Interlake School Division in Stonewall, Manitoba, Canada, is the first International SSEP community, and is one of 17 communities participating in Mission 3 to ISS. For International Communities, SSEP is sponsored by th Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education.

Maria Nickel, the SSEP Community Program Director for Interlake, recently sent the email below to provide a sense of program impact in their community. We wanted to share it.

We have also added it to the In Our Own Words page. If you’d like to read about SSEP impact in other communities visit the In Our Own Words page.

“How do you describe what SSEP has meant to Interlake School Division‘s Gr 5/6 kids, all 450 of them and the division overall? EPIC MOTIVATION & INSPIRATION to be the best student scientist ambassadors for Canada & the world. The program has meant a monumental shift in thinking about science and it’s future impacts. Our kids have dreamt huge dream of cures, treatments, and problems solved to some of the world’s greatest challenges: disease, health promotion, hunger, food production, waste reduction and innovative fuel sources. It has impacted the way they view science, engineering, technology and math in an exhilarating and captivating way. It has paired kids with each other to work towards a common goal: be the best real scientist you can be and work hard to be better, challenge each other, cooperate together, be leaders and become leaders, strive for greatness and work as a team of cohesive learners and goal setters. The awe-inspiring emotions felt here is like the excitement felt when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon in the Apollo mission. Simply put it has been MAGICAL!”

-Maria Nickel, Woodlands Elementary Middle Years Science Coordinator
SSEP Community Program Director, Interlake School Division
Stonewall, Manitoba, Canada

The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in the U.S., and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education internationally. It is enabled through a strategic partnership with NanoRacks LLC, working with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the utilization of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory. SSEP is the first pre-college STEM education program that is both a U.S. national initiative and implemented as an on-orbit commercial space venture.  The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) is a National Partner on SSEP.