The World Space Week is October 4th – October 10th annually. So, we maybe a week late but nevertheless PNA celebrated its own Space Week with all its usual gusto and enthusiasm. After math in the mornings, usual lessons were suspended in favor of a full intensive week of space related lessons, activities and curriculum. Culminating in our ‘Night At The Museum’ event and a whole school trip to the planetarium. Grade classes worked on their own class projects for the museum in the morning but in the afternoon grades were mixed and split into ‘crews’. These crews worked together in the afternoon to perform space related experiments, activities and to solve a critical mission.

The 4th Grade project was focused around ‘Robots in Space’. After laying the framework of why we use robots and what they are built to do. We narrowed our focus onto 2 of the most famous space faring robots. The Mars Rovers ‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’. NASA sent these robots to Mars with 4 main goals.

1. Determine whether life ever arose on Mars.
2. Characterize the climate of Mars.
3. Characterize the geology of Mars.
4. Prepare for Human exploration.

With these goals in mind 4th grade embarked on the challenge of planning, designing, building and coding their own interplanetary rovers that could strive to achieve those ambitions goals.

In the afternoons during Space Week. Grades were split into mixed aged ‘crews’. Collaboratively as a group they had to complete experiments, solve problems and over come challenges. These ranged from designing and creating rocket balloons that could generate enough thrust to deliver a payload, conducting and investigation into the surface tension of water and how it acts in space to construction our own modules for the ISS.
Luckily the students were aided in their challenges by Su Curley an engineer from NASA who works on and develops the space suits that the astronauts ware during an EVA. She provided much information and many insights into the technology that astronauts use and was able to answer a huge amount of questions that the students had. Many of which seemed to revolve around the myriad of different ways one could die in space.
We were also fortune enough to be able to Skype with John Herrington who was the first Native American astronaut and who visited the ISS and performed an EVA during his time there.
It was amazing to listen to them speak and inspiring to hear their stories. So we are grateful to them for giving their time to us. And also to Rich who showed and shared some of his space collection with us including some moon rocks!

The students all had a fantastic week and hopefully learnt something new! I know I did!