Mathematician Katherine Johnson was a trailblazing NASA scientist back in the 1950s and 60s. Her work was so important that after NASA started using computers in the late 1950s, astronaut John Glenn refused to fly on his 1962 orbit around the Earth until Johnson checked the computer's calculations by hand. She was invaluable to NASA and to the US space program for 33 years.
To give students a way to learn learn more about Katherine Johnson's life, I put together a 2-step equations color-by-number activity. The activity is editable if you would like to change any of the equations or facts for your students. You can access the activity for free here.
"We needed to be assertive as women in that days – assertive and aggressive – and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be. In the early days of NASA women were not allowed to put their names on the reports – no woman in my division had had her name on a report. I was working with Ted Skopinski and he wanted to leave and go to Houston, but Henry Pearson, our supervisor – he was not a fan of women – kept pushing him to finish the report we were working on. Finally, Ted told him, "Katherine should finish the report, she's done most of the work anyway." So Ted left Pearson with no choice; I finished the report and my name went on it, and that was the first time a woman in our division had her name on something."
- Katherine Johnson, Black Women Scientists in the United States, Indiana University Press, 1999
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