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In June 2015, all 140 Year 9 students at La Châtaigneraie participated in the first Mission to Mars STEM project in conjunction with the EPFL’s Robotics Systems Laboratory and the Swiss Space Center. It was the result of over a year and a half of planning and collaboration with Ecolint’s Robotics group set up by then Director of Education Conrad Hughes and the EPFL’s Robotics Systems Laboratory managed by Professor Francesco Mondada. The Math, Science and Computer Science departments at La Châtaigneraie took the Mission to Mars concept put forward from the Ecolint Robotics group and designed a half-term project and curriculum that culminated with a final Mission at the end of the school year. During the first mission, students had to use EPFL’s Thymio robot as a rover to explore and map a crater on Mars. Given the success of this first mission, the EPFL robotics team created an international robotics collaboration in November 2015 and 2016 called R2T2 where teams from 16 schools in Europe and Africa worked together to solve problems on a damaged Mars space station. Two teams of middle school students from Nations and La Châtaigneraie participated in the project alongside other Swiss, Austrian, French, German, Italian and South African teams. The EPFL R2T2 team built on the strengths of the first Mission to Mars to create an even more complex, engaging and challenging scenario
for participants. https://www.thymio.org/fr:thymio-r2t2 & Swiss Info news story: http://goo.gl/ZdUq8f
Now in June every year, all 140 year 9 students undertake a new Mission 2 Mars building on the success for the previous missions and the R2T2 collaborations. M2M was launched at the in March with a video by Swiss Astronaut, Commander Claude Nicollier. Click here to watch the Mission briefing by Commander Nicolier: https://goo.gl/nXKTcS
Having learned a lot about from the two previous projects, the La Chât M2M team of Michael Winter, Matt Boden and Daniel Auger along with the help of Umberto Cannella from the Swiss Space Center and Christophe Barraud of Mobsya and Professor Francesco Mondada from the EPFL robotics lab, set out to make the new mission scenario more coherent, realistic and challenging for students. M2M uses the same scenario of a damaged European Space Agency Mars station used in R2T2 but has some more complex tasks to force students to use more programming to solve the programs instead of just remote control driving. The M2M teams will have to get their rovers to exit from their landing craft, navigate to the station’s outer perimeter, find its way through a closed outer corridor and then, once inside the station, assess the damage, move components back into to place and detect if the power generator is still functioning and at what power. They will have to coordinate with other rover teams working in their sector of the station to accomplish all their tasks and deal with the time delays of sending communications to and from their rovers on Mars.
From April to June, prior the final mission, students studied Space Sciences in their Science courses, looking at topics such as the Physics and Engineering behind rockets and landing craft and the Biology and Chemistry of travelling and surviving in space. The teams learned to program and control their rovers in Math and Computer classes. An excellent Math activity where the students learn the Math behind navigation and calibration of a robot was developed by Matthew Boden, Richard Collinson, Daniel Auger and Anna Louise Machell of Nations. First run at La Chât in 2015 and then improved upon by Math staff at Nations, this is an excellent example of collaboration between departments and campuses in order to produce the best possible learning experience for all our students. This year, all year 9 students in the Foundation (at all 3 campuses) did the week long activity in their Math classes. The activity covers Math concepts such as: linear graph equations, distance time graphs, rearranging equations, coordinate systems, working in different number base systems (base 60), calculating proportions and scale, precision, and Theoretical vs Applied Mathematics.
Missions take place in the last two weeks of school (3 separate mission days). Each mentor group will go through the 3 hour mission to try to repair the damaged space station. Whether the final mission is a success or not, the process of getting there and the learning along the way will hopefully spark our students’ interest in Space Sciences and show them how multiple areas of knowledge and teamwork are needed to solve problems. In particular, we hope that students are encouraged to continue to study STEM subjects given the need for Scientists, Programmers and Engineers.
The project will be packaged up by the Swiss Space Center and EPFL in order to promote Space education in Swiss schools as a result of a grant given to all three partners in the project: Ecolint, Swiss Space Agency and EPFL’s Robotics Systems Laboratory. The Swiss Space Agency is working on having a continuous Mission to Mars educational exhibit at the Swiss National Transportation Museum in Lucerne https://www.verkehrshaus.ch/en. The Mars Station and rovers would have a permanent home at the Museum and schools and students could either undertake the mission of repairing the damaged station while visiting the Museum virtually or physically. Schools could connect with the rovers while in class or at the museum. They would use the material and activities developed at La Châtaigneraie to prepare for the final mission and learn more about space sciences.
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