Today was an amazing day of STEM in the Sun!

Today was an amazing day of STEM in the Sun! Four Red-Tailed Hawks ROADS on Asteroids teams met at Tacoma-Narrows Airport, WA to collaborate on scientific experiment documentation, to envision the ROADS on Asteroids challenge set design, and embrace process development and robotics programming. All four teams drafted final mission development logs (MDL) covering crater formation experiments and search for signs of life exploration. After carefully documenting how thy followed the scientific method, four students move to the hangar to prepare for the design and build of the challenge set. They reviewed the challenge requirements, discussed techniques to model the “Snowman” crates on Vesta, and contemplated the material to be incorporated. While the set design planning was underway, the other twelve students lesson how to flow diagram processes, and then flowed out steps to program a blindfolded human “robot”. The day ended in a fun exercise of flow charting and directing every step by step command necessary for the “robot” to navigate a simple maze and move a bottle of water. It was a great lesson in attention to detail, clear communication, following directions, the importance of contingency planning and the value of sensors. #ROADSonAsteroid