This week eight of our students from KS3 took part in the NAE SEA STEAM Festival. Despite it taking place virtually due to COVID restrictions, our students still enjoyed the full benefits of the festival, collaborating and sharing ideas with students from other countries in addition to applying their coding skills.
The premise of the festival was “Mission Control”. The students were set a task to design and build a base on Mars for future explorers. They had two days to complete the task and needed to take into account the conditions on Mars as well as how they could use resources on the planet to help build and sustain a habitation facility for astronauts at the base.
As our students worked on the task they were also set extra urgent time-sensitive missions. One mission involved saving the Mars Perseverance Rover. We received a transmission that the rover had become lost and needed to be navigated back to base by sending it a code it could follow, while avoiding craters and an oncoming sandstorms. In order to save the rover, students had to use a coding programme where they controlled the rover with a computer mouse. If it hit a carter or the sandstorm the rover broke and the team had to start again. It really was impressive to watch the students apply their coding skills and they even turn the task into a game. Despite the pressure, students stayed calm and problem-solved in an innovative and fun way. Another task that caught the team off guard was a scrambled message they needed to decode within a set time-frame. It involved them having to decode several ciphers and even use Morse code. Again they stayed calm and teamwork and perseverance prevailed.
A great part of this festival was that we were buddied up with another school, St Andrews International School Bangkok. Thanks to Google Meets we were able to share ideas and advice on tasks and observe each other's progress. The two days accumulated in an online assembly where all participating schools shared their final base designs. It would be an understatement to say the students enjoyed themselves. They relished in the challenges and worked together as a team, compromising and delegating roles. It was also a great opportunity for them to apply prior knowledge they have accumulated across a whole range of subjects in order to solve the tasks. It was problem solving at its best.
David Burke
Design Teacher
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