Documenting Rocket Science
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The Honors project is potentially the most valuable component of an Honors education. Typically Honors students choose to do their projects in their area of study, but some will pick a topic of interest unrelated to their major.
The Honors Program requires that the project be presented at a poster presentation event. Poster presentations are held each semester. Most students present during their senior year, but may do so earlier if their honors project has been completed.
This site presents project descriptions and selected posters for Honors projects completed since the Fall 2015 semester.
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Aerospace engineering, or rocket science, is just one of many engineering disciplines that make use of collaboration with technical communicators to provide a comprehensive overview of any engineering project, old or new. For my honors project, I explored multiple aspects of being a technical communicator that collaborates with an all-engineer team to produce effective technical communication. The Cyclone Student Launch Initiative (CySLI) gladly accepted my offer to assist them with their NASA competition documents while I worked on my project. In exchange, I gained the technical background required to produce three forms of technical communication about rocket science at Iowa State: a brochure, a newsletter, and a technical description. The brochure is designed to reach out to middle school students who may be interested in model or high-powered rocketry. The newsletter is meant to inform CySLI team sponsors and program coordinators of events that occurred during CySLI’s competition year. Finally, the technical description provides a condensed design overview of the 2016-2017 rocket and provides information about NASA’s Student Launch challenge. Through working with these engineers, I gained a better understanding of how collaborative processes function in technical communication and had the experience of a lifetime building a true rocket.