Summer program aims to send students’ coding projects to space – The Mercury News

Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars, students sang in a large Campbell Middle School classroom as they tucked away their workbooks and laptops.

They werent rehearsing to form a Frank Sinatra tribute band. Crooning the tune is the celestial motivation for a group of roughly a dozen students hoping to get their lines of code to the International Space Station this summer.

The Zero Robotics program at Campbell Middle aims to take students work to the moon and beyond, all while teaching students about space exploration, computer science and coding.

The five-week summer program is an offshoot of a national high school program and competition provided through a partnership between MIT Space Systems Lab, the Innovation learning Center and Aurora Flight Sciences. It is sponsored by NASA, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space and the Northrup Grumman Foundation.

The program sees students learn about efficient use of fuel and how to write specific lines of code. Once theyve had enough practice on and off the computer, students write and send the best line of code to the competition in their respective state. There are nine other teams in California competing.

Students must complete objectives, such as navigating around obstacles, docking to other satellites or going in a particular direction, all while conserving the most amount of fuel possible.

Winning teams will get their code uploaded to the International Space Station and watch via a live feed as small robots aboard the space station follow their program. The robots are similar to the ones students work with in the program back on Earth.

Students participate in a game to program movements for synchronized, position, hold, engage, reorient, experimental satellites, or SPHERES for short.

I thought the SPHERES would be shaped like the Earth, but they are shaped like a 3D octagon, said sixth-grade student Tamba Bangurah.

This is the first year students from the Campbell Union School District have participated. Summer camp program coordinator Tanner Marcoida said he had been planting the seed among some students toward the end of the school year to generate interest in participating.

If we have the best code out of our region, then our code will be uploaded to the space station and we will get to see the SPHERES, the actual robots that are on the space station in zero gravity, he said. We actually get to see them play out the game that they have been coding this entire time. Thats quite the treat for hard work.

Documenting the middle school students feat is a film crew from National Geographic.

Marcoida and his students have had Thomas Verrettes film crew follow their daily lessons and games and it will stick around until the final winner is announced.

I didnt know what school I would be in at the time, what students Id be following and the educators, Verrette said. I used the orientation as that resource. I watched how all the educators responded to the program and interviewed quite a few of them and then decided on Campbell.

After deciding Marcoida and his students would be an interesting group to film, he showed up the second day of camp with cameras to get the students used to the crew and having cameras in the room.

The kids are great, Verrette said. Every once in awhile theyll smile and laugh because they forget that were there. In some ways they are a lot easier to deal with than adults when youre trying to document something.

Verrette said he hopes when the documentary is complete and released, people have a newfound respect for science.

As for a release date, Verrette said that is to be determined.

For more information about Zero Robotics, visit zerorobotics.mit.edu.

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Summer program aims to send students' coding projects to space - The Mercury News