Year 8 Computer Science had the exciting opportunity to visit the Natural History Museum to take part in a Mission to Mars! The students designed, created and coded their very own Mars rovers and took part in a range of challenges. Students worked in small teams to design and build their Lego Martian Rover before seeing how their rovers performed on a realistic Martian surface.

 

Mission to Mars Workshop

 

We had a workshop which was about the Mars rover and how the rover works. We then made our own out of Lego to add adaptations to it and then we tested them on a special mars surface. It was extremely interactive and the museum staff were extremely helpful. We could also customize our rovers with names and accessories such as, our rovers name which was Theseus Romulus the fourth and there were other names such as Space Bugzz. The workshop was very realistic and it made us think like actual engineers at space stations. Even more so, to make it more realistic we had a weight limit we had to not go over, just like real engineers when they have to make sure the rovers can still move around on mars. The test areas of the surfaces were also extremely fun, as we could test out our design and test our code.

 

At the end of the workshop, all the groups placed their robots onto the mars landscape and presented their robots. This was so we could all see the other rovers and do some challenges. At the end of the workshop activity, the whole point was to be able to code ourselves out of any situation since realistically when rovers are set to go to mars, Nasa wouldn't be able to go up there and fix the problem physically.

In conclusion, Our day was quite fun and interactive but also a way to stretch our robotics skills as we already participated in a robotics club at Hornsey, so this was a fun way to learn more from people outside of Hornsey.

 

I found that the day was also a way to problem solve in a different way from what we are used to since we weren’t allowed to touch our rover during the actual mission to mars. To others who haven’t done coding this would have been a way to gain new experience and see if they like such activities.

 

Written by: Fizzah, Holly and Daphne