This World Space Week, we are celebrating the ongoing work STEM Ambassadors are doing through the One Million Interactions space initiative.
The initiative aims to get space professionals engaging with young people each year and in the UK space is a fast growing sector, with space launch sites being built, constellations of satellites being launched and new companies springing up across the country.
STEM skills are at the top of the list for employers in the sector: we need engineers to design and build satellites as well as the systems on the ground that control them; we need computer scientists to handle the vast amounts of data they produce and we need scientists to interpret information from space about weather, climate, the environment and the universe.
One Million Interactions
Launched last year by the UK Space Agency, ESERO-UK and The Careers & Enterprise Company, the initiative was set up to help space professionals engage with young people about the sector and career opportunities – from talking to a class of school children about careers in space, to setting space design challenges. In the first half of this year, a number of Space Ambassadors (as we like to call them) delivered over a quarter of a million engagements, many of them during periods of lockdown!
Bringing STEM into the classroom
Space Ambassador volunteers are helping to alleviate some of the constraints teachers face in the classroom, by delivering curriculum linked and careers focussed activities in exiting and stimulating ways through the context of space and they are doing this both face-to-face and virtually.