Human Factors in Space Exploration: Fitts' Law Activity for Middle School Girls

Abstract

Space exploration is a demanding endeavor, filled with extremely demanding tasks for both astronauts and ground personnel, making it a natural application area for Human Factors Engineering (HFE). This paper describes on ongoing project to develop and deliver hands-on HFE activities that expose middle-school age students to concepts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas, while leveraging the backdrop of space exploration to make the activities fun and exciting. This pilot activity focused on a well-known HFE result known as “Fitts' Law”, a function describing aimed movement time as a function of task variables. The activity included introduction to HFE, description of Fitts' Law, experimental data collection and graphing, and a design component relevant to Fitts' Law (i.e., emergency button placement on a control panel). Initial offerings of this activity indicate high potential for success and broad impact.