RA-Sat Educational Technologies

The project aims to contribute awareness and knowledge about the satellite and space technologies to improve the development in these areas in Turkey. RA-Sat teaches the fundamental science behind these technologies with an applied training set. The developed amateur satellite ground station hardware and working principles of this hardware are reduced to a high school level to teach high school students.

As stated in the National Space Program, human resources in the space sector should be increased in Turkey to improve domestic and national space technologies. The project aims to spark an interest in space among high school students and prepare them for space-related research with an applied training set.

RA-Sat is prepared with respect to the high school curriculum. The ADDIE instructional design model is used to prepare the usage and learning style of the amateur ground station. This student-centered set can be defined as a type of STEM kit with a mixture of hardware and software.

Achieving learning objectives about space technologies by making space reachable both theoretically and practically even in high school.

The ADDIE approach, an instructional design model, has been preferred as a training method due to its easy applicability as well as its effective and common usage areas. The student-centered teaching model consists of five steps: analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation.

Other station projects focus on how the product or system is built and assume that the basic science behind the system is already known. On the other hand, RA-Sat examines an amateur satellite ground station at the high school level across different disciplines. It does this not only by preparing documents, but also by following the student-centered ADDIE model through a specific scientific method. In addition, the development of an original station design with reduced cost continues.

RA-Sat wants to inform students about space sciences as early as possible. However, the students' current knowledge determines whether they are the right target audience. In the curriculum analysis conducted within the scope of the ADDIE model, the project—initially targeting all high school students—has been refined to target 10th, 11th, and 12th-grade students. While basic concepts start becoming familiar by the 10th grade, 11th and 12th-grade students can establish direct relationships with the subjects they see or will see in their lessons.