This is definitely something that would be a part of that, and it could get this program moving at the level we want it to be at a lot quicker.”

Regardless of if the tax passes, engineering will remain a priority for the system. Coleman said the changing economic landscape will make the academy a great asset for the future, and he is determined to find a way to eventually put the pieces together.

“It’s our job to prepare students for the world, and there is a lot of potential there for future jobs for our students,” he said. “We got some information from folks in north Alabama and across the state about the need for engineers, and we felt like we want to provide an opportunity for our students. We feel like the future holds a lot of opportunity, and we’re excited about this.”

* Trent Moore can be reached by e-mail at trentm@cullmantimes.com, or by telephone at 734-2131, ext. 220.