Rover Races Event

From SEDSWiki

CU-SEDS did an outreach project with a 7th grade class at Peak-to-Peak Charter School, in Lafayette Colorado. We did an activity called Rover Races with 5 Earth Science classes (average 24-29 students each). The activity taught students about the Mars Rovers. More specifically, the students were taught about the science objectives, history, and how they are operated. The activity took approximaetly 45 minutes. To illustrate how the rovers operate we carried out an activity called Rover Races. The students were assigned the following roles: rover team (three students were blindfolded and linked together to be directed through an obstacle course made out of construction paper); driver and communicator (commanded the rover team through the course); judge (counted how many times the rover team stepped on the construction paper, which were symbolic of boulders or craters); and timer (recorded the duration of time the rover took to go through the course). We did the activity two times, and allowed the students make corrections to team strategy the second time. We also emphasized times was second to the amount of mistakes the team made.