News Story

Christmas on Mars?

Simon Buckingham Shum, Tuesday 18 December 2007 | Annotate

120 Year 5+6 pupils (9-11 yr olds) at Bushfield School in Wolverton gathered last week to hear about KMi's work with NASA in anticipation of future manned missions to Mars. We had a great assembly with Earthlings battling out quizzes with Martians, movies from the historic NASA lunar missions and the current Mars MER mission, discussions about how ICT is changing the ways we communicate, and a hands-on exercise when we encountered some alien lifeforms, photographed and videoed them, and then brought them into the Compendium tool to start mapping scientific arguments. The children learnt that these science investigation tools were exactly what real NASA geologists used in field trials at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, which we visited in Google Earth, and watched on video. This was the second school science outreach event from the groundbreaking EPSRC CoAKTinG e-science project (2002-04).

Related Links:

• EPSRC CoAKTinG Project: NASA testbed
• EPSRC CoAKTinG Project: Homepage
• Bushfield Mars 2005 gig
• Bushfield School, Wolverton
• Compendium: dialogue mapping tool
• Article: Scaffolding School Pupils’ Scientific Argumentation with Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps