A Mission to Mars

Prep pupils in our 10s and 11s attended Harrodian's first official STEM trip to the Natural History Museum to take part in the Mission to Mars: Lego Explorers workshop.  

Organised by STEM Co-ordinator and Head of Design Jake Murray, 25 pupils - many of whom are keen STEM lunchtime club goers - enjoyed a day of hands-on learning dedicated to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. 

The morning was spent at the Exploring Space gallery in the Science Museum, learning about spacecraft sent to other planets and looking at the design and engineering of rockets, satellites, probes and landers.

In the afternoon the group walked over to the Natural History museum where they listened to a presentation delivered by museum scientists about the importance of space exploration, the solar system and in particular Mars - its size, distance from the sun and atmosphere. In small teams of two or three, they were then tasked with making their own basic Martian rover prototype (without motors) from Lego and elastic bands which they could then propel using hand force. 

Another presentation followed - this time on block coding and using LEGO® Education WeDo 2.0 robotics sets. The children learnt how to code their rovers in order to add up to 20 different functions like moving it forwards, backwards, adding sounds and lights and were then able to test and evaluate their designs.

In an exciting finale, the group was set a challenge to see how their rovers performed on a large-scale realistic Martian surface. In their teams, they decided on the aims for their rover and built the appropriate tools and features, whilst also considering the budget and weight of their designs. They then had to talk through their designs and present their findings to the rest of the groups. 

Two girls from the 11s – Isabelle and Sienna – won the challenge as they built a rover that was particularly impressive as it had a fully functioning reverse feature, something which the others didn't have, or failed to work upon testing. Their design also included propellers and solar panels along with some fun features like flashing lights and sounds. 'I love doing science experiments at school so the best bit for me was actually building our rover,' says Sienna. Her teammate Isabelle, winner of this year's 11s Science Fair for her 'Magnetastic' experiment, picks out coding as one of the highlights of the day. 'I have done quite a bit of coding at school in computing lessons, so I was really interested to see how I could use this to add or remove different features from our rover in order to improve the design,' she says. With their different interests and complementary skills, both girls made a formidable team that the boys failed to beat!

Valentin and his two team members Gabriel and Arthur, all from the 10s, really enjoyed having some fun with their design. 'We added a function on our rover that connected to our tablet screen and flashed up images of Mars landscape,' Valentin explains with a smile. But on a more serious note, he is quick to appreciate the educational value when he says, 'I would love to have a career in naval engineering when I am older and this workshop showed me just how important models such as LEGO are for engineers.'

Encouraged by the enthusiastic response of the 10s and 11s, Jake Murray and the rest of the team are keen to put together a more comprehensive programme of trips for different year groups across the school, as part of Harrodian's co-curricular focus on STEM. To find out more about STEM at Harrodian and the full range of clubs and projects that pupils can get involved with, please click HERE.