Working in space

For this session students will find out the answers to the following questions: What do the UK Space Agency and European Space Agency do? What are the STEM subjects and how do they relate to a rover mission? What jobs are there from design, launch, landing and exploring? What skills are needed within these jobs?...

Nature and machines

This session will allow students to explore how nature has enabled animals and plants to move on the surface of our planet and how this can be used to create future rovers for exploring Mars. How will future machines travel effectively across the various types of Martian terrain and survive some of the...

Instructions, flow charts and decisions

For this session students will think about what instructions are needed within the software of the ExoMars rover and how they will make the hardware work to complete tasks successfully. There will be a focus on three steps within computational thinking: identify the problem, decomposition and collecting data. After...

Instruction sets

Students will explore the difference between RISC and CISC instruction sets by navigating a rover to different locations on a given map. They will explore how increasing the range of instructions can reduce the number of instructions required but increase the amount of data required to store the commands. They will...

Lesson 8 - Comparing Mars rovers

This activity develops digital literacy using the context of exploring Mars. Also developing the skills of collecting, analysing, evaluating and presenting data and information. Children first learn about infographics and establish what makes a good one. They then design their own infographic to allow the reader to...

Lesson 7 - Mission to Mars

This activity provides a cross-curricular opportunity, mixing computing, design technology and science in the context of designing a Mars rover. Children consider the requirements of a Mars rover and create criteria for the design. They design their rovers then evaluate them and re-design them, modeling the process...

Lesson 6 - Searching the internet

This activity develops digital literacy using the context of exploring Mars. Children learn about what a search engine does and consider what happens when they use one. They also begin to find out that some internet sources are more reliable than others and think about which might be trustworthy.

The...

Lesson 5 - Decision trees

In this activity children are introduced to decision trees and their use in computing algorithms. Working together they consider how a decision tree might support the navigation of the ExoMars rover searching for a suitable place to drill.  They then role-play the rover and follow the decision tree instructions,...

Lesson 4 - Communicating images

In this activity children explore how images are stored and communicated by computers (including robots and rovers). They learn how a picture is made up of pixels and how each pixel is coded for by a number code, which is then converted into an image. Children learn about Binary code and how it is used to represent...