A whole new space program

The Medford campus was one of six Massachusetts higher-education institutions selected to share in $1.5 million the state is receiving through NASA’s Summer of Innovation pilot program, an initiative to boost the science, technology, engineering, and math skills of students underperforming in those areas.

Tufts and another funding recipient, Framingham State College’s Christa McAuliffe Challenger Learning Center, are using a portion of their respective awards in a collaborative effort.

Through its Center for Engineering Education and Outreach, Tufts for some years has offered summer workshops in which public school children from Malden, Medford, Melrose, Somerville, and other communities learn engineering concepts by building robots with a Lego kit. The McAuliffe center has offered similar programs to schoolchildren in the Framingham area.

The two institutions are teaming up to create a curriculum that each will offer to middle-school-aged children in their summer programs this year. Through it, children will use Lego robotics to design, build, and program planetary “rovers’’ such as the two Mars Rovers.

“It’s very helpful,’’ Morgan Hynes, the education research program manager at the Tufts center, said of the funding.

Hynes said that in addition to its summer workshops, the Tufts center has worked with Lego Education North America, an arm of Lego Corp., to develop software that helps teachers offer engineering programs in the classrooms using Legos. It also hosts conferences and maintains a website on Lego engineering.

He said the NASA grant “allows us to explore this new curriculum’’ that could potentially form the basis of a new Lego educational software product.

Hynes said that although they recognize the value of robotics as an educational tool, many teachers may shy from using it because it can be “very chaotic to teach it’’ in the classroom. He said curriculums such as the one the Tufts and Framingham centers are developing could help encourage them to try.

By collaborating, the two centers can draw from both the Tufts center’s expertise in developing Lego-based robotics programs, and the McAuliffe center’s experience in devising educational programs focused on space science, say officials from both centers. The McAuliffe center has a life-size model of a Mars Rover in the lobby of its planetarium.

“They have a great reputation for what they’ve done with Lego robotics,’’ Mary Liscombe, director of the McAuliffe center, said of the Tufts center. “So we are delighted to work with them. They’re just as excited with what they’ve seen over here. So I think it will make a great partnership.’’

Liscombe, who was a friend of Christa McAuliffe’s and a classmate of hers at Framingham State, said the curriculum, now under development by the two centers, promises to be stimulating for the students involved.

“Each team will get to design its own planetary rover. I think it will be exciting,’’ she said, noting, “They will be designing them to accomplish tasks so they are going to have to know a little bit about space science and about the planet the rover will be working on.’’

In addition to the curriculum development, both centers will be using their funding awards — the Tufts center received $180,000 and the Framingham center $100,000 — to increase the number of students they serve in their summer programs, and the number of teachers who are able to participate in the summer training seminars they offer on using robotics in the classroom.

The Tufts center, which typically serves 40 to 60 area children in its summer robotics camps, expects to serve as many as 150 this summer as a result of the NASA funding, Hynes said. The center’s camps are generally held on Tufts’s Medford campus, but some of the additional enrollments this summer will be from camps the center will be holding in Boston in partnership with local organizations.

Hynes said Tufts welcomes the chance to “reach more students’’ with its summer programs, which he said meant exposing more children to the educational opportunities available in engineering.

NASA awarded its Summer of Innovation grants through its National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program, in which it provides funding to a network of consortiums of universities, industries, public agencies, and other groups in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.

Massachusetts, whose consortium is led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of only four states to receive the grants, which totaled $5.6 million.

The consortium allotted the state’s award to seven projects involving six institutions.

Other recipients of Massachusetts grant allotments included the MIT Edgerton Center, which will sponsor summer camps in three communities, including a two-week camp in science, technology, and engineering for Gloucester children.