The Champlain Valley School District has been working with Natasha Grey and her 6th-grade students at CCS for the past few weeks. The students took part in a NASA mission called Sally Ride EarthKAM (Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students), a NASA educational outreach program that enables students, teachers and the public to learn about Earth from the unique perspective of space.

Students were able to link to a camera onboard the International Space Station and have downloaded about 120 pictures of various places around the planet. They are using these pictures along with Google Earth images to better understand the impacts of geography on the development of human civilizations, investigating what features tend to correlate with places of dense human populations versus situations where people choose not to live.